What does Jesus have to say to the disinherited?

Howard Thurman

A few weeks ago I was at a small group meeting of a church I'm attending. We were discussing Howard Thurman's book Jesus and the Disinherited.

It was first published in 1949. Almost two decades before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. And almost seventy years before religion in the US became increasingly polarized and politicized. 

In the preface to his book, Thurman wrote: "The significance of the religion of Jesus to people who stand with their backs against the wall has always seemed to me to be crucial... My interest in the problem has been and continues to be both personal and professional. This is the question which individuals and groups who live in our land always under the threat of profound social and psychological displacement face. Why is it that Christianity seems impotent to deal radically, and therefore effectively, with the issues of discrimination and injustice?..."

Thurman goes on to discuss four key concepts. Three of them (fear, deception and hate) are components in building the wall of social injustice. One of them (love) is key to offering hope in breaking that wall down.

But before Thurman gets into the heart of the matter, he writes about Jesus.

He begins by taking a look at Christian missionary activity. While Thurman appreciates the basic human instinct to share with others what you have found meaningful, he quickly offers a caution. "It is the sin of pride and arrogance that has tended to vitiate the missionary impulse and to make of it an instrument of self-righteousness on the one hand and racial superiority on the other... [F]or decades we have studied the various peoples of the world and those who live as our neighbors as objects of missionary endeavor and enterprise without being at all willing to treat them either as brothers [or sisters] or as human beings."

He asks us to consider the masses of people who live "with their backs constantly against the wall. They are the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed. What does our religion say to them?"

Writing from almost seventy years ago, Thurman says "The search for an answer to this question is perhaps the most important religious quest of modern life."

Given the current state of affairs in the US and across the world, the question remains extremely relevant. 

What does Christianity have to say to "Dreamers" now that DACA has been disabled? What does Christianity have to say to about the plummeting refugee/immigrant resettlement quota in the US? What does Christianity have to say about social injustice, in general, in the 21st Century?

Thurman begins his discussion by turning to Jesus. What do we know about the historical Jesus?

Jesus was a Jew. It could be argued, writes Thurman "that God could have expressed himself as easily and effectively in a Roman. But he did not." Jews living in Galilee under Roman authority were living as a minority culture. Jesus was one of them. 

Jesus was poor. He wasn't even middle class. During his three years of ministry as a teacher, he had no permanent home. As such, Jesus had infinitely more in common with poor folk than he did with the religious leaders of his day. (In fact, his economic and social status were two things, among many others, that irked the Pharisees and Sadducees).

To sum up his assessment of Jesus, Thurman notes "Jesus was a member of a minority group in the midst of a larger dominant and controlling group. In 63 BC, Palestine fell into the hands of the Romans. After this date the gruesome details of loss of status were etched, line by line, in the sensitive soul of Israel, dramatized ever by an increasing desecration of the Holy Land." 

Jesus came onto the scene in the middle of a sociological mess that bore tons of consequences. "In the midst of this psychological climate," Thurman points out, "Jesus began his teaching and his ministry. His words were directed to the House of Israel, a minority within the Greco-Roman world, smarting under the loss of status, freedom and autonomy, haunted by the dream of the restoration of lost glory and a former greatness. His message focused on the urgency of a radical change in the inner attitude of the people."

Jesus knew, full well, the pressures that his culture group were facing. "With increasing insight and startling accuracy he [Jesus] placed his finger on the 'inward center' as the crucial arena where the issues would determine the destiny of his people."

Jesus experienced the oppression of the people he walked with. He knew the effects of oppression - both on those being oppressed and on those doing the oppressing. And what Jesus said and how he lived was a direct response, a clear answer to the disinherited.

From this starting point, Thurman goes on to examine the main instruments of oppression - fear, deception and hate. And he then takes a look at the power of love.

Thurman asks us to consider the example of the Roman Centurion [captain] who came to Capernaum for help with healing one of his servants (Matthew 8:15).  Jesus responds by asking the soldier if he wanted him to come to his home. The captain says, "I am not worthy that you should come to my home; but speak the word and my servant will be healed."

Jesus recognizes the stripping away of pretense and social status contained in that statement. So Jesus says to the crowd surrounding him and the captain, "I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith." 

Thurman writes, "The Roman was confronted with an insistence that made it impossible for him to remain a Roman, or even a captain. He had to take his place alongside all the rest of humanity and mingle his desires with the longing of all the desperate people of all the ages. When this happened, it was possible at once for him to scale with Jesus any height of understanding, fellowship and love. The final barrier between the strong and the weak, between ruler and ruled, disappeared."

"The crucial question," asks Thurman, "is, can this attitude, developed in the white heat of personal encounter, become characteristic of one's behavior even when the drama of immediacy is lacking?"

Thurman felt that it could. And the love that he was writing about was grounded in forgiveness. A forgiveness that does not ignore the root causes of injustice. He says that such forgiveness is mandatory, for three reasons:
1. God has forgiven each of us "again and again for what we do intentionally and unintentionally."
2. An evil deed does not represent "the full intent of the doer." 
3. Evil-doers do not go unpunished. "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... At the slow burning fires of resentment this may be poor comfort. This is the ultimate ground in which finally a profound, unrelieved injury is absorbed."

In order for love to do its work fear, deception and hatred must be recognized and dealt with. This is the fertile ground upon which hope blossoms. 

This is Thurman's answer to the question: What does the religion of Jesus have to offer to those who stand with their backs against the wall?"
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