14 minute read
A Thicker (Black) Jesus
Toby Castle
It was April, 2015. Los Angeles was buzzing with energy but still predictable: terrible traffic, poor air pollution, and pockets of good coffee. I had just returned from Baltimore, Maryland where I had completed five days of research observing, engaging, and attempting to understand the Freddy Gray Uprising. This was not the first uprising I had witnessed in response to police brutality against people of color. I had been studying the cultural functions (and malfunctions) of systemic racism and trust deficit in Oakland, California and Ferguson, Missouri for almost nine months. The violent death of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenage boy of color, killed in a northern suburb of St Louis in August 2014 by white law enforcement was my catalyst. It changed how I saw myself in God’s world. It helped me see the need for a thicker, ‘Black Jesus’ in our local church communities. I guess, one could say, it shaped my calling.
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As I walked to get my morning coffee I was thankful for the community God had planted me in. Living in LA, I found myself in a melting pot of brilliance: Sharp minds; articulate orators; innovative artists; and aspiring theologians. If ever I was going to be formed in a context of cultural insight and by a community of excellent people, it was in this moment. Yet, upon reflection, I found I was becoming frustrated by a nagging blind spot. My friends and fellow students were mostly, if not all, theorists. We came to seminary to analyze; wrestle; conceptualize and resolve. We could discuss and debate for hours. When we had dinner, the content of our conversations were mostly about public theology. But still, we did not practice. If we were practicing, it was within the four-walls of the church. This was safe, affirming, predictable – but also insufficient. It was public, but it wasn’t.
My research, experiences, and growing understanding of the complexity of racial intersectionality led me to realize that when the people of God, on mission with God, make public, social commitments to care with and for those oppressed by injustice and poverty, their faith must exist on the streets. It is here they become covenantal instruments of God. Essentially, they begin to embody a thicker understanding and praxis of what it means to be on mission with God. Their faith, in this moment, becomes public as it is drawn into their everyday. I wrestled with this issue and began to realize that a public faith is a holistic expression of the Gospel. Anything less is underdeveloped. When something goes public its mantle is tested. It’s open to scrutiny. It cannot function as a reductionist expression of truth, but must handle and answer sufficiently the complexities of life. Subsequently, I came to see that as a follower of Jesus, we must reimagine our faith not as personal and private, but personal and public.
Jesus is Black
Learning all this, I came to see that my perception and reception of Jesus was too thin and sanitized to respond sufficiently to the injustices I had witnessed. It was in this moment I needed to encounter a Jesus that more appropriately equipped me for the social and spiritual needs in my local context. I needed a thicker, ‘Black Jesus’ to help me navigate the complexities I was encountering. James Cone, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree writes, “God is Black in so far as he stands on the side of the oppressed.” I had whitewashed Jesus. I had disassociated his theological and ontological realities that were fundamental to his humanity. Jesus was less human and more God; less the subject of my conviction, more the object of ego. Whether it was oversight or ignorance, my personal disassociation of Jesus’ cultural reality in first century Palestine detached me from seeing and understanding the manner in which cultural systems impact certain communities – especially, in this case, people of color. I recognized I need to understand the cultural context Jesus was born into. Jesus was a Jew, Jesus was a poor Jew, Jesus was a member of a minority group in the midst of a larger, dominant group living under occupation and Jesus was born to an un-wed teenage mother. And so, to understand Jesus as black is to not receive and perceive him as black as defined by his ethnicity. To understand Jesus as black is to receive and perceive the nature of his being, his existence, his reality. This is not, therefore, a position bound by his race, although he was a Palestinian Jew. This is a position that contends for an ontological and theological affirmation of Jesus’ blackness, rather than an anthropological affirmation of his existence.
While I can never articulate the Black experience, it became imperative that I sought to understand how various social structures, colonial language (both in the United States as well as in Australia), cultural biases, and communal practices sub-consciously marginalized people of color. These moments in Ferguson, Oakland and Baltimore magnified in me my own biases that contributed to the subjugation of the black experience. Despite not being part of the central narrative, I learned very quickly that my cultural background and subconscious biases merely perpetuated a theology that saw Jesus first and foremost as God, secondly as white, and thirdly contending for my individual prosperity. This had to change. Willie Jennings, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School argues that all people, despite their ethnicity, can participate in whiteness. Whiteness is not a biological reality one is born into, but a collective power structure in the polis that one chooses to participate in and affirm. Jennings states “Whiteness as a way of being in the world has been parasitically joined to a Christianity that is also a way of being in the world. It is the fusion of these two realities that gave tragic shape to a Christian faith at the dawn of what we call colonial modernity.” It is this fusion of whiteness and a thin understanding of Jesus that has catalyzed many of the struggles we see in our world today. Struggles against nationalism, racism, sexism, and the degradation of our planet. What stops people from participating in concrete, public practices of faith and justice that brings about a thicker more robust expression of faith? Especially in contexts where the people of God are called to contend for others in situations that are seen as complex and capricious. In response, I propose three hurdles that the local church faces currently that inhibit its ability to participate in a thicker expression of a black Jesus: (i) In regards to race, white fragility; (ii) In regards to theology, reductionism; (iii) In regards to community, hyper individualism.
White Fragility
Robin DiAngelo, author of ‘White Fragility’, defines racism as encompassing economic, political, social, and cultural structures, actions, and beliefs that systematize and perpetuate an unequal distribution of privileges, resources and power between white people and people of color. She goes on to say that this unequal distribution benefits whites and disadvantages people of color overall and as a group.
Racism is not fluid; it does not flow back and forth, one day benefiting whites and another day (or even era) benefiting people of color. The direction of power between whites and people of color is historic, traditional, normalized and deeply embedded in the fabric of Western society. White people, DiAngelo asserts, live in a context that is deeply separate and unequal by race where white people are the beneficiaries of that separation and inequality. They are, especially in the church, insulated from racial stress while at the same time feel entitled to and deserving of their advantage. The original purpose of racism, especially in the United States, was to justify slavery and its associated financial benefits. Although racism functions in a different way in our current day and age, the hangover of racism and its fringe benefits still exists – especially when one focuses on the feelings of white moderates. It is this group of people and their associated tables of power that influence implicitly what is perceived to be normal. ‘White Fragility’ is a state in which a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include an outward display of emotion such as anger, fear, guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.
Racial stress results from an interruption to what is racially familiar. These interruptions take on a variety of forms and come from a range of sources. These include: Receiving feedback that one’s behavior had a racist impact; suggesting that group membership is significant, an acknowledgment that access is unequal between racial groups, being presented with a person of color in a position of leadership; being presented with information about other racial groups through, for example, movies in which people of color drive the action but are not in stereotypical roles, or multicultural education and suggesting that a white person’s viewpoint comes from a racialized frame of reference. It is here I recognized I embody the descriptors of what is known as white privilege - one who identifies as being white, male, middle-to-upper class, educated, heteronormative and able bodied. I also see that by writing this I am positioning the ‘voice’ of this article around a white narrative. Simply, there is no way around this. I know, and hope to express an understanding that, I am not a white knight. But I do believe it is imperative for members of the white community to be articulate and engage with humility, while also recognizing the need to build emotional stamina when people of color challenge the historical status quo. For whites to say they are color blind, to attest that they don’t see race, or become fragile during these conversations is to personify momentary amnesia and forget that the power of God resides in all of us. This narrative must be inverted so that we can be equipped to sit, listen and reside in our neighbor’s pain, communicate as a means of seeking understanding – not seeking to be understood and to participate in the process of peacemaking, justice and reconciliation. This is the practice of shalom, the balm that heals a broken world.
Reductionism
Reducing an expression of Christianity to the 5-P’s of Transformation, the 4-C’s of Loving Your Neighbor, or the 7-T’s of Becoming More Like Christ is a dead giveaway that you’re failing to communicate the gospel with integrity. Some may argue this approach to preaching and teaching are tools of “good communication.” If so, I argue they have missed the nuances found in the Gospel message and thinned the Church’s understanding of Jesus to a 5-point plan of prosperity, reducing the gravity of Jesus’ influence on earth to a 140-characters, a sound that oversimplifies reality – such as “Show your best, hide the rest,” or a TED Talk that fails to ground itself in anything other than anecdotal evidence. The church, firstly, requires a thicker understanding of Jesus that is grounded in an historically embodied, black, and culturally sensitive understanding of Christ. For God to be black is not a description of ethnicity alone, but a concrete sociological revelation that Jesus existed on the margins of society. We fail to read the Bible well when we place an imperial lens on a subversive text. Secondly, the teachers of our faith communities have a responsibility to offer a holistic understanding of Jesus’ sovereignty over all areas of life and creation – there is no separation between private and public spheres, Jesus should be seen as shaping all aspects of life. Thirdly, the church is required to offer a strong call for repentance from our captive ideologies such as nationalism, racism, and greed that see the practice of justice as an optional add-on to the call of God. And lastly, we need to reconcile with ourselves that Jesus did not have blonde hair and blues eyes, but was a poor Jew, born to an unwed teenage mother, as a member of a minority group, living under occupation of the Roman Empire. The key to the development of this form of discipleship stems from our willingness to look closely at Jesus’ teachings, including the Sermon on the Mount, that practice a revelation of a thicker, historical Jesus in the public square.
Hyper-Individualism
Individualism is the toxic potion splintering humanity. Humankind, in a move of desperation, sought self-preservation and self-expression as a means of measuring success, even if such success came about at the detriment of one’s neighbor. Jesus’ actions and teachings showed a different reality. Paul, highlighted the nature of Jesus in Philippians 2 and described a savior who considered others more valuable than himself. So he emptied himself, poured himself out and laid his life down for others. We as followers of Jesus are called to the do the same. Christina Cleveland, in Disunity in Christ, writes “Rather than using his power to distance himself from us, Jesus uses it to approach us.
He follows his own commandment to love your neighbor as yourself – often to his detriment... by pursuing us with great tenacity in spite of our differences. He jumps a lot of hurdles to reach us.” When one exegetes a church service or community, despite the continual attempts of building inclusive relationships that focus and function on the wellbeing of the “other,” there exists an individualistic reality that dictates the language, actions, and worship of a given local community… at the detriment of living out a Christ like life. This speaks into people’s social imaginary and creates a perception that the only reason God sent Jesus into the world was to save me from my sins. This is simply not the case. Over and again we read, in the gospels and Paul’s letters, a re-imagination of community that conceives a counter-cultural movement of collective transformation and liberation. The church’s standard was the kingdom of God, not any particular political ideology or program. This appeal highlights what Dietrich Bonhoeffer described as ‘empathetic incarnational action’ (stellvertretendes Handeln), where the church spoke and served on behalf of the suffering and marginalized.
Where to From Here?
I’ve come to learn that theological principles alone are too obscure for a community of believers, who say they follow Jesus, to wage peace and justice in the public square. At the intersection of race, faith, and violence, theological practices call the people of God to be creative and nonviolent, embodying the love of Christ in the daily and mundane. What this has come to mean is that we must begin to see and discern the various historic and embedded practices within our faith communities that marginalize people of color. When exegeting a culture or community there are some simple critical and curious questions we can begin to ask ourselves. Such questions include: “Who is on stage and what role do they play in leading and serving a community?” This includes questions that seek to identify certain biases about race, but also age, gender, qualifications, and language. What authors are you asked to read when studying? Is there the freedom to question practices, language or tradition within your faith community? To what extent does the faith community you’re a part of represent sociologically the local community in and around your building? Do pastors encourage critical dialogue, or do they have the final word in most topics? The absence of a such these critical practices reveals a bias that is endemic within the Protestant community where the profession of our faith, originating from the Great Commission, reduces the mission of God’s people to a verbal confession that dilutes the message of God.
This deficiency, I describe as Protestant passivity, has seen the church become rather tame, regarding its public influence. The leaders of the church must examine their practices as a means of reclaiming their prophetic position and presence in the public square. As Jesus has become thicker, more robust and less fragile in my day-to-day life, I have come to see that our journey in God is just as, if not more, important than our destination through him. God is a God of justice. He is also a God of peace. For us as the people of God to engage in creative and ambitious just peacemaking practices we must reclaim a thicker, ‘Black Jesus’ grounded in the historical context of the first century. In doing so, it will prepare us to engage robustly in the public square. As such, we will stop reducing Jesus to a fancy catchphrase and begin to equip the people of God to embody a thicker Jesus in all areas of life.
