GOD’S STRATEGIC ALLIANCE WITH THE LIMINAL AND MARGINALIZED
The good news of the Christian faith for liminal and marginalized Asian Americans is that the liminal place of marginality is precisely where God is to be found. God chooses the liminal margins of this world as the strategic place to begin God’s decisive work of carrying out God’s own end in creation. God chooses to work through liminal/marginalized people in order to love and redeem all fallen humanity. This is because marginalized people, though sinful themselves, possess a more heightened liminality than those at the dominant centers of the world and thus a little more openness to God’s good news. There is a passage in the fourth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel that is seldom referred to in theology and preaching. After mentioning that Jesus settled and made his home in Capernaum by the sea, “in the territory of Zebulun and Naphatali [i.e., Galilee],” the author of Matthew quotes from Isaiah 9:1–2:
Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,
on the road by the sea, across the Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles—
the people who sat in darkness
have seen a great light,
and for those who sat in the region
light has dawned. (Matt. 4:15–16)
“A great light” in the “Galilee of the Gentiles”? “Light has dawned” in the land of “impure” people who are either Gentiles or those who associate with foreigners, the region of culturally and religiously backward peasants? No wonder the attention soon centered on Jerusalem as the center of the Christian movement while Galilee became invisible. The Gospels, however, point to Galilee as the place of Jesus’ life and ministry. My thesis in this book is this: the redemption of fallen creation, especially humankind, involves the transformation of fallen humanity into persons who can participate in God’s own work of repeating in time and space the inner-trinitarian community of love. For this purpose, the Son of God came into the world and appealed first to Galileans, a liminal and marginalized people who, unlike those at the centers, would be more open to the radical newness of the gospel. The Son of God made, in other words, a strategic alliance with Galileans and called them to be his own “first responders” or “first followers” in order to redeem ultimately the whole humankind.
God “could not” begin this work of redemption with the proud people at the dominant centers because their self-preoccupation is protective of the status quo. So God chose to approach first the liminal and marginalized people of the world. It is not that God loves them any more than the people at the centers. It is, rather, that to begin with marginalized people is more strategic for God because of their intensified liminality. It is the social location of liminality characteristic of marginalized people that makes it strategic for God to begin with them in God’s work of redeeming all people. Healing and freeing up a marginalized people’s suppressed liminal creativity is the first step God takes in God’s grand project to build a beloved community here on earth.
Those who hear and respond to God’s call to participate in God’s own project in time and space, regardless of their ethnic or racial backgrounds, are chosen by God. But marginalized people, like Asian Americans and all others who may intentionally become liminal, are chosen by God in an additional sense—namely, in being called to become the first believers or initial responders. Asian American Christians’ special calling, therefore, is God’s appeal to them to exercise the creative openness of their suppressed liminality for the sake of the values of God’s reign. It is worth repeating that this special calling is not limited to any one ethnic group. Any person who intentionally becomes liminal for the sake of God’s kingdom has this special vocation. Asian Americans are simply de facto in the social location of liminality and marginality. Their calling is to be empowered by Christ to face up to and begin exercising their liminal creativity for God’s reign.
God’s strategic alliance with the liminal and marginalized began with God’s choice of the nomadic family of Abraham. God called them to leave home and enter the life of liminality in the wilderness where they were to search for “a better country” whose “architect and builder is God” (Heb. 11:16, 10). God brought the already marginalized Hebrew slaves out of Egypt and threw them into a wilderness. In that harsh and liminal predicament, the liberated Hebrew slaves often despaired. But by God’s unfailing care and presence, they experienced the emergence of communitas and solidarity as a people, as well as the birth of the monotheistic devotion to Yahweh who brought them out of the land of Egypt. In the wilderness experience, as biblical scholar Robert L. Cohn puts it, “the forces of liminality and communitas oxygenat[ed] the heavy atmosphere of structure.” Cohn continues, “the religious and social values developed during this ‘moment in and out of time’ continued to reassert themselves in later periods … especially during the exile.”1 In this way, the history of Israel can be read as the story of God’s choice of a liminal/marginalized people for God’s own purposes and God’s repeatedly empowering them to face up to, and to use creatively, their experiences of liminal wilderness and exile, or what Walter Brueggemann calls “landlessness.” In Jesus of Nazareth, God’s alliance with the liminal/marginalized takes the form of God’s becoming a liminal/marginalized person Godself. God does God’s redemptive work not just for the people but also as one among them. Crucially, God’s incarnation as a historical person has to be taken in all of its concrete historicity. God did not become a general human being but a liminal/marginalized person. And God did not become a general marginalized person (who can only be found in a dictionary), but a concrete marginalized person—namely, a Galilean from the village of Nazareth. This means that Jesus was part of the religious, cultural, and political ethos of Galilee.
Thus, Jesus Christ, whom the Christian church confesses as Lord and Savior, is the Son of God who came to Galilee as well as out of Galilee. God, in other words, came to the world as a liminal/marginalized Galilean and also emerged out of the liminal/marginalized Galilee. A Christology that is faithful both to Jesus’ historicity and to the church’s confession must be both a descending and an ascending Christology. The bifurcation between what we call “Christology from below” and “Christology from above” must be overcome. I now turn to a consideration of Jesus Christ as a liminal/marginalized Galilean and the meaning of this Christ for Asian Americans and all other liminal/marginalized people.
GALILEE AS THE PLACE OF JESUS’ MINISTRY AND GALILEANS AS HIS FIRST FOLLOWERS
The importance of Galilee, or more specifically the lower Galilee at the northern end of the Sea of Galilee, as the center of Jesus’ ministry began to be noticed in the 1930s through the writings of Ernst Lohmeyer and R. H. Lightfoot.2 Since then, their main thesis in regard to the opposition between Galilee as the place of people’s acceptance of Jesus and Jerusalem as the city of hostile forces against him has received much development and refinement.3 Most recently, the publication of several landmark studies on Galilee by Richard Horsley and others has added a great depth to our understanding of Galilee in its historical, sociological, and religious context.4 The cumulative insight of these studies is the incontrovertible centrality of Galilee and Galileans in the New Testament Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching.
First, Galilee was the place where Jesus by divine intention lived and began his ministry. Matthew points to the divine intention in Jesus’ choice of residence by referring to the dream that told Joseph to avoid Judea and to settle in Galilee (Matt. 2:22–23). Matthew cites the Old Testament to validate Jesus’ move from Nazareth to Capernaum at the beginning to his ministry (Matt. 4:15–16; Isa. 9:1–2). Sean Freyne observes that for Matthew Galilee and Capernaum are not “just safe haven for the main character …; they are actually the divinely willed theatres for the career of Jesus.” Further, the description of Galilee as the “Galilee of the Gentiles,” for Freyne, is in accord with Matthew’s final attitude toward the Gentiles and Jesus’ mission. Freyne concludes: “Galilee, therefore, has been blessed with a messianic visitation in the career of Jesus, seen as a light for those in darkness.”5 For Matthew and Mark, Jesus’ first public appearance is his baptism by John, and both evangelists make a particular note that “Jesus came from [Nazareth of] Galilee” (Matt. 3:13; Mark 1:9)—to be baptized. At the moment of baptism, the voice from heaven declares, “This is [‘You are,’ Mark 1:11; Luke 3:22] my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17). The words this and you here do not refer to some general or abstract human being but, rather, to “Jesus who came from Galilee,” Jesus the Galilean. That the ensuing drama is about the Galilean Jesus and that this is God’s own intention is unmistakably noted by the evangelists. After Jesus’ baptism as a Galilean and his temptations in the wilderness, it is in Galilee that he inaugurates his main teaching: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matt. 4:17).
Second, Capernaum in the lower Galilee was the headquarters of Jesus’ ministry, and Jesus received the greatest acceptance in Galilee. Matthew and Mark report that at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry he “went throughout Galilee,” teaching and healing people (Matt. 4:23; Mark 1:39). Those from outside of Galilee such as Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, Tyre, and Sidon also came to hear Jesus but, as Mark emphasizes, it was the Galilean followers who were a “great multitude” (Mark 3:7–8). Jesus travels to the surrounding Gentile territories but always returns to Galilee (Mark 7:31).
Usually, according to all four Gospels, Judea, or more particularly Jerusalem, is the place of rejection while Galilee is the place of acceptance and refuge. In John 3, Jesus goes to the “Judean countryside” (v. 22), but when he hears that the Pharisees are alarmed about him, Jesus “left Judea and started back to Galilee” (John 4:1–3). And, “when he came to Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him” (John 4:45). The people at the center of the religious establishment were not the ones who recognized and accepted the Word become flesh (John 1); rather, the despised people of Galilee were those who welcomed the Messiah.
The Galilean acceptance of Jesus was not unqualified. Matthew and Luke record Jesus’ severe judgment of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and even Capernaum for their lack of repentance. Unlike John, the Synoptic Gospels have Jesus use the proverbial saying, “Prophets are not without honor except in their own country,” in regard to the incident of rejection in Nazareth (Matt. 13:54–58; Mark 6:l-6a; Luke 4:16–30). Mark comments that Jesus “was amazed at their unbelief” (6:6a). Peter’s denial of Jesus, the male disciples’ absence at the crucifixion, and other incidents all point to the fallibility of Jesus’ Galilean followers. The Gospels’ record of the fallibility of Jesus’ disciples and the nonresponse from some Galileans keep us from any kind of romanticism about Galilee. Galileans were sinful just as anyone else. As Freyne points out, however, in comparison to the hostility of Jerusalem to Jesus, the warmth of the Galilean acceptance of him is overwhelming. Galileans in their liminal predicament had a greater openness to the new message of Jesus than those at the center did. Although Jesus’ Galilean followers were not perfect disciples, they still were Jesus’ most loyal friends. At the time of Jesus’ agonizing death on the cross, Galilee did not totally abandon him. As Matthew records, “Many women were also there, looking on from a distance; they had followed Jesus from Galilee and had provided for him” (27:55). Galilee was with Jesus at his burial. “The women who had come with him from Galilee followed, and they saw the tomb and how his body was laid. Then they returned, and prepared spices and ointments” (Luke 23:55–56). Galilee did not leave him alone in his death, as again the women from Galilee went to the tomb with spices to anoint him (Matt. 28:1; Mark 16:1; Luke 24:1; John 20:1). Thus, even among Jesus’ Galilean followers, the women were the most faithful. In this way, the faithfulness of the women from Galilee connects Jesus’ Galilean ministry before the crucifixion with the resurrected Jesus who reunites with the disciples in Galilee. Jesus reaffirms his initial choice of Galilee as his place of work by telling his disciples ahead of time: “But after I am raised up, I will go ahead of you to Galilee” (Matt. 26:32). At the dawn of the Easter morning, an angel in lightning white tells Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” that Jesus “has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him” (Matt. 28:7; Mark 16:7). In Matthew’s account, Jesus himself appears and tells the women: “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me” (Matt. 28:10). A few verses later, we are told that the eleven disciples “went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them” and that there “they saw him.” And the risen Jesus with “all the authority in heaven and on earth” gives his Galilean disciples on this Galilean mountain the great commission to spread the gospel to “all the nations” (Matt. 28:16–19).
So the reunion of the risen Jesus with his Galilean disciples happens not in Jerusalem, the center of religious establishment, but in Galilee, the peripheral area that is scorned by the center. Galilee is the place of the disciples’ “seeing” of the resurrection. In this way, the risen Jesus relates himself to what he did in Galilee: his ministry in which “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the good news brought to them” (Luke 7:22). The one who turns out to be stronger than death is not any ruler or high priest at the religious and political center of Jerusalem but, rather, Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee who epitomized in his life the reign of God’s compassion, forgiveness, and justice. And the place where the disciples experience this fact is Galilee. Galilee is Jesus’ chosen place for his ministry both before and after the resurrection.
Luke reports in Acts 1 that Galileans were the witnesses to Jesus’ ascension. As Jesus “was lifted up,” “two men in white robes” said: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” (v. 11). Galileans are those who are given the secret of how Jesus was going to return. Galileans appear again in Acts 2, as Luke records Jesus’ Galilean followers, commissioned by God to spread the good news to “all nations,” beginning to fulfill their role as the “first responders” to Jesus. As a group of Jesus’ followers began speaking in tongues about “God’s deeds of power” (v. 11), the Jews “from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem” gathered near them and were “bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native tongue of each.” They asked: “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?” (vv. 5–7). Thus, in choosing Galilee as the primary place of Jesus’ ministry, God’s ultimate intention went far beyond Galilee.
Thus far, we have looked through the texts of the Synoptic Gospels, the Fourth Gospel, and Acts as they are given in the New Testament canon. Some scholars have tried to work with the oldest materials in order to get a picture of the earliest followers of Jesus and their communities (that is, what has been called the “Jesus Movement”) in Jesus’ own time and soon after the resurrection. Most recently, Richard A. Horsley, in his book Sociology and the Jesus Movement, analyzed the Q material (the sayings source found in both Matthew and Luke but not in Mark) as well as the text of Mark itself. Horsley’s conclusion is that “the arena of Jesus’ activity is primarily Galilee,” and that much of the materials in the Gospels, including “Q” and Mark, were probably developed in Galilee or southern Syria. The Q people, according to Horsley, “understand John and Jesus as the climactic figures in the line of the prophets, who almost by definition, stood over against and were rejected by the ruling institutions and their representatives [i.e., Jerusalem].” Horsley notes further that “the only place names [in Q], apart from the doomed Jerusalem, are towns at the northern end of the Sea of Galilee, Capernaum, Chorazin, and Bethsaida.” In short, “the social location [of Jesus and the Jesus Movement] is popular culture, apparently Galilean, remote from Temple and official tradition.” An examination of the earliest materials confirms, then, what we saw in the Gospels as a whole, namely, “that Galilee, as opposed to Jerusalem, was Jesus’ chosen arena of ministry, and that primarily Galileans constituted Jesus first followers or the participants in the ‘Jesus Movement.’ ”6
THE LIMINALITY OF GALILEE AND GALILEANS
What is the meaning of God’s appeal to Galilee and the Galileans? Why Galilee, and why Galileans? I have already suggested that God’s choice of Galilee as Jesus’ place of ministry is due to the limited and yet real openness of Galileans as a liminal/marginalized people. But in what ways were Galilee as a place and Galileans as a people both liminal and also marginalized? An understanding of Galilee’s liminal marginality is crucial for Asian American theology because such an understanding shows concretely the ways in which the social location of Jesus relates to the social location of Asian Americans. Moreover, the way Jesus dealt with his own social location can teach Asian Americans how to deal with theirs.
Biblical scholars have noted the liminal character of Galilee and Galileans although they do not use the term liminality. I cite here just a few examples. Sean Freyne, for example, concludes his literary and historical study of Galilee by suggesting that the Gospel narratives “use Galilee as a symbol of the periphery becoming the new, non-localized center of divine presence.” Freyne mentions Galilee’s “detachment” and “distance” from the center of power in Jerusalem that made Galileans more “open” for Jesus’ ministry.7 L. E. Elliott-Binns also suggests that Galilee’s freer atmosphere and its distance from the capital might have been the reasons for Jesus’ choice of Galilee as the center of his ministry. Anne Hennessy, still another biblical scholar, refers to Galilee as an “open space” and a land of a “broader range of experiences” and “accessible horizons” as the reasons for Galilee’s importance in Jesus’ ministry.8
The terms open space, detachment, freer atmosphere, and periphery all refer to a liminal situation. In what follows, I shall briefly outline the situation of Galilee and Galileans as possessing the creative potentials of liminal space. First of all, Galilee’s geographical location has a great deal to do with its political and social and cultural liminality.9 The Hebrew term ha-galil is a secondary shortening of an original galil-hagoyim, meaning “circle of peoples” or “circle of the nations” (Isa. 9:1; quoted in Matt. 4:15, translated into English as “Galilee of the Gentiles”). Thus, the name Galilee refers to the geographical and political reality of being surrounded by powerful nations and empires and being frequently subjected to their infiltration, migration, and domination. From 734 B.C.E. on through the next six centuries, Galilee was under the foreign administration of Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Egyptians, and Syrians. Galilee in Jesus’ time was a conquered territory of Rome. It is important to note here that the administration of Galilee by foreign powers usually did not involve any deployment of native Galileans. Assyrians ruled Galilee directly from their city of Megiddo. The Hellenistic empires of the Ptolemies and Seleucids and later the Hasmonean high-priestly regime followed by the Romans all used the Galilean city of Sepphoris as their administrative and military center, until the Roman client-ruler Antipas built Tiberius as the second foreign administrative city in Galilee. But the officialdom in Sepphoris and Tiberius was peopled not by native Galileans but by foreigners brought in from outside of Galilee. As Horsley explains, Galilee, in contrast to Samaria and Judea, did not have its own native aristocracy that could rule its own people on behalf of the foreign powers and function as a kind of buffer, thereby mitigating, at least in some ways, the harsh impact of foreign domination.10
The direct rule of Galilee by the foreign conquerors made it difficult for Galileans to develop any official tradition out of its popular customs or any clear sense of themselves as a political power or an ethnic group. Horsley notes that from the earliest times “in the experience of Israel as a political power, the Galilean tribes must have been somewhat peripheral.”11 Galilee was a “frontier” for the encircling foreign powers as well as for the power center of Israel in Jerusalem. The political and religious centers of the Israelites were always in the south at Shilo, Gilgal, Shechem, and then Jerusalem, while no central city or temple was established by the indigenous people of Galilee. Being, therefore, a “power vacuum,” Galilee lacked any political and cultural coherence or unity as a region.12 Galilee was geographically, politically, and culturally a relatively unstructured frontier land. Galilee was at the edge, in-between, out of the power structure, and thus liminal. Galilee was liminal also due to its cultural diversity. The repeated foreign invasions exposed Galileans to the existence of different cultures. Although the outsiders living in Sepphoris and Tiberius had only minimal contact with Galilean villagers, there would still have been what Horsley calls a “steady and slow” cultural impact upon Galileans. Galilean population itself was also mixed. In 732 B.C.E., the Assyrian conqueror Tiglath-pileser took as many as 13,520 Galilean prisoners to Assyria, seriously depopulating Galilee. Scholars believe that Galilee was probably resettled largely by non-Israelites in Persian and Hellenistic times. So non-Israelites and “Gentiles” lived alongside Galilean villagers. Horsley reports, “Within the same village, Israelites and Gentiles lived in adjacent houses or shared the same courtyard, or perhaps even shared a house or oven.”13
Another factor that broadened the cultural outlook of Galileans was the presence of international trade routes. For example, Capernaum, the headquarters of Jesus’ ministry, was near the border between Galilee and Golan. Located near a border crossing, Capernaum surely must have been affected by the foreign people in transit. Galilee, therefore, was culturally a frontier. Galilee was liminal.
Third, Galilee was religiously liminal. Galileans felt themselves as both belonging to the religious center, the Jerusalem Temple, and also distant from it. To understand the relation between Galilee and Jerusalem, we must recall that Galilee and Judea were under different foreign administrations for eight centuries, with the result that Galileans and Judeans underwent separate developments in their religious lives. Moreover, Judeans, unlike Galileans, had many centuries to get adjusted to the Temple-state rule, and had their own aristocracy and priestly elites who could in some ways “soften” the brunt of the foreign rule through the Temple-state structure. Galilee, on the other hand, had no sacred center of its own or religious establishment and thus maintained its own inherited religious beliefs and customs in their popular forms. Therefore, when Galilee came under the jurisdiction of Jerusalem in the early Roman period, only about one hundred years before the time of Jesus, the Temple-based high-priestly structure must have appeared to Galileans as odd versions of their ancient Israelite tradition. Galileans, especially those with an Israelite background, might have found Jerusalem’s religious establishment as the new political and economic center of power strange and disagreeable. Galileans worshiped the same God of Israel and shared with the Jerusalem Temple establishment common religious roots. They both shared the exodus story, the Mosaic covenant, stories of independent early Israel prior to the Solomonic monarchy and its temple, the Elijah-Elisha story cycle, the Song of Deborah, and others. Some Galileans, therefore, can be assumed to have had some genuine loyalty to Jerusalem. Some even made pilgrimages to the Temple, although how many made such pilgrimages is uncertain.14
So Galileans’ position in relation to Jerusalem was one of ambivalence. Galileans felt both belonging to Jerusalem and at the same time detached from it. They were liminal in their relation to the Jerusalem Temple-state. From this liminal space, Galileans had the capacity to see the center with a critical eye.
THE MARGINALIZATION OF GALILEE AND GALILEANS
Galileans were not just left alone in their liminal situation but were oppressed, dehumanized, and looked down upon. Galileans were marginalized by the foreign invaders and also by the religious-political center, the Jerusalem Temple-state. As noted earlier, Galilee was repeatedly invaded and exploited by various foreign empires throughout its history. Foreign conquerors and their agents were also in their midst within Galilee, in Sepphoris and later Tiberius.
Galilee was also politically vulnerable to the center of power within Israel itself. When King Solomon was building the Temple, for example, all Israel was forced to generate revenues and forced labor, but Galilee was affected most severely. In order to solve a “balance of payments” problem, Solomon ceded to Hiram, king of Tyre, “twenty cities in the land of Galilee”—along with their people, of course—in payment (1 Kgs. 9:10–14). Galilean peasants were mere dispensable pawns to the center of power.15
Galileans were also objects of scorn within Israel, especially in the eyes of the Jews in Jerusalem, for cultural and religious “backwardness.” Galileans were despised for their lack of knowledge of the Torah and for their laxness in following the law and in paying taxes. Galileans were looked down upon because they were considered culturally impure due to their associations with foreigners. Galileans were also jeered at because they did not speak correct Aramaic.
But most demoralizing and destructive for Galilean peasants was their economic exploitation by the Jerusalem Temple-state and their consequent social and religious alienation. Under Herodian client-kings, Galileans villagers were forced to pay three layers of taxes: the dues to Temple and priests, tribute to Rome, and taxes to Herod, Antipas, and Agrippas. It has been estimated that over one-third of Galilean peasants’ crops was taken in order to meet the three different demands.16 When Antipas launched the projects of rebuilding Sepphoris and of building Tiberius, the exploitation of Galilean peasantry became intensified. Invariably, the peasants lapsed in meeting the demands and began incurring debts. When they were unable to pay back debts, they lost their land and became tenants for their creditors. Often they left their ancestral homes in search of work. This downward spiral of indebtedness had at least three consequences. The first is the shift in their social position. Galileans who lost their lands now occupied a less respectable social position as sharecroppers or laborers, often on what had been their own ancestral land. Such a forced downward mobility certainly must have been deeply demoralizing. The second consequence was the disintegration of the fundamental social forms of family and village community. Many became day laborers or had to leave home in search of work, while some others joined bands of brigands. Galileans were suffering a serious social dislocation and disruption.
Perhaps the most agonizing consequence of Galileans’ economic plight was religious in nature. The Jerusalem Temple stipulated that the productivity and fertility of the land were tied to the peasants’ faithful fulfillment of the thank-offerings and other Temple dues and tithes. Any lapse in these payments meant a breach not only of a financial kind but also of a religious nature. Not to pay dues to the Temple was not to fulfill a religious obligation. With the relationship with the Temple broken, the peasants found themselves separated from the only place where they could pray for God’s blessings of the fertility and productivity of their land, which in turn would be the only way through which they could hope for a better crop and for the restoration of their relationship with the Temple.17 When Jesus taught his disciples to pray for the forgiveness of their “debts,” he had both real financial indebtedness and also something much more crucial in mind.
The dominant center’s marginalization of Galileans would have frustrated, suppressed, and disabled the creative potential of Galileans’ liminality. The creative thrust of their liminality was of course never completely dormant but was expressed in the form of what political scientist James C. Scott calls “subtle acts of resistance” as well as in the appearance of armed bandits. Banditry is always a form of protest to oppression. But what banditry usually lacks is “a vision of a different social order that one might aspire to.” And the oppressed people’s rebellious actions only led to a greater suppression by the center, thereby creating a “spiral of violence.”18
Galileans needed to be empowered to resist marginalization. They needed someone to help them break the spiral of violence and restore peace in the land. Galilee needed to be healed and redirected in the exercise of their liminal creativity. They needed a radically new vision of how human relatedness could be changed. They needed to be empowered to exercise their liminal creativity.
Galileans got far more than they could ever have hoped for. God came to dwell among them to heal and transform them and to empower them to exercise their liminal powers in the way they were intended to be exercised. They were given a new vision of God’s “new family” with Jesus as the head. What is more, God came to them to invite them to be the “first responders” to the new vision. They would in turn proclaim what God had done for them to others in the world.
Asian Americans’ predicament in the United States is similar to that of the Galileans of the first century. God comes to Asian Americans again today in the form of Jesus Christ who will heal us and empower us. We now need to examine carefully how and for what this Jesus, a liminal/marginalized person, exercised his liminal creativity and how God in him was the forgiving, saving, and enabling God for the liminal/marginalized Galileans. We need to see why the hope of Asian Americans lies in the Galilean Jesus and the God who was in him.