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INSiGHT Reflection: Rising Up and Leaving Behind the Whitewashed Tomb
Rising Up and Leaving Behind the Whitewashed Tomb...
By Peter Cruchley, Council for World Mission
In these reflections I propose to explore how Jesus’ life, death and resurrection offers not just hope, but challenge to the legacies of white colonial power ever present in our world and lives. A generation of contextual theology should by now have put to death the White Jesus so familiar to us, but yet this remains the dominant way we imagine Jesus’s power and therefore his personhood. As we shall see, the biblical text contrasts Jesus’ power with the colonial power of the (White) Roman empire, and this stands out all the more in the midst of the global Black lives matters struggles and CWM’s intention to repent and make reparation for the legacies of slavery in our life.
Our journey to Easter began with the temptation of Jesus, a moment when he is confronted with how he wants to use his power and what kind of Messiah he is called to be. This became all the more urgent again in Holy Week when Jesus was confronted with the Imperial power of Pilate, the complicities of Caiaphas and the punishment for insurgency, execution. Even in the garden Jesus refuses to call on the symbols of Imperial power, the legions of angels, (Matt. 26: 53) and he does not back down from the confrontation with the only White man in the Bible, Pilate.
In the first Temptation, a hungry Jesus is invited to turn stone into bread:
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, 2 where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. 3 The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.’ 4 Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, “One does not live by bread alone.”’ Luke 4: 1 - 4
Forty days and nights without food is going beyond the experience of Israel, who at least had manna in the desert. Famished and starving as he is, Jesus still allows Scripture to speak more loudly than the rumbling of his stomach. The Devil invites Jesus to do what human beings do, which is to put their needs before everyone and anything else. But Jesus refuses to objectify creation, he seems willing to let stones be stones, rather than process them into something he can use and profit from. Jesus’ curious loyalty to stones will be rehearsed again at the entry into Jerusalem, when Jesus tells the Pharisees that the stones themselves would herald his messiahship if his disciples were silent, (Luke 19:40). Jesus, understands his calling speaks to the identities and dignities of all creation and they are not to be used and exploited for his purpose. As Jesus remarks, one does not live by bread alone, one lives by the relationships we inhabit and loyalties we honour. When we come with Jesus to the table, we realise that far from taking a self-denying approach to bread, in fact Jesus, values bread so highly, he is ready to become it himself, (Luke 22:19).
Far from crushing stones into bread, he breaks his body, not so that he might live, but that ‘whosoever might eat this bread will live’ (John 6:51). Jesus dies thirsty, (John 19:28) rather than give in to the imperial longings Pilate and others like him live by.
Contrast this with all that the limitless hungers and urges which have driven 500 years of Colonial Imperial Capitalist whiteness. All that has done to objectify, and commodify products like Sugar, Coffee, Rubber, Tobacco, Cotton, Tea, Teak, Oil and so on. And then all that has been done to objectify, and commodify persons of African and African descent, and to persons indentured from Asia into the Caribbean, Pacific and Africa, especially in the profit and production of those resources.
In the second Temptation, Jesus is tempted by complicity with power and empire:
5 Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. 6 And the devil said to him, ‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. 7 If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.’ 8 Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.”’ Luke 4: 5 - 8
The Devil offers Jesus a vantage point on all the kingdoms of the world in hope of their glory and adulation. Isn’t this God’s normal vantage point, looking down on Creation looking up to God? The witness of the Bible to this point suggests that this has not worked out well for God. Even his own people have been stiff necked and refused to look up in love, (Exod. 32:9). It must be tempting for God to impose God’s authority and power and settle for a ‘quid pro quo’ deal with the powerful and the popular, after all this is what the Church has done and does. Here we have the temptation for God, and God’s Son in particular to come to the earth as Emperor and settle for a worship he knows is unfaithful, but at least enforceable because it’s the product of fear and envy.
Instead of the Emperor’s throne Jesus chooses the position of the rebel and this becomes apparent several times in the Temple in Holy Week. Jesus’ rebellious spirit in shown in the cleansing of the Temple, (Luke 19: 45-46), the prediction that it will be torn down and three days later rebuilt, (Matt 26: 61, John 2:19). The position God takes is not from above, but from below. When Jesus sees the widow make her gift to the Temple, and predicts the destruction of the Temple, (Luke 21:6) he looks up, (Luke 21:1). Jesus, in this way comes not from above but from below, not from afar but from amongst. His presence and power are not concerned with getting the agreement of the powerful but beginning the liberation of the powerless. Thus, he steps out onto the streets of Yangon, Hong Kong or Delhi because his mother gives him this rebellious Spirit, when she sings her Magnificat over him, (Luke 1:46-55). This is the Spirit Jesus is as full of in the wilderness, (Luke 4: 1) as the Temple is empty of in Holy Week, which is why Caiaphas collaborates and emulates the power of Pilate. 9 Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, 10 for it is written, “He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you”,11 and “On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.”’ 12 Jesus answered him, ‘It is said, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”’ 13 When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time. (Luke 4: 9 – 13)
The Devil invites Jesus into a show of power, that will fake jeopardy to impress and entertain the crowds: ‘Show them you cannot die’, hints the Devil, ‘show that you are indeed protected and upheld by divine love’. In that tempting drama, the crowds spectate his possible death and this angelic intervention will confirm that Jesus is undoubtedly the Son of God. The Devil knows that the Tomb is the test for God, that most think the argument for faith in God is that it should, God should, offer protection to the faithful, (Ps.16:10). The irony is of course, that Jesus, will take up a place on a pinnacle. Not on the Temple Mount, but on Mount Golgotha, on the cross. And he will throw himself down, even to the place of the dead, but no angels will come to minister to him there, and even precious few of his friends. This will not be fake jeopardy. Indeed, God in Jesus will be put to the test, as Jesus wrestles with accepting the cup of suffering in Gethsemane, (Luke: 22:42) and then at that moment, the angel does come to give him strength, Luke 22:43, not to evade death but to choose it. And the Devil is right, the stone will not harm him. We come to Easter morning, and there we discover the faithfulness of the stone, for it rolls away for him as he steps into new life. (Luke 24:2)
When Jesus spoke about the grave, he gave it a colour, Whiteness, (Matt 23: 27), and it represented hypocrisy. When Jesus rises from the tomb, it is to assert God’s counter creation to the world White Colonial power has both co-opted and corrupted, and has, for 2000 years, said is without alternative. The Holy Week narratives deepen, confirm and complete the resistance Jesus shows to imperial colonial power from the start of his ministry. Jesus dies in the face of the White colonial gaze of Pilate and the centurion. His crucifixion echoing George Floyd’s words beneath the gaze of Derek Chauvin, ‘I can’t breathe’. But he rises to his Jewish sisters and brothers, to confirm them and us in believing God will not bow to the idolatries, powers and certainties of empire, that ‘Babylon’ is as fallen as the tomb is empty, (Isa 21: 9, Rev. 18:2). We are challenged then to leave behind the many implicit and explicit ways we look on Jesus as White, which also means to challenge the many ways church behaves as if Christianity is an empire to defend and extend. Then we can heed the voices in whom the risen Jesus is calling us away from the dead, dividing racist ways of living we have known, finding instead we are at the beginnings of a restored creation making peace with its past, and embodying a transforming healing humanity (Ephesians 2: 13ff).
