Easter is not only an opportunity to relive Christ’s resurrection, but also an opportunity to resurrect ourselves, and our thinking about the example Christ gives in our lives.
His suffering is representative of the suffering our young people endure today, and, in fact, so representative, that it is high time we see Him in them.
Even for non-Christians, I believe it is necessary to acknowledge the historical Jesus, and the fact that for at least 2,000 years, humankind has worshipped, studied, debated and warred over someone who hung out with the poor, the oppressed, the sick and uninsured, and the imprisoned.
Renowned theologian and mystic Howard Thurman made the case in his landmark, Jesus and The Disinherited, that Christ was in the 99 percent.
“The economic predicament with which he was identified in birth placed him initially with the great mass of men on the earth,” Thurman wrote, and “the masses of the people are poor.”
Thurman described Jesus “as a member of a minority group in the midst of a larger dominant and controlling group.” Rome occupied the Holy Land, as Herod sold out to oversee the subjugation of his fellow Israelites. Jesus’ “words were directed to the House of Israel, a minority within the Greco-Roman world, smarting under the loss of status, freedom, and autonomy.”
Galilee, where Christ lived, carpentered and ministered was a culturally diverse region where Jewish, Gentile and other “indigenous cultural traditions and social customs were cultivated basically at the popular level, which probably also meant considerable local variation,” according to Richard A. Horsely in Galilee: History, Politics, People.
And, as in all oppressed, colonized communities, the people spoke a language all their own. Aramaic was the vernacular, which, J. Stephen Lang writes in Everyday Biblical Literacy, was “looked down” upon by Hebrew-speaking Jews in Judea.
Galilee was often considered a ghetto, and her inhabitants considered inferior, uneducated and unclean, as disclosed when Philip told Nathanael of Jesus of Nazareth, Nathanael famously replied: “Nazareth?! Can anything good come from there?!” (Jn 1:46)
Irrefutable historical evidence of socioeconomic and political oppression experienced in the community where Christ lived, carpentered and ministered laid the foundation for theologian James H. Cone’s groundbreaking, A Black Theology of Liberation, which not only defined and named the historical African-American prophetic Christian experience, but influenced the spirituality of the first African-American president–a spirituality which incited News Corp’s obsession with the president’s former Pastor, and Cone contemporary, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright.
Jesus, according to Cone, became a “human being for oppressed persons, whose identity is made known in and through their liberation…God is known where human beings experience humiliation and suffering.”
This suffering Galilean community in the time of Christ was constantly negotiating between the dream of freedom and the reality of subjugation. The resistance movement led by Judas the Galilean remained fresh in Rome’s mind.
Rome feared that at any moment any Galilean, but especially Jesus, might organize and mobilize to resist again and challenge their authority. All Galileans were, therefore, deemed subhuman and criminalized, including Jesus–an outlaw and a hunted man, constantly pursued for arrest.
Jesus was, therefore, like young people of color today, constantly stopped, and when not frisked, vigorously interrogated by the Pharisees and Sadducees. Profiled, Jesus was able to elude capture by simply blending in with the crowd. He, therefore, was not only a typical Galilean in class, culture and speech, but a typical Galilean in dress, also.
Galilean men wore tunics, mantles, sandals and head coverings to protect from the sun. How many images have depicted Christ and his disciples with their heads covered? The accepted, popular, yet lamentably, too-white image of Christ in Western culture is a messiah with his head covered. So, Jesus was likely to have worn a head covering, at least, when he was not in prayer, as Paul’s instructions to the Corinthians mandate (I Co 11), or, at most, he wore one frequently, especially during prayer, as was Jewish custom.
Jesus likely identified with all things Galilean. If his dress was indistinguishable from the average Galilean, so, too, indistinguishable, were the authorities surveillance of Him as a stereotypical Galilean subject. All Galileans were a threat because Jesus was somewhere among them, and Jesus was a threat because he was somewhere among the Galileans.
So Jesus was a working class carpenter with no union in a poor, urban, diverse community, forging a style and language all its own, despite both oppression and an occupying force seeking to demoralize and discourage any resistance. Does not Jesus’ reality in His day describe the reality of the average youth of color today, except for the part about Jesus being employed?
As was the case with Christ’s Galilee, the question is to resist or not to resist. Our youth choose to resist most often by forging their own music, sometimes loud like Jordan Davis’s, their own language and their own popular style of dress, like the hoodie–also, a rather practical attire for rain, as was the case when George Zimmerman pursued Trayvon Martin. As a result, our youth, “over the past 50 years,” Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad has observed, “have been identified as ‘suspicious’ by their clothing, whether they were or not.”
Samad writes: “In the 1970s, wearing army jackets (as many of the returning Vietnam vets did – and many school kids – Hell, I had one), made black men suspicious and dangerous. In the 1980s, it was P-Coats. In the 1990s, it was Raiders jackets. In the 2000s, it was Georgetown jackets. In the 2010s, it is ‘hoodies.’”
Historically, law enforcement in America, just like Rome breathing down the neck of Galilee, feared that at any moment any African-American might organize and mobilize the people to resist and challenge racism and white supremacy. So the police were deployed to occupy the ghettoes disproportionately, and all were suspicious according to skin color and dress. The handful of true criminals in our communities were used to indict us all,as Criminalizing A Race author Charshee McIntire wrote, “inherently deviant and criminal.”
Innocents indicted and executed were Amadou Diallo, Johnny Gammage, Tyisha Miller, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant and Ramarley Graham.Their indictments, and the general indictment of our communities–along with the continued distribution of guns within our communities fromwithout our communities–has justified the occupation of our communities by law enforcement for generations, and shaped the dominant culture’s stereotypes and profiles of people of color.
Stop-and-Frisk and Stand Your Ground enable both this profiling and the extrajudicial executions of young people of color.
All of us, but especially our young men like Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, are deemed criminals, outlaws and are hunted and constantly pursued for arrest, thus, likening our experiencing to that of Christ and His experience to ours. The hoodie Christ wore can be observed in the literal sense, and the one He wears in the metaphorical sense, in that He identified and identifies with those who are oppressed, stopped and frisked, and with the ongoing tension that always exists between the oppressed and their oppressor.
Cone writes that “knowing God means being on the side of the oppressed [and] becoming one with them. We must become black with God!” Being black, so to speak, is to dwell in the house of God with the oppressed, essentially becoming Christ.
I would argue that becoming black, becoming Christ, today is a lot easier if you are among those who are also oppressed: the poor, women, Latinos, LGBTQ’s, and if you are a senior or a part of the working class, you also are getting closer to blackness everyday. Paradoxically, becoming black and becoming Christ today is also a lot easier if you are Muslim, not to mention being an already black President believed to be Muslim.
But becoming one with God and the oppressed also requires living with the imminence of death by violence, as Christ did and as most of our youth do everyday. Jesus knew his violent death was certain, and horrifically, our youth, too, have that knowledge.
In The Cross And The Lynching Tree, Cone argues that not only are Jesus and African-Americans “both ‘strange fruit,’” but that Jesus was “the first lynchee.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Unearned suffering is redemptive.” The suffering and death of Jesus Christ mobilizes true Christians to seek and redeem love, justice and an end to oppression. The suffering and death of Emmett Till redeemed a power within the African-American community and its allies not seen since the end of Reconstruction and advent of Jim Crow, and mobilized the modern civil rights movement.
Trayvon, Jordan and Renisha McBride are our latest lambs. And how their names have gone unforgotten. If you kill a lamb, we will do nothing less than utter that lamb’s name forever. Their suffering and their deaths redeem our will to stand up as an entire nation against injustice, and against the 1 percent that not only supports “Stand Your Ground”-type laws, but also supports today’s post-Reconstruction-like voter suppression in order to prevent us from changing those laws.
Trayvon was profiled as his head was covered, Jordan for listening to loud music and Renisha for knocking on a door seeking help. Christ was profiled as his head was covered, as he preached a loud gospel, and as he stood at the door and knocked (Revelations 3:20).
As Christians observe the Passion of Christ, all should observe the plight of our youth, and the daily threats to their lives. A movement to end profiling people of color, to end violence against African Americans, not only at the hands of civilians, but also at the hands of law enforcement, should be organized. A resurrection of a spirit of resolve and resistance like the anti-lynching movement in the early 20th century is necessary.
Indeed Jesus lives. The hoodie he wore is the same one our young people wear today as innocent victims. Let us take up His cross, take up the crosses of our young people, don our own hoodies, and, in doing so, save ourselves.
The Rev. Matsimela Mapfumo (Mark A. Thompson), M.Div is the host of Make It Plain on SiriusXM Progress 127, M-F, 6-9p ET