Identity Politics
Proper 16 Luke 13: 10-17
22 August 2010
It is hard to imagine a pastor being as hard-hearted as the man who was in charge of the synagogue in which Jesus was preaching in our morning’s Gospel lesson. I suppose some people have so many control needs that they don’t want anything to happen in their place that they have not authorized. But still it seems strange: Jesus cured a woman fairly debilitated with her disease. Who could really be against that? When things seem so strange, that is the time when we have to suppose that something is going on that we don’t understand. Here is what I think is happening. (I learned this from Tom Wright’s work on the Gospels—though if I misunderstand him, I am holding him blameless for this treatment.)
Jesus was a wonder-working prophet in first-century Israel. His job, as with all prophets, was to renew the people of God. There were also signs that he was the long-awaited Messiah, which lent even more power to his prophetic and healing ministry. Now, normally, when a prophet did his work, he called people back to their roots, to their identity as Jews. Jesus did this in one way—referring constantly to the earliest traditions and to the great prophetic teachings. But one of the things he did not do was call people to a renewed engagement with the traditional marks of their Jewish identity.
There were three things that set Jews apart visibly in their world: circumcision, kosher, and Sabbath. Jesus doesn’t say much about circumcision, but he has a lot to say about dietary laws and keeping the Sabbath day—none of which the community leaders of his day agreed with. He set himself over against current teaching and actually undermined the Sabbath and kosher. Two of his famous lines were: The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath; and, it is what comes out of a man that makes him unclean, not what goes in.
In doing this, Jesus created a lot of confusion and anger and outrage. These were the badges by which Jewish identity had been secured. Only a little more than 100 years in the past, Jews had died by insisting on eating kosher and keeping Sabbath and circumcising their little boys. Practicing these rites and keeping these laws, were the main ways in which Jews set themselves apart as God’s people in their world. Yet, here was Jesus, supposedly leading a movement to renew Israel, and he was constantly undermining the things that ordinary Jews were supposed to do in order to be good Jews. Why did he do it?
His reasons get right to the heart of something crucially important for us. Jesus was undermining the traditional ways of identifying oneself as a Jew, because he was intending to replace them with something else. From now on, he taught, you didn’t need to be circumcised, eat kosher, and keep Sabbath; you could if you liked, but they were no longer important. What was important, and only what was important, was loyalty to him. Following Jesus became the new way of being faithful to Jewish history and fulfilling God’s will in the present.
Obviously, there was going to be a lot of controversy over this. Many, perhaps most, Jews, wouldn’t accept it. A prophet was supposed to support and enhance the tradition, not subvert it. Even those followers of his who put loyalty to him ahead of everything else—for example, his disciples—didn’t really understand the full implications until later. It took a big conference of apostles, which we read about in the book of Acts, before new Christians who converted from paganism were clear that they did not have to become Jews first, that is, by being circumcised, eating kosher, and keeping Sabbath.
So the pastor of the synagogue wasn’t necessarily a hateful man because he didn’t want the woman healed on the Sabbath. He was trying to maintain the whole idea of Sabbath as the Jewish badge of identity. What we have here, is a case of identity politics. The synagogue leader was fighting for his understanding of who was a real Jew. It is as if we had a bishop come into this church and start preaching against the resurrection. Oh, wait, we already have one of those—but no one takes him seriously as a prophet who wants to renew the church. Suppose a really powerful evangelist who seemed to care about Jesus and the Gospel came to us and taught that we should not celebrate the Eucharist because it was just an old superstition? Of course, we know of evangelists like that. Obviously, you don’t do whatever some prophet says simply because he is charismatic and popular.
Nor should the synagogue pastor have given in to Jesus simply because Jesus was charismatic and popular. But serious questions have to be asked when we come to the case of the woman herself. Sometimes when people are holding on to things that are badges of identity, they do it in a way that hurts people around them. They are afraid to let go of some symbol that tells them who they are, so that those who have no place within that symbol are made to feel second-class, even though they are thoroughly worthy people. It was as if the synagogue leader used his zeal for the Sabbath to beat the poor sick woman over the head. This happens all the time.
I read just this week that there is a community in New York in which some folks are angry because Russian immigrants are building a community center. There are folks who treat these Russian immigrants as if they were bad people because they don’t like to hear Russian being spoken in the supermarket. A woman was reported to have said that she doesn’t like the feeling of being a foreigner in her own town. She only wants to hear English, not Russian, being spoken by her neighbors. Now no one says she and her friends have to give up speaking English. English is a lovely language when it is spoken and written well. But the Russian immigrants are her neighbors. Why does she use English as a club to beat them over the head? Why not pick up a few Russian words to make her neighbors feel welcome?
Jesus was very clear: even the pastor gave his mule a drink of water on the Sabbath; why not help this poor woman? In the name of maintaining a symbol of one’s identity in the face of people who seem to threaten it, there are those who treat their animals better than some of the people around them.
So what kinds of identity politics shall we play? We all need to have some idea of who we are and we often define ourselves by symbols that mean a lot to us. For example, I am a Midwestern, white, German-American, farm boy from Southern Minnesota. Those things are important to me. They go a long way towards defining who I am. But they don’t go the whole way and they don’t go the most important distance. I am, first and foremost, a follower of Jesus—not always the best, but I am determined to put that loyalty ahead of everything else. The Midwest has changed a lot since I was a kid. German-Americans are harder to find; so are farm boys. White folks are getting to be a minority, too. Does all that matter much? Not really. I can still follow Jesus.
When people primarily desire to follow Jesus, the secondary badges of identity don’t seem so important, while, when other signs of identity are primary—the language you speak, the class you belong to, your skin color, your immigrant status—people can end up treating their actual neighbors rather poorly, while imagining themselves to be among neighbors who no longer are there. These days when our own country is changing so rapidly in ethnic and linguistic and other ways, it pays to remember that pastor of the synagogue who would rather have let that poor woman suffer—treating her worse than his pets—because he was clinging to his old vision of how things were supposed to be. I cannot resist quoting the old apostle Paul, who certainly put in his time in fights over identity politics: “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”