6/14/20 “Updating Jesus’ Instructions” by Nancy E. Petty
Matthew 9:35-10:8
When Jesus sent out his disciples into the world his instructions were clear. “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” With these instructions, he sends them out to do the very works that defined his own ministry from the beginning: healing and liberation. Healing and liberation was always the focus for Jesus. If you took every story of Jesus from the Bible, you could place it under one of these two headings. And his instructions to the early disciples were no different: cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. This was the work of the prophets before Jesus. It was the work of the prophet Jesus. And it is our work as prophets today. Healing and liberation.
People often ask me, “How do I know if someone is truly speaking God’s word or not? How do I know if they are truly God’s prophet and a disciple of Jesus?” I understand the question. I mean Franklin Graham says he is speaking God’s word and following Jesus. And so does Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Jim Bakker. But their words sure sound different from, let’s say, William Barber and Kelly Brown Douglas—not to mention Jesus. So how does one discern the voice of a prophet? If the words and actions of those claiming to be God’s prophets of today are not marked by healing and liberation for all people you need to question whether they are God’s prophet and a follower of Jesus. Whether with Jesus or sent out by Jesus, the authentic proclamation of God’s kin_dom is marked by healing and liberation: cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. These were and remain Jesus’ instructions. And just to put a fine point on what I am saying, Jesus’ mission was never about establishing a religion or converting people to a religion or establishing megachurches. It was about healing the ills of a society that caused harm to the most vulnerable, and liberating those who were oppressed by the empire. His instructions were to heal people and free them.
But here’s the thing: instructions only take us so far. Have you ever tried to follow the instructions that are included in the box with the bicycle that is in 50 pieces? Or the small night stand from IKEA that requires “some assembly” and upon opening the box there are literally a 100 pieces wood and plastic bolts and screws and closures and openings in all various sizes, and many of them don’t correspond to the instructions provided? Sometimes instructions only take us so far.
Jesus sends the disciples out with the instructions of curing sickness, raising the dead, cleansing the lepers and casting out demons and yet, when they are on their own, they have to decide how to follow his instructions in new and emerging contexts. In each place and time, they have to assess what it means to cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers and cast out demons. They have to assess in their time and context how the work of healing and liberation needs to take form and shape. They have to analyze the structures and systems they are living in that are keeping people sick and oppressed. But the work is always about healing and liberating.
There is so much healing and liberating work that needs tending to in our world right now. AND, in this moment in time the focus of that work in America must be the healing and liberation of racist policies, structures, institutions and governance that has kept and is keeping black Americans oppressed. So how do we, here in America in 2020, update Jesus’ instructions to speak to our time and our culture?
Cure the sick…Today, the sickness we must cure is the cancerous tumor of racist ideology, language, policies and laws designed in our nation’s foundation and carefully nurtured and cultivated in our systems today. White America has been taught to honor and idolize our founders. Our history books are full of stories of these monumental men, their courageous battles, and their eloquent words. We are taught to revere these men who gave the world a shining new paradigm of human governance aimed at freeing man from tyranny. And yet, these men who held the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in one hand, held in the other a bill of sale for the bodies of other humans. We placate ourselves by saying that slavery was accepted at the time, and therefore we must judge these men by the morals of the day. But is it not our moral, religious, ethical and national responsibility today to see them clearly as deeply conflicted men who paid for the luxury of their ideals with black bodies, black labor, black pain, and black death. Every time we choose to glorify the founding of this country, or our founding documents, without explicitly naming the devastating hypocrisy of them, we perpetuate the oppression of black people in this country. James Baldwin, in his essay Nothing Personal says it this way:
“…we live by lies. The lie has penetrated to our most private moments, and the most secret chambers of our hearts.
Nothing more sinister can happen, in any society, to any people. And when it happens, it means that the people are caught in a kind of vacuum between their present and their past – the romanticized, that is, the maligned past, and the denied and dishonored present. It is a crisis of identity. And in such a crisis, at such a pressure, it becomes absolutely indispensable to discover, or invent – the two words here are synonyms – the stranger, the barbarian, who is responsible for our confusion and our pain. Once he is driven out – destroyed – then we can be at peace: those questions will be gone. Of course, those questions never go, but it has always seemed much easier to murder than to change. And this is the really the choice with which we are confronted now.”
If we are to follow Jesus’ instructions to heal and liberate in 2020 we will need to begin by looking honestly at our past? Are we willing to acknowledge that white slave owners deliberately created and propagated fear and hatred for blacks among poor whites? Will we confess that all of white America prospered from the unauthorized, unpaid, felonious labor of enslaved people? Will we start acknowledging that “bad neighborhoods” didn’t found themselves – that we red-lined those neighborhoods to ensure that black people could not own? Do we have the courage to admit that every social system we fund in this country disproportionately favors whites over blacks and those of other non-white races? Racism was in us the day this nation came into being, and it has been maintained since that time with an ever evolving set of euphemisms to hide from our own selves what we are complicit in. Can we bear to hold that tension, knowing that the very lives of young black men today depend on it? Jesus says cure the sick.
Jesus said, raise the dead…The dead we must raise are the black and brown people dying in our for-profit prisons as a result of our nations’ inhumane and corrupt criminal justice system. Our criminal justice system has condemned, in many cases, innocent black and brown people to a life of incarceration—a sentence of death by stripping them of their humanity and dignity and respect—without proof of guilt or fairness in sentencing—therefore also denying them their constitutional rights. Our criminal justice system is letting white people go free while sentencing our young black and brown brothers and sisters into the 21st century form of slavery.
This past week, I marched with a group of young people who carried their Black Lives Matter protest to Central Prison. I listened as one young black man spoke of how if he was charged for marijuana possession today he would receive a $50 fine. But how some of his brothers were sitting in Central Prison having received a life sentence 15 years ago for the same charge. In case you think the young man was making this up or exaggerating, I encourage you to google life sentence for marijuana later to read some of the stories. How do we think that is okay? We have even legalized marijuana in some states, but we have not freed people who were convicted 10-15 years ago of marijuana possession. Why? Because they are black, and when the US declared war on drugs somebody had to carry the blame. How do we think that it is okay for a man be imprisoned for life for marijuana, when another man, a police officer, remains free after busting his way into Breonna Taylor’s home while she was sleeping and firing his gun killing her because he believed her apartment had been used by a drug dealer to receive a package?
How can we think it is okay for our justice system to profile men, women and children because their skin is black or brown? A criminal justice system that profits off the poor and vulnerable and black and brown bodies is a corrupt and sick system.
For white people, it is imperative that we analyze our own complicity in how we participate in and are protected by a justice system that is meted out predominately by white people of power. Sure, our children get a drug possession charge and we pay an expensive lawyer to make the charge go away. All the while, a black mother or father saddled by the income inequality in this nation watches as their child sits in a jail cell being abused by those who are trusted to serve and protect.
As white people of privilege, our analysis, I imagine, will require some large shifts in our thinking. Things like the legalization of marijuana. Or new laws that don’t simply protect the lawlessness of our police force. Or maybe defunding the police in order to reshape policing in our nation and to fund much needed community social programs. By defunding, I mean shifting budgets to address community needs. Maybe our police officers don’t need to carry guns like in other countries where crime is low; which means we also need to reform gun laws in this country. Maybe it should be illegal for our police agencies to buy and stockpile military weapons or use chemical gases on protesting crowds.
To start, at the very least, our criminal justice system should be emptying our jails and prisons of the black and brown bodies that have been unjustly targeted by a bankrupt and racist criminal justice system. And if we, as white people, are not fighting to liberate our black and brown brothers and sisters who are dying in our prison system by calling on and demanding criminal justice reform then we are not following Jesus’ instructions.
Jesus also said cleanse the lepers…The cleansing we must be about today is in cleansing our nation’s police force from their racist policies and procedures. Here, I am not comparing lepers to police. Lepers in Jesus day were outcast and marginalized from their communities—treated as non-human beings. No, I am updating Jesus’ instructions to name what needs cleansing in our nation right now. Our policing and those who enforce our nation’s policing need cleansing from their bigoted and racist policies and actions. And this cleansing cannot be a surface cleansing. It will require a deep cleaning—the kind of cleaning and cleansing where all the furniture is pulled away from the walls, the couch cushions are removed, the cabinets are emptied, and every nook and cranny is exposed so that the dirt that has accumulated there can be swept away. A kind of temple cleansing that Jesus did when corruption had taken over the temple. In this nation, our police stations have become the temples that need cleansing.
As white people, if we see a black or brown person in an encounter with a police officer we need to stand vigil and give witness to the encounter. On Friday, as I was taking my afternoon walk downtown I heard loud voices. On the opposite side of Fayetteville St where I was walking I witnessed a black man and officer having what sounded like a heated conversation. I heard the black man say to the officer, “I’m not afraid of you.” To which the officer angrily said back, “And I ain’t afraid of you.” A few more words were exchanged between the two. As the black man walked across the street toward me, I asked, “Are you okay man?” He replied, “I’m not afraid of him. They can kill us in the streets but I will not be afraid of him.” I listened as he talked about being a black man while cops are killing unarmed black men every day. Finally, I spoke. I said, “I’m with y’all man. I’m standing with y’all.” He looked into my eyes and said forcefully, “Don’t say y’all. My name is George. Call me by my name. My name is George.” George and I stood and talked for another 15 minutes and before we said goodbye George asked if we could hug. For a good 15 seconds we embraced. He thanked me for listening and bearing witness. The cleansing needed will need our witness and it will need our action. If we want to follow Jesus’ instructions, this is the work we are being called to do as his followers.
Finally, Jesus instructed his disciples to cast out demons…The casting out of demons we must do in 2020 will need to focus on changing a capitalistic structure that ensures income inequality between black and brown people and white people. To recap, from 1619 to 1865, the vast majority of black people in the United States were not paid to work, were not allowed to own property, did not receive basic health care services or standard nutrition, and were physically and psychologically tortured. From 1865 to now, black people earn less, on average than their white peers, but the really devastating piece that perpetuates generational poverty is that black people have never been given the opportunity to accumulate wealth. Home ownership and inheritance are the drivers of wealth creation in the population, and both of these have been largely withheld from blacks by policy and practice. Christina Gibson-Davis, an Associate Professor in Duke’s Sanford Public Policy school tweeted this week that the median wealth of black families with kids is $294. The medial wealth for white families with kids is $47,250. There is one cent of black wealth for $1 of white wealth. One cent, to one dollar. What is demonic if not that? Income inequality for blacks in this nation is a demonic force—one that our capitalistic extraction system perpetuates. To follow Jesus’ instructions in 2020 we must be willing to cast out this demon.
Healing and liberation. Those are the instructions handed down to Jesus and those are the instructions Jesus handed down to his followers. If we are not focused on this healing and liberation in our nation, individually as people of the Christian faith and collectively as a Christian church, we are not following Jesus’ instructions. It’s that simple.
