Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Jesus' Racial Slur and the Bible


I’ve changed my mind about scripture.

I became aware of this slowly. My change of mind began as a kind of unease with certain passages—an unease that I filed away, in some back-room drawer of my brain, for a long time. But eventually, there were too many passages filed away to escape notice. They troubled me.

For example, I recently reread a sermon I preached years ago about the Canaanite woman who came to Jesus looking for a miracle exorcism for her daughter. It is found in Matthew 15:21-28. Early on in the sermon I noted that when the woman asked Jesus for healing, he didn’t answer her a word. At that point, I stopped preaching, and silently looked over the congregation for a whole minute. This got across, to the audience, something of the woman’s tragic situation. However, the silence also underlined, I think, the enormity of Jesus’ refusal. The disciples then urge Jesus to send the woman away. And so he does. Jesus says to her, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

This passage is obviously nothing like the one where the disciples turn away the children. In that case Jesus breaks with cultural convention and responds, “Let the children come, for the kingdom of God belong to such as these.” In the Canaanite woman’s case, however, Jesus tells the foreigner to get lost. No kingdom for her. She doesn’t belong.

But she won’t leave. So this time Jesus says, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” Jesus responds to a suffering mother’s plea for her daughter’s life with a demeaning and racist refusal to help. Jesus thinks Canaanites are dogs.

In my sermon I acknowledge that this is a hard saying. I try to soften it. I suggest that maybe Jesus was reminding this woman that it just happened to be God's strategy for Jews to hear his message first, only then, through the Jews, for the gentiles to hear the word—a standard exegetical twist to justify an otherwise horrible slur. Not that she, as a non-Jew, would have understood this theological twist.

There are other ways preachers and exegetes have tried to excuse Jesus’ behavior. Perhaps Jesus used this hard language because he knew ahead of time the eventual outcome of situation, and so let it play out. That would kind of be like making a baby blind so that Jesus could heal her later and so prove his Messiahship.

Or, perhaps Jesus was just expressing a widely shared cultural prejudice that he really can’t be blamed for. Or, maybe Jesus didn’t really mean what he said because of his obvious regard for foreigners that shows up in other Biblical stories. But doesn’t that make his behavior all the worse, here? Maybe this text reflects Matthew’s prejudice, rather than Jesus’. But that doesn’t make much sense either, since Matthew, in fact, from the magi at the beginning of the story, to the command to teach and baptize to the ends of the earth at the end of the story, seems to have had a deep concern for non-Jews.

We can dream up all sorts of “just-so” explanations. At its most obvious, literal level, however, this story includes Jesus using a racial slur. To call anyone a dog—no matter when and where—is to dehumanize that person, to dismiss his or her essential value before others and God. It is sin.

But on that Sunday I didn’t go into any of this. I trod lightly. This slur was a side of Jesus better passed over quickly and filed in that drawer I mentioned above. Rather than talk about the slur itself on the lips of Jesus, I immediately noted that the woman acknowledged that she was a dog. I quoted Martin Luther, who said that by saying “Yes Lord,” the woman “caught Jesus in his own words.” By saying “yes, Lord” she reminded Jesus of all his sermons about love for the hungry, the thirsty, the mourning, and the poor in spirit. Her "yes Lord" reminded Jesus that he had once said he would not despise a contrite heart. As if Jesus should have needed reminding.

From the Luther quote I moved quickly to a conclusion about how faith can move mountains—that is, how faith like the Canaanite woman’s can even endure God’s silence. It seemed like the right homiletical move, even if it made faith into a kind of works righteousness.

But the slur rankled, somewhere, deep inside. Now, years later, I have an African American grandson and an Afghani foster-daughter. I have an African daughter-in-law who was stopped at two a.m. in East Grand Rapids, not because she was speeding, but because she was out of place. I’ve experienced how hard it is to get good Christians to make room in their churches for people who don’t belong to their tribe. I read the news. I’ve taken courses that explain how structural racism—starting with slavery and Jim Crow laws and moving onto red-lining in real-estate and subpar schooling for poor inner city neighbourhoods—has all helped keep (most) African Americans and Canadians in their place.

Now I can no longer excuse Jesus’ response. It was deeply prejudiced and wrong. It infuriates me. How is it that a Messiah doesn’t know better?

As a result, I’ve changed my idea of scripture. Of course, as noted above, it isn’t just this passage. There are a whole host of scriptural issues that we tend not to take at face value but make excuses for, instead. From the Holy War of the Old Testament Jews against the Canaanites (them again) to the immanent expectation of Jesus’ return; from the obvious artifice of Old Testament books like Isaiah to mixed notions about who Jesus actually was that are found throughout the New Testament; from the condemnation of gay and divorced people to the requirement that women keep silence and are saved by childbearing many, many Biblical narratives are deeply disturbing and inconsistent with the highest ideals of other parts of scripture.

I find myself at a place where I’ve come to a corner, downtown, and am set to turn, unable to see what is ahead. I’m committed to the journey, but I’m not sure what I’ll see or meet round the corner. I’m not sure how to make peace with all this stuff. The paradigm I learned in seminary, with arguments about such passages full of eccentric and retrograde orbits to make the overall geocentric galaxy work, doesn’t work for me anymore.

Where then does one find God? Maybe God comes upon us, reveals himself or herself, in the reading. Maybe God chooses us whether we like it or not. What about scripture? Maybe scripture is witness to a long, bumpy tradition of people with a vague sense of the numinous, that I can learn from. Maybe scripture is partly right and partly wrong and I need to use its central themes to correct the outliers. We’ll see, round the corner.

What I do know, however, is that as uncomfortable as the uncertainty is I also love the freedom I now have to share both the best of scripture and my struggles with it in my present congregation. This community helps me feel as if I don’t need to turn that corner alone.

14 comments:

  1. Thanks, John. It's a bit of an uncomfortable corner to come to, but I've discovered that it allows (requires) me to face the harm of my own prejudices without the crutch of some verse to "support" me--or to distract me from facing that harm by spending countless hours wallowing around in exegetical soup trying to free my conscience to feel the depths of my complicity and the demands for just actions.

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    1. "Face the harm of my own prejudices . . ." Yes, I can echo that. We may try hard when it comes to overcoming prejudice, but we never quite finish the journey. That's tough.

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  3. John, Here is a Sojo Article that makes a reference to the same NT story: http://sojo.net/blogs/2014/01/02/five-things-will-shock-our-grandkids-about-us/ Jim Geertsma

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    1. James--thanks for the link. Think the Sojo article goes a bit easy on Jesus, but otherwise great!

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    2. John - Your blog and your book have been helpful to me. I'm a woman who struggles with many of the same issues you mention and who is also uneasy about many scripture passages. The CRC has been my life, my community for so many years and it still is for most of my family, but I no longer can be part of it. It's quite the journey - hard but also very interesting. Take care.

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  4. These puzzles become less puzzling after you learn that the historical Jesus was a Jewish preacher of the kingdom of God, urging fellow Jews to return to the heart of the Torah before the end of the world arrived. His focus was on Jews, not Gentiles. Only when you start thinking of him as the later theological construct do these sayings become confusing.

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    1. Anon--I agree that there are good and reasonable explanations for Jesus' slur (and I refer to something like what you suggest when I note that a common response to the slur is to suggest that Jesus had the idea he had to go to Israel first and then gentiles).
      I'd add, however, that from the perspective of 2000 years, we should now be able to agree that this is a slur, whatever historical Jesus-Canonical-theological reasons we account for it. No matter why Jesus said such a thing -- we can now see that it was wrong.

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  5. John, I'm currently reading (and writing a review) of Lisa Sowle Cahill's book, Global justice, Christology, and Christian Ethics. She's sees that story as evidence of 1) Jesus living in his own time, when in his cultural upbringing he was taught that salvation was only for the Jews, but that 2) Jesus was a learner, and this was a learning moment. Having been led to believe that Canaanites were dogs, he was now seeing a new possibility, one that he actually embraced.

    Does that way of approaching this passage provide any help?

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  6. Maybe, a bit. But even here, you have to admit that this is a very different picture of Jesus than the one we've learned in our seminaries. A Jesus who spews racist comments (thus sinning) and needs to repent once he's realized it was a sin (because the woman calls him on his promises, ala Luthor) is a far cry from the perfect, sinless, flawless lamb that my tradition teaches me Jesus was.

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  7. If Jesus is such a bigot, then why go to Beirut at all?

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    1. Well, I'm not sure the right approach is to say that Jesus was "such a bigot." However, a consistent theme in the gospels is that Jesus sought relief from the crowds. That would be the most likely answer consistent with the portrayal of Jesus in the gospels. Another point to keep in mind is that this passage was written long after Jesus' death, and served theological purposes. It is hard to gauge its historical accuracy. It not unlikely that to say that this portrait belongs to Jesus' chroniclers, and so it is difficult to say how well it relates to Jesus' actual activities and words.

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  8. Perhaps this marks our recession from Christendom that Jesus increasingly offends. I'm continually amazed at how so many seem to love Jesus, especially when they know so little about him. He has an amazing reputation even while respect for the church continues to crater.

    Almost everything we have about Jesus in the canon drew offense from someone. This star offended Herod. He seemed to continually irritate the religious authorities over his refusal to comply with the tradition of the elders and wage their culture war against an unjust occupation. His silence before Pilate offended the government. His stripping and washing the disciples feed offended the disciples. Judas likely turned because of offense. Classical pagans were offended that a god would be humble and exalt the meek. The best thing he probably did was shed flesh but then to take it up again? It seems the only thing these entrenched enemies of each other (Pharisees, Aristocracy, Herodians, Romans, etc.) could agree upon was that the world would be better without Jesus.

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What do you think?