Jesus and the Disinherited

I’ve just finished reading Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited. Thurman was a 20th century theologian who wrote about racial injustice and the affinities between Christ and blacks living in segregated America. Jesus and the Disinherited was published in 1949, but easily reads as if it had been written today. I would recommend the book strongly (it’s barely 100 pages, but is not something you can rush through and will certainly shake you up). Thurman moves through three effects of injustice – fear, deception, and hate – to conclude with a chapter on Christ’s love as our model for moving beyond injustice to living in love with one another. I have a hunch I’ll be writing on this for a while, so I figure I should start by sharing Thurman’s thoughts.

For Thurman, we overcome injustice when “Each person meets the other where he is and there treats him as if he were where he ought to be” (105). He draws from the biblical example of Christ found in John 8: 1-11. A group of men brought an adulterous woman to Christ to test him – the law stated clearly that she should be stoned for her crime, and if Jesus said differently, they could catch him for violating Jewish law. This is how Thurman depicts the encounter, starting with the question from the scribes and Pharisees:

“What is your judgment?” was their searching question. To them the woman was not a woman, or even a person, but an adulteress, stripped of her essential dignity and worth. Said Jesus: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” After that, he implied, any person may throw. The quiet words exploded the situation, and in the piercing glare each man saw himself in his literal substance. In that moment each was not a judge of another’s deeds, but of his own. In the same glare the adulteress saw herself merely as a woman involved in the meshes of a struggle with her own elemental passion (105).

We know how the story ends. The accusers, knowing their sins, leave one by one until Jesus is left alone with the woman. He asks her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" She said, "No one, sir." And Jesus said, "Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again" (John 8: 10-11).

Thurman responds:

This is how Jesus demonstrated reverence for personality. He met the woman where she was, and treated her as if she were already now where she willed to be. In dealing with her he “believed” her into the fulfillment of her possibilities. He stirred her confidence into activity. He placed a crown on her head which for the rest of her life she would keep trying to grow tall enough to wear (106).

For Thurman, justice is more than sentiment, and it is surely not an abstract concept. He warns that “merely preaching love of one’s enemies” will never realize change. Rather, he points to “a core of painstaking discipline” each person must choose to adopt that compels us to model Christ’s example every time we encounter someone different from ourselves. Laws may change structures of injustice, but only our behavior, as the sincere expression of our humbled hearts, will bring justice itself.

I might write next about the relationship between our own repentance (and need for Christ’s forgiveness) and our ability to ‘do justice’, though I also think Old Testament teachings on the subject are both beautiful and instructive. And, there’s no point writing about this if we don’t also think very practically about how we meet others where they are, and what we do when they don’t meet us in return (we won’t change the world if we’re Pollyanna about it!).

Be well,

Becky