Sunday, January 27, 2019 | 4:00 p.m.

Jesus the Teacher and the Disinherited

“Who Is Jesus?” Sermon Series

Nanette Sawyer
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 32
Luke 4:14–21

Jesus was filled with the power of the Holy Spirit of God. This is emphasized in Luke’s account of these early events in Jesus’ life and ministry.

In his baptism, when Jesus was praying, heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove, and Jesus was called “Beloved” (Luke 3:21–22).

Then, “full of the Holy Spirit,” Jesus returned from the River Jordan and “was led by the Spirit in the wilderness” (Luke 4:1), where he went through forty days of temptation.

Jesus was full of the Spirit and led by the Spirit.

After that, Jesus returned to Galilee, again “filled with the power of the Holy Spirit,” where he began to teach in the synagogues, and Jesus’ fame spread throughout the region.

When he read from scripture, he selected the verses in Isaiah that began “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me.”

Jesus taught, yes, but he wasn’t just teaching ideas. He was teaching a way of being. Filled with the Holy Spirit he had a mission and a purpose, and the way he fulfilled that purpose was part of the teaching.

Quoting Isaiah, Jesus said that God sent him to preach good news to the poor, but Jesus himself was poor. We should remember that. He wasn’t a wealthy man coming to tell poor people how to live or what to do.

He was God living in the body of a poor man, a tradesman, a carpenter. He was God, experiencing life under occupation of the Roman Empire.

We know that Jesus was poor, because when his parents brought him to the temple for his dedication and circumcision, they could not afford to bring a lamb as an offering as the book of Leviticus called for. Instead they brought two doves as offering, which is what Leviticus says you should do if you cannot bring a lamb.

Jesus grew up poor. And he was not a citizen of the Roman Empire as the Apostle Paul was later. When Paul was imprisoned and treated badly, he could call upon his rights as a Roman citizen. He could file a complaint with the authorities and hope that some justice might come retroactively.

But Jesus could not call upon any of these rights and freedoms. Jesus did not have citizenship status, and that put him at risk with the Roman authorities.

He was living in solidarity with those who suffered, because he was one of them. But he was not only surviving; he was filled with the Holy Spirit. His face shone. He had inner power and dignity. He had the royal power of God in him, and he knew that he was beloved. He was marked and named and claimed as God’s own.

Filled with the Holy Spirit in this way, living in poverty, living in an oppressive situation, Jesus, through the words of Isaiah, proclaims release, recovery, liberation, and favor. Howard Thurman said that “the basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed. . . . Living in a climate of deep insecurity, Jesus, faced with so narrow a margin of civil guarantees, had to find some other basis upon which to establish a sense of well-being” (Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, pp. 29, 34–35).

In case you don’t know who Howard Thurman was, he was an African American pastor, theologian, philosopher, and civil rights leader who lived from 1899 to 1981. He wrote many books, including one called Jesus and the Disinherited.

Vincent Harding wrote the foreword to this book and said that this book “is the centerpiece of the Black prophet-mystic’s lifelong attempt to bring the harrowing beauty of the African American experience into deep engagement with what he called ‘the religion of Jesus.’”

What did Thurman write about? As Harding described it, Thurman combined the African American experience with the religion of Jesus in such a way that Jesus’ teaching could become “the basis for an emancipatory way of being, moving toward a fundamentally unchained life that is available to all the women and men everywhere who hunger and thirst for righteousness, especially those ‘who stand with their backs against the wall’” (Vincent Harding, Foreword to Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited).

Thurman asked this question: What does the religion of Jesus have to offer to those whose backs are up against a wall? He’s talking about people trapped in systems of oppression and made to feel that they don’t matter, that they won’t be protected, that they are less than other children of God, and even that they are not children of God.

What does the religion of Jesus have to offer those of us and those among us who have our backs up against a wall?

Sometimes Christianity has offered not good news but bad news: slaves, submit; women, submit; LGBT persons, submit to our definition of who you are. Let us control your destiny.

That’s not the good news of the gospel, and it’s not the liberating message of Jesus. That’s the bad news of religious shame and manipulation.

That bad news would say, Things are bad now? Don’t worry, you’ll get your reward later, in heaven, in another world, in another time. So for now, submit.

But Jesus brings another message, one that is truly good news to the poor, the oppressed, the disinherited, and the dispossessed.

To quote Thurman again, “Wherever [Christ’s] spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them” (Jesus and the Disinherited, p. 29).

In other words, there is a way to survive and even thrive, here and now, that does not submit to domination. Jesus calls us all to a life of dignity and integrity, a life of respect and self-respect. This is a life of resistance, but it’s a certain kind of resistance.

What is Jesus’ technique of survival for the oppressed? Every oppressed person is faced with daily decisions about whether they will resist or not, and if they do, how they will resist the fear, deception, and hatred that tries to bring them down.

Part of the task is to deeply analyze how these weapons—fear, deception, hatred—function in society. Once these dangers are recognized and understood as clearly as possible, each person “must learn how to destroy these or to render themselves immune to their domination” (Jesus and the Disinherited, pp. 108–109).

In analyzing the injustice, we could think of at least four ways that a person might respond in the face of dehumanizing injustice. In broad strokes, Howard Thurman maps it out like this:

First, Thurman describes two kinds of nonresistance. One form is total surrender to the dominating power, giving up the sense of autonomy and individuality and becoming like the oppressor.

The Sadducees were a bit like this. They became like the Romans as much as they could in order to not be destroyed by the Romans.

A second form of nonresistance could be called cultural isolation. You separate yourself from the dominant culture and try to have as little contact as possible. You maintain who you are, but you live in the contempt and anger that you feel toward the people in power. But you don’t resist. You stew. Your spirit is diminished.

The Pharisees as a group tended to be more like this, holding on to bitterness and a deep fear of the power of the Romans and what they might do to the Jewish people.

There are also two forms of resistance that Thurman describes. And of course there are many variations on all these experiences. Painting the picture in big strokes, we clearly see that physical resistance is one option. Maybe this is even armed resistance.

In Jesus’ day this was the position of the movement of the Zealots. The physical fight forces the dominating powers to also fight to try to keep their power and control in place.

In this fight the resisters at least feel that their existence is acknowledged. They have to be dealt with. Thurman describes this as releasing tension and freeing the oppressed from “a sense of impotency and helplessness.” At least they are doing something. At least they are causing themselves to be seen and acknowledged.

But Jesus’ way is a fourth way. It is a way of resistance rooted in God—God’s power, God’s love, God’s vision, and God’s Spirit. Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is in us.” This means the kingdom is in us right now. Not in the afterlife. Not in another world at another time. But right now.

Jesus brought this good news message to the House of Israel, a minority within the Greco-Roman world. Ever since Palestine was conquered and occupied by the Romans in the year 63 BCE, Before the Common Era, before Christ was ever born, the people had been struggling with the loss of status, freedom, and autonomy. They were an occupied nation.

In that context, Jesus’ message was about an urgent “radical change in the inner attitude of the people.” He recognized that no external force, no matter how powerful it is, can destroy a people without first winning a “victory of the spirit against them” (Jesus and the Disinherited, p. 21).

In other words, resistance to domination requires a spiritual upliftment, a strengthening of the spirit so that the spirit cannot be crushed. If the spirit cannot be crushed, the people will survive. Howard Thurman suggests that this is the technique of survival that Jesus offers for the oppressed.

For people whose backs are up against a wall, there needs to be a foundation on which they can stand. Without civil guarantees, we stand on the guarantees of God, not because of what it means for the future, but because of what it means for us right now.

It means that when we or anyone is told that we are less-than, God says something else. You have the kingdom of God in you, Jesus said. I have the kingdom of God in me. Jesus taught this. And he taught how to overcome despair of the spirit, how to win a spiritual victory that can support ongoing resistance.

To quote Thurman one more time, he described the spiritual victory about which Jesus taught. He wrote, “The disinherited will know for themselves that there is a Spirit at work in life and in the hearts of men which is committed to overcoming the world. It is universal, knowing no age, no race, no culture, and no condition of men” (Jesus and the Disinherited, pp. 108–109).

This kind of resistance requires work, yes. It requires the dedication and discipline of developing and maintaining a spiritual life of prayer and living with awareness and with deep analysis of each situation. It requires honesty about one’s own motivations and reactions to the chaos and injustice that permeates our lives.

Honesty and understanding of ourselves will allow us to control the quality of our inner lives. Without this rootedness in God’s Spirit, other people will be able to control, manipulate, and subjugate us.

But in all this work and the grace that flows from it, there is a Spirit at work that is committed to overcoming the injustice of this world.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” Jesus said. And the Spirit of the Lord is upon you and upon me. Let yourself know that your spirit cannot be crushed. And in that is the victory and the survival of humanity. May we go forth full of the Holy Spirit. Amen.