On August 8, 2011, just before sunrise, two car loads of white teens hit the road of Jackson Mississippi. They had been drinking through the night. At some point in the early morning they came to the conclusion that their mission was to find any black person and just mess them up. It did not take long to find their victim walking across the parking lot of the Metro Inn on the outskirts of town. His name was James Craig. James was a 49 year old autoplant worker and was walking to his car. The group attacked Anderson, beat him up and robbed him.
One of the teens, Deryl Dedmon Jr., after participating in the beat down took things to another level. While James was on the ground injured from his beating, Deryl walked over to his Ford F150. He turned his truck on and ran James over, killing him. It would be easy to write off this act off as the alcohol-fueled actions of some teennagers gone wild. But they didn’t set out to mess with just anyone. They purposely sought out someone who had to be black. They had predetermined whose lives were less valuable than their own. There was no debate as to who their victim should be. This wasn’t impulsive.
What would make people regardless of color, social-economics or education, choose to shed the blood of others? It is the same misguided passions that created American slavery, apartheid and Jim Crow. You can see the same thing in Islamic fundamentalism, rape-culture, economic stratification and the continuing racism and sexism across the globe. For all the theories and questions that we would like to deploy to explain the corrosion inside the human heart, the reality is that our mistreatment of one another is just plain old superiority.
On just about every page of the New Testament one will discover that followers of Jesus and the early church struggled with the most was the issue of superiority. The Jews had experienced a religious system that had told them that they were superior. They had heard that since they were children, generation after generation. It wasn’t enslaving others or economics that made them superior. It was what they called the “works of Torah.” In the book of Romans Paul is facing the fact that this superiority issue is causing all kinds of conflict among the believers. Jews had placed their hope in the power of the works of torah. Israel had been chosen by God to deal with the sin of Adam which was to deal with the problem of evil in the world. Paul starts off the book of Romans saying in Romans 1:16 “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”
That passage would have been a shock to the system if you were a Jewish follower of Jesus. It is appalling on so many levels. As a Jewish person you have grown up being told to follow all these rules. You have spent the majority of your life keeping up your end of the bargain with God. Your end of the bargain with God, it was assumed, is to practice the works of torah. Circumcisions, rules about food, Passover and all of the other boundary marking behaviors and festivals that set you apart as a special person because you are one of God’s chosen people.
The works of Torah didn’t simply make you different. It is what made you better. It made you superior. Accepting Jesus meant that you were not better than Gentiles. That is what Paul means when he says he is “not ashamed.” He is not ashamed that the God of the universe had fulfilled his eternal plan to redeem all nations and all people. Many Christians view Paul’s statement about not being ashamed as having something to do with public statements of faith. For most American Christians we take not being ashamed to mean something like:
- A teenager showing up to public school on Monday morning with their Bible in hand
- Wearing a Christian t-shirt that has a statement of your belief in Jesus on it
- Posting statements of your faith in Jesus on your social media accounts
None of that is what Paul is talking about. Paul’s concern is the default condition in the human heart that seeks supremacy over others. The scandalous news that Paul is proclaiming is that God is working for the reconciliation of all people through the resurrection of Jesus. After all, one of Jesus’ most radical teachings was that he challenged the lines that we draw to divide ourselves one from another.
Supremacy rips at the fabric of unity in families, towns and nations. The Jews felt superior because they thought their Bible told them to feel superior. Paul confronts them with this simple fact, they have no justification to feel justified. Like all of us Israel was infected with sin. Sin is a virus with no human cure. The darkness of our hearts and heads is universally shared. What’s more we often bask in the glory of our sin and condone the darkness when we see it in others.
A little later in Romans 1 Paul outlines many of the sins we are capable of and routinely practice like: injustice, wickness, greed, envy, murder, enmity, deceit, cunning, arrogance, self-importance boasting, disobedience to parents, shameful sexual acts and many others. Paul’s point is that God’s people have failed to be God’s people and that has created a problem. God must remain faithful to the covenant. Yet what is God to do when God’s partners haven’t kept their end of the deal? NT Wright puts it this way: “If the covenant was put in place to deal with evil in the world, then the failure of the covenant people to be the light in the world means that the covenant itself seems to be under threat.” What is God to do about the failure of his people to do their part?
God’s answer was not to wait until the end of time or to send a savior that would raise an army that would defeat the Romans and establish a King in the line of David. God’s answer is what it has always been. It is to rescue all people through the cross of Jesus in the here and now. This is still foolishness in a world worried over domination and a desire to marginalize. The idea of an all embracing God is just as scandalous today as it was in Paul’s time. Paul put his case this way in Romans 2:17-24:
“But if you call yourself a Jew and rely on the law and boast in God and know his will and approve what is excellent, because you are instructed from the law; and if you are sure that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of children, having in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth— you then who teach others, do you not teach yourself? While you preach against stealing, do you steal? You who say that one must not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in the law dishonor God by breaking the law. For, as it is written, “The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.”
Feeling superior to others is not simply an intellectual issue. In other words our problem is not just a lack of knowledge. If we could just gain deeper insights into the Bible then we would have the knowledge to become better followers of Jesus. Our superiority complex is not just an lack of knowledge. Richard Beck in his book Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality puts a spotlight on how disgust plays a major role in how we treat one another. Beck writes:
Disgust is a boundary psychology. Disgust marks objects as exterior and alien. The second the saliva leaves the body and crosses the boundary of selfhood it is foul, it is “exterior,” it is Other. And this, I realized, is the same psychological dynamic at the heart of the conflict in Matthew 9. Specifically, how are we to draw the boundaries of exclusion and inclusion in the life of the church? Sacrifice— the purity impulse— marks off a zone of holiness, admitting the “clean” and expelling the “unclean.” Mercy, by contrast, crosses those purity boundaries. Mercy blurs the distinction, bringing clean and unclean into contact. Thus the tension. One impulse - holiness and purity - erects boundaries, while the other impulse - mercy and hospitality - crosses and ignores those boundaries. And it’s very hard, and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see this, to both erect a boundary and dismantle that boundary at the very same time. One has to choose. And as Jesus and the Pharisees make different choices in Matthew 9 there seems little by way of compromise. They stand on opposite sides of a psychological (clean versus unclean), social (inclusion versus exclusion), and theological (saints versus sinners) boundary.
Many Christians have read their Bibles and been baptized. We have our Christian friends, music, concerts and t-shirts and we have participated in things that help people. We are, by definition, a good person. This is what Paul is addressing directly. A merit based salvation that can lead us to live as if we are superior (driven by a disgust towards the unclean, the outsider and the sinner). Paul asks a wonderful yet uncomfortable question in Romans 3:27-28 So is there any place left for boasting? No. It’s been shut out completely. And how? By what sort of law? The law or works perhaps? No! By the law of faith. We hold that people are justified, that is, made right with God through faith, which has nothing to do with the deeds the law prescribes.
Just thumbing through the story of Jesus we see that this has always been the case. The men and women who welcome Jesus into the world were the first signs that God was working outside the lines we often draw between us and others. If Hollywood, AM Talk Radio, the political camps of our day were in charge of casting the story of Jesus then none of it would have ever happened. When Jesus is present the entire world comes together. Regardless of who you are, where you were born, your religious merits, race, gender, demographics, Jesus is letting us know that boasting and superiority are not Christlikeness. If the idea of losing your boasting fills you with despair, if you’re uneasy to learn that you are equal to all the people you’ve spent time hating, disposing, or feeling superior to, what you are actually feeling, according to Paul, is ashamed of the gospel.
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