Saturday, May 11, 2024
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Jesus and the disinherited
The Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have come to believe that I came from God.
In 1949, the year Margaret and I were born, Howard Thurman wrote Jesus and the Disinherited. Trying to understand what can move American society away from the either-or thinking that sees enemies on every side, David Brooks returned to that “magnificent” book. You can read his essay here.
Jesus was a “disinherited, his back against the wall.” This pictures the plight of not just minorities at all times in history, but also, eventually, of those who persecute them. “Up against the wall!” Police and soldiers say that, of course, in attempts to control their adversary, but so do the adversaries, and they might add another word or two to the epithet.
Brooks points out that dominators fear the moment when they lose their power, and those who are dominated … well, as Thurman said, “There are few things more devastating than to have it burned into you that you do not count!” Everyone is in the same boat, afraid of the lightning and the storm, and Jesus is somewhere out there walking on the water. Hurry up, Jesus! Can’t you see we need you here?
David Brooks found his favorite Thurman sentence: “There cannot be too great insistence on that point that we are here dealing with a discipline, a method, a technique, as over against some form of wishful thinking or simple desiring.” But, as Thurman later says, “Can the mouse forgive the cat for eating him?”
Jesus says “YES” because 1) God forgives us again and again, 2) no evil deed represents the full intent of the doer, and 3) because “life is its own restraint. In the wide sweep of the ebb and flow of moral law our deeds track us down, and doer and deed meet.” Paul said it too. Leave the vengeance in God’s creative and capable hands. His is the far better perspective.
But if so, then what methods, what techniques? These must be methods that develop inner authority, “well within the reach of everyone,” Thurman says confidently. And the “ethical demand upon the more privileged and the underprivileged IS THE SAME.”
That be me. And that be you.
Mr. Brooks calls us to be citizens that create social change not with words or intentions, but by learning “how to listen well, how to ask for and receive forgiveness, how not to misunderstand one another, how to converse in a way that reduces inequalities of respect.” This, Brooks says, “is not a method for cowards.” Then this painful personal cleansing allows us to choose political acts “directed against the forces of evil rather than against the people who happen to be doing the evil.”
Remembering that “unearned suffering is redemptive,” we can choose to refuse to hate. We will become able “to avoid commiting not only external physical violence but also internal violence of the spirit.”
Howard Thurman, who deeply influenced the thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr. endured his own education as a black man, as one of the disinherited. If I am willing to become one of the disinherited as well, I can learn all of this as well. But David Brooks remembers Abraham Lincoln’s reference to the “better angels” when he says, “Nonviolent resistance is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice. It has a deep faith in the future.”
As Thurman wrote, “Our deeds track us down, and doer and deed meet.” It’s in this moment, reserved for all of us, when God’s grace profoundly prevails, and we are free.
Rev. Thurman quotes the spiritual that King sang out so well, and inspired President Lyndon Johnson to say the same:
FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST, THANK GOD ALMIGHTY, FREE AT LAST!
If not in this world, then in the next.
Jesus said, “Amen, amen, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in my name he will give you. Until now you have not asked anything in my name; ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete.
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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