My friend Josh, a pastor, picked up the microphone in a room full of black men and women and said, “I am a black American, descended from slaves. But more than that, I am descended from a people who prayed for freedom and found it from a God who freed them.”
You could hear the intake of breath and ripple effect of that statement in the room. Josh was not denying the painful history of his black ethnic identity. He was not denying the deep wounds of slavery and racism. But he was defining the scars of his people by the scars of Christ. And somewhere in that rang a clarion call of hope. It was the story of Jesus, gleaming in the cracks of the anguish of Josh’s ethnic background.
Jesus knew ethnic scars. He lived in a time when ethnic tensions and vengeance bubbled over like a hot cauldron. The Jews resented Rome, which punished and crucified hundreds if not thousands of those who tried to rise up against its regime. And civil war, betrayal, prejudice, and ethnic hatred had separated Jews and Samaritans for more than six hundred years (see Josephus, Ant. 18.29-30; 20.136). And yet Jesus treated Samaritans with kindness and healed those who did not share his ethnic background.
My friend Josh was no stranger to pain. He was often the only black kid at his school in an almost all-white Iowa town where his dad was a doctor at the local hospital. When he was little, he was bullied almost every day for being black, and he found few friends in middle or high school. What kind of person would you expect to have emerged from that experience? If you met Josh, you would find someone who is loving, spontaneously fun, and insightful—you would be surprised that he endured such rejection and loneliness. While in college, Josh experienced the wonder of being welcomed, loved, and recognized for his gifts in a multiethnic Christian community at his school and also at an incredibly loving Asian American church. Today, he leads a multiethnic community made up of inner-city New Haven, Connecticut, residents and Yale PhD graduates—blacks, Asians, whites, and Latinos who trust each other across ethnic stories. Many submit to his gifted leadership and wisdom and are led to faith by his words and example. Though Josh grew up experiencing racism, bullying, and exclusion because he is black, his journey with Jesus transformed him into a leader of all people.
My husband, Shin, first encountered Josh’s church after a season of being burnt out by ministry in his Korean American church and struggling to live up to his family’s expectations. When Shin knelt to receive prayer at Josh’s church, a handful of the pastors and ministry leaders laid hands on him. Those hands all belonged to black men, and Shin began to sob as he experienced, for the first time, healing from the hands of black American men. Shin grew up in a mostly black neighborhood in urban Plainfield, New Jersey. As a first grader, he had been the target of bullying and beatings every day during lunch and recess because he was the only nonblack kid at school. No one ever told Shin that not all black people are violent—it just so happened that these bullies were black (just as Josh’s bullies all happened to be white). School administrators didn’t know what to do, so they quarantined him with a teacher who would grade papers while he drew pictures. Shin learned to be afraid and avoided black American communities for the next twenty years, until spiritual emptiness and exhaustion led him to a multiethnic congregation. He didn’t know that he needed healing in this area of his life.
“But God knew,” Shin said as he recalled that moment where a hidden wall broke within him, “and these men became some of the closest friends in my next season of life. I learned about the beauty of the history of the black church, the pain my black friends go through, and about the poetry and artistry that flows from them like water.” Shin could not have experienced this beauty and wept alongside his black sisters and brothers if he had not experienced healing in his perception and relationship with black women and men.
When our wounds are denied or ignored, further brokenness is caused. Try telling a person who was raped or abused that their pain was imagined, asked for, or “not really that bad.” Depression, suicide, and other emotional problems can occur when such pain isn’t validated. I’ve ministered to many college-age women and men who battle the depression and demons of such invalidation. When Jesus begins to redeem our ethnic identities, he doesn’t deny the scars, pain, or sin that are in those histories. He says, “Let me in. Let me show you how you are made beautiful in the imago Dei, and let me heal the places of brokenness and sin.”
One of my favorite times of learning was during a team orientation for a short-term mission trip to Uganda in 2008. We heard from Lamin Sanneh, a Yale Divinity School missiologist who converted from Islam to Christianity as a teenager in Gambia. Sanneh held us spellbound as he spoke, and I remember his words as clear as day: “Every culture is like a water bay that anticipates the cargo of Christ. When Christ comes like a jet propeller plane and lands in that bay, he looks around and says, ‘Look at the beautiful things in this bay. I made it this way. It bears the intended goodness of the Creator God.’ Christ then looks at the places of brokenness, sin, and pain, and says, ‘Let me excavate those places and fill them with myself.’” Jesus redeems our ethnic identities by affirming the created good in each of our cultures and by renewing, healing, and restoring the parts of our cultures that hold the effects of sin, brokenness, idolatry, and racism.
Richard Twiss, the late Native American theologian, writes about the importance of helping Native men and women embrace their ethnic heritage as good and asking Jesus to bring healing to their self-image as a Native person. This is a difficult task given the history of the church trying to rid the Native people of Native culture and language. Twiss shares the story of Bill, a Native man, who said, “When I started embracing the victory I have in Christ as being fully realized as a Native Christian, . . . I was empowered to become a whole person.”1 The beauty of Bill’s ethnicity was amplified by Jesus, and the brokenness and sin were excavated and replaced with Jesus’ healing, spirit, and truth. Twiss writes, “Jesus came to make our cultures better, not take them away from us.”2
Jesus brings healing to our stories, not by denying them, but by addressing our wounds and teaching us to love even the unlovable parts. He brings affirmation of the good and healing in the broken in every part of our lives, including our ethnicities.
As Jesus redeems our ethnic stories, he shows us that we are made well. And he invites us to confess our places of sin, idolatry, lack of forgiveness, racism, and wounds. As we repent, surrender, and invite him to redefine our understandings of our ethnic selves, he brings healing, forgiveness, and restoration. This allows us to embrace the good we receive from the Creator God and to be healed.
My friend Dexter is Taiwanese American, and for most of his life, he bore the emotional, verbal, and physical abuse and brunt of his mother’s dissatisfaction with her own life. When he became a Christian late in college, he cried out to the Lord about the pain, silencing, hatred, and blows that his mother had aimed at him for most of his life. Dexter wrestled with the Scriptures that said honor your mother and father and love your enemies. He prayed for years that his non-Christian family would turn to Jesus. In the midst of this, Dexter heard a call to ministry, so he turned away from the affluence of working in finance. His parents cut off Dexter from the family, saying he had shamed them and that he was no longer their son. It was a painful and dark season. And still he prayed, sending flowers that were thrown in the garbage, his letters and emails unreturned.
Slowly, the Lord began to rebuild Dexter’s relationship with his brother. After many years, Dexter started to see how God was using him to be a restorer and repairer of the family whose expectations and family idols had kept him trapped for so many years. When Dexter shares about his experiences of redemption with his family, many Asian Americans (but certainly also black Americans, Latinos, whites, and beyond) express a longing to see their own families restored, for parents to no longer be seen as oppressive gods but instead as the honored elders who point us to the goodness of God.
I met a Nadia, a young Latina woman, at a retreat and she told me about how she hated being Latina. Not only had she experienced racism aimed at her from white and non-Latino people, Nadia also repeatedly heard from other Latinos that she was “not Latina enough” because she didn’t speak enough Spanish and had non-Latino friends. And she despised the machismo that led to misogyny and mistreatment of women in her family. “I don’t fit here or there—my own people reject me. I have nowhere to go,” she said. We spoke at length about what it meant for Nadia to forgive her own people and to forgive those that had rejected her, Latino and non. As she prayed forgiveness among her tears, she began to see herself as an ethnic Latina, a gift to those around her, and as someone who refused to participate in ethnic isolation even though everything around her told her to do so. Jesus was encouraging her to continue extending wide the familia embrace of God. He was both affirming the beautiful ways he had made her and also helping to remove obstacles that kept her from loving others in Jesus’ name.
Jeremy is black and Nigerian American. Since his youth, he was teased and called a “Nigerian booty-scratcher” by other black children (also a common experience of many second generation African children). To hide his last name, he adopted the nickname “Jerry-O,” which sounded cooler on the football field. He rejected associating with the ethnicity of his last name—which also held the painful reminder of a Nigerian father who had abandoned his family long ago. Quite unintentionally, Jeremy came to faith later at a Nigerian American church, and he became connected to his culture and ancestry in ways that he never could before. He learned to be proud of his name, proud of Nigerian songs and customs, and proud of the ways that God the Father made him as a Nigerian American and a black man. He also became a pastor and father figure to many high school youth at his black church who were growing up without knowing their fathers.
At the Urbana 15 Student Missions Conference, Native American participants sang “Holy Spirit Fiyah,” a call and response song with improvisational dancing that represented their tribes of origin (both in dress and dance). They offered all of the beauty of their ancestral cultures to fifteen thousand people as an act of profound worship in a public, communal setting. Many people wept as they sang and watched these beautiful displays of uninhibited Native worship in tune with the imago Dei of Native cultures. It was as if the singers ushered us into one of the purest forms of worship, delighting in how the Creator God made us. A multiracial black woman who had recently been embracing her Native heritage texted me afterward, “I am weeping—why do the tears not stop?” I replied, “Because it is beautiful, and it is awakening a part of you that God placed there since the beginning.”
I have the incredible privilege of working with an organization that has intentionally made space for helping Native students enter the kingdom without demanding that they shed their cultures or become “white” or “Western.” And as Native men and women usher us into worship, I see greater openness from all to worship, lament, and listen to the Holy Spirit.
When Jesus redeems our ethnic identities, he refuses to let us be defined by death and brokenness. As Jesus invites us into resurrection life, he renames us and calls us by what he is inviting us to become. He flips the lie of what we have been called or called ourselves on its head.
Instead of “slave” and “less than,” Jesus calls black men and women to be prophets, leaders, queens, and kings in his name.
Instead of “unwanted foreigner” or “stranger,” Jesus renames Latinas and Latinos as those who teach us the wide familia embrace of God so that all may know his name.
Instead of being defined by family scars and expectations, Jesus calls Asian and Asian American men and women to be restorers and repairers of our families and beyond.
Instead of “heathen” or “savage,” Jesus honors Native women and men as the holy priestesses and priests of the living God.
Instead of “unwanted” or “terrorist,” Jesus invites Middle Eastern men and women to be the most honored guests at the table.
Instead of “broken halves” of “incomplete wholes,” Jesus tells multiracial women and men that they are fully white and fully Latino, fully Asian and fully black, fully Haitian and fully white. And they know better than anyone else how to navigate the complexity of multiple cultures.
But what about white women and men? What is the redeemed name that Jesus gives to white people, taking into account the history of privilege and racial tension with people of color in the United States?
I often see different mournful responses in white men and women who have chosen to engage in multiethnic community. One is the wistful, “Everyone has a culture but me. How do I regain what was never taught to me, or what my grandparents gave up because they were forced to assimilate?” The second is a deeper response to the reality of racial scars: it’s a sense of shame for being white, for the history and legacy of racial injustice, for current inequalities and violence. Shame is different from guilt, as guilt is “I have done something wrong” while shame is “who I am is wrong.” As a Southern white male friend mournfully asked after the shooting at a historically black church in Charleston, “What can save my people after so many centuries of blindness and injustice, sin and death?” What new name for white Americans will not ignore or disregard the historic pain endured by people of color?
A wise man once told me that you can judge a people by their proximity to their religious text. The Quakers were known for their commitment to scripture, prayer, and opposition to slavery. Levi Coffin, an American Quaker, was nicknamed the president of the Underground Railroad because of his lifelong work in the abolitionist movement during the early 1800s. Coffin helped between two and three thousand black Americans escape slavery and raised more than two hundred thousand dollars for the abolitionist cause. When Coffin was chastised by neighbors and friends for contributing to an illegal effort, he responded, “The Bible, in bidding us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, said nothing about color, and I should try to follow out the teachings of that good book.”3
As Coffin introduced his white community to the powerful narratives of black former slaves, they too became moved by the cruelty endured by these men and women. They too became convinced that slavery was incompatible with the gospel. Their homes became centers for making clothes for black escapees and part of the network of the Underground Railroad. Coffin and his fellow Quakers set up a fair-labor factory to sell slave-free goods and worked with a few white plantation owners who had freed their slaves and were paying them wages. He visited Canada to make sure that his black friends were safe and flourishing.
Coffin was influential and affluent, and he did not shy away from the reality that he was a white man with power and privilege. As is found in so many white stories, Coffin took individual risks and used that boldness for the good of others. He became a brother in arms with black men and women. He was not a white savior but instead fought alongside black people for a common cause. He became a freedom fighter.
In the spring of 2011, I was leading a spring break trip connecting service, justice, and faith as we helped rebuild parts of the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. Each evening, we discussed the relevance of Jesus to the conversation of justice in a room full of Christian and non-Christian students of varied ethnicity, including activist black students whose grandparents had ties to the South. One evening, I talked about white martyrs from the civil rights movement, many of them Christians, who had risked their safety, comfort, and lives for the cause of nonwhites. Many of the black students wept and asked, “I’m a junior in black studies . . . I’m a senior in urban policy . . . Why have I never heard these names?” In the midst of this emotional conversation, a black male student decided to follow Jesus. When I, an Asian American woman, shared the stories of white American Christians who chose to follow Jesus into sacrificial love at the cross and become reconciling freedom fighters, that example caused a black man to say yes to Jesus.
As I’ve taught on ethnicity and reconciliation that includes white people at the multiethnic table, I have become convinced that we often lack language or even a hope-based identity for how white Americans can engage in the conversation. The university has either shallow or retributive options for white people: ignore the scars or atone for their people’s sins. It’s easier to settle for a shame-based identity or self-atonement than dare to call white Christians to a hope-based identity that leads to deep sacrificial love and stewardship because we don’t hear about white activists. We need to recover the stories of white Christians who helped the poor and oppressed, who fought for abolitionism, women’s suffrage, and civil rights.
Instead of “oppressor” and “enslaver,” Jesus calls white men and women to be freedom-fighters, advocates, and allies: sisters and brothers in arms who use their power and position to work alongside others to help restore the imago Dei in all.
But there’s a problem with this story. We run the risk of forgetting the past if we choose to use a new name for a historic enemy of our people. How can I, as a Korean American, be reconciled to Japanese Americans after hundreds of years of injustice done to my people? How can black Americans (or Native or Latino) be reconciled to white Americans after slavery, genocide, and racism? Who pays the cost for this new name?
In the summer of 2008, I had the privilege of working with former child soldiers in Uganda. These young girls had been forced to kill their families and were kidnapped, raped, and birthed children. They had escaped from the bush with their young children but often ended up in villages where they had no male protectors and no trade skills to survive. The girls were targeted with violence because they were seen as the enemy. They represented the victim-turned-perpetrator, and usually the only groups helping them were faith-based, foreign nonprofits. The question lingered in my mind: Would they ever be accepted as part of the Northern Ugandan people?
After our time in Uganda, we traveled to Kigali, Rwanda. The Genocide Museum there is a sobering lesson about the depths of the depravity of the human heart. At the height of the affluence of Rwandan Hutus in 1994, they led a one-hundred-day genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, cutting down the Tutsi population by a tenth.4 Tutsis and Hutus share the same ethnic history, but during the age of Belgian colonization, Rwandans with more European facial and cranial features were called Tutsi and given greater access to education, job opportunities, livestock, and housing. The remaining majority was called Hutu. The Tutsi-Hutu distinction would remain long after the Belgians left. And the enmity led to the 1994 genocide, with much government propaganda to support the destructive rage. Hutus turned in their Tutsi neighbors and families, which is why the Hutus were able to kill almost a million people in three months. When the dust of the genocide settled and the international community was in uproar over the atrocities, all the senior leaders stepped down. A young group of pastors and community leaders were tasked with leading the country out of its chaos.
The leaders formed the Truth and Justice Commission, but they quickly found their ability to administer justice was limited. Out of the remaining nine million Rwandans, over half were guilty of theft, rape, collusion, and murder. They did not have enough courts or judges to try the guilty, much less the prisons to hold them. They could execute those who were guilty, but was more bloodshed the answer? The larger problem was that the 1994 genocide was one of several in the cycle of ethnic cleansings that had reverberated throughout the past century.
The leaders needed to stop the hatred. One of the organizers, Antoine Rutayisire, told us, “The only way to put a stop to the cycle was to kill the hatred itself.”5 And the only way they knew how was through Jesus. So they renamed the Truth and Justice Commission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, because justice was not going to be possible. This was not a matter of distributive justice (redistribution of goods) or retributive justice (punishing the wrong). It was a matter of restorative justice—restoring the relationships that had long been broken in the hopes that such restoration would bring the long-term healing Rwanda needed.
Antoine spoke of how they adopted a Rwandan traditional justice process called gacaca, loosely translated as “justice among the grass,” because the court meets outdoors. It brings together the entire village to hear from all parties involved in a crime, while respected elders serve as judges. For example, if someone stole a cow, the victim’s family would say to the perpetrator’s family: “Your son stole our cow and damaged us. Our relationship is broken.” The perpetrator’s family would respond, “Yes, our son did steal your cow, and we are so sorry for the damage it has caused you.” After much dialogue and conversation, the perpetrator’s family would say, “Here is your cow” (and offer another cow if they had the means) so that the relationship could be restored. They decided to apply this same reconciliation process to the victims and perpetrators of the genocide.
As Antoine explained gacaca to us, I asked, “I’m sorry, but are you saying that you asked someone whose mother and sister were raped and killed to forgive their enemy? That’s a hard pill to swallow.” Antoine solemnly raised his eyes to meet mine and said quietly, “Yes, we did. And they wanted to.”
Many Tutsis wanted to forgive and be released from the burden of vengeance. Some Hutus were resorting to suicide after realizing that instead of being the heroes they had believed they would be (as was stated in the radio propaganda), they were internationally despised killers of innocent people. Christian Hutus confessed their sins and crimes, and Tutsis shared the pain and loss they suffered over many months. After many tears during the reconciliation meetings, they would rise, embrace, and go out into the streets of Kigali to talk about a day when Rwanda would no longer be defined by ethnic killing. Antoine stretched his arms wide as he explained, “Only at the cross can victim and perpetrator die to themselves and rise as one new people.”
Sin done to us and sin done by us has a cost we can’t pay, and a power over us that we can’t fight—without Jesus. God despises the desecration of his imago Dei, and he demands payment for such wrong. Death is the just sentence for a killer, an enslaver, or one who benefits from another’s suffering. On a cosmic level, no amount of human effort can make up for the damage that is sustained in ethnic division, even though apology, reparations, and systemic changes are necessary on a human level. Jesus alone pays the cost for a new name. He pays the cost, the penalty for sinning against another and desecrating his imago Dei, when he dies upon the cross.
Not only does he pay this cost on the cross, but when he rises again, he breaks the power of sin in us. Corrie ten Boom, a Holocaust survivor, writes in The Hiding Place about meeting one of her captors at a German church after she spoke about God forgiving sins. He did not remember her, but she remembered him, and she froze as he extended his hand out to her and asked for her forgiveness. She did not want to. All the bitterness of her sister’s death and the terror of the camp rushed back into her memory. But she needed to obey her Lord. She asked Jesus to help her as she struggled to lift her arm. And she felt a current, a healing warmth, jolt through her arm into their handshake, leading to the most intense experience of God’s love she would ever encounter.6
Jesus gives us the power to forgive our enemies. He, as healer, has the power to bring healing to our broken concepts of our ethnic selves, to our idolatries and our divisions. God’s death on a cross and his defiant reversal of death in the resurrection pays the cost and supplies the power to call an enemy brother and sister. There is no other space, philosophy, or religion that allows enemies to be reconciled as one people while fully acknowledging the wrong and fully committing to restoration.
“Only at the cross can victim and perpetrator die to themselves and rise as one new people.” Antoine’s words have reverberated through my soul and remain there, echoing. Only at the cross can privileged and oppressed die to themselves and rise as one new people.
In Ephesians 2:14-16, Paul writes, “For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility. . . . His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.”
My college freshman year, a Japanese American minister stood before a group of mostly Korean and Chinese Americans and shared his horror at learning about the atrocities Japan committed against Korea, China, and many other Asian countries. He was full of sorrow but also full of quiet humility and dignity as he said, “On behalf of my people, I am so sorry for the violence, war, oppression, and injustice we committed against you.” Many of us were stunned. Why would he do this? His family had lived in the United States for three generations and lived through the Japanese internment camps during World War II. He wasn’t even born when Japan committed these acts! And yet, his words struck something in me as I realized that he was choosing to be someone different—a peacemaker and reconciler with those who had been oppressed by his people. His words of repentance exposed in me the unaddressed cracks in my ethnicity the sorrow and bitter anger I had never offered to Jesus. Jesus was not content with me defining my Korean American ethnic identity with disdain, bitterness, and distrust of an ethnic other. I could start to forgive without denying the scars of my people.
In the Rwandan reconciliation process, I found an answer for how Jesus redeems the ethnic stories of ethnic enemies and reconciles us to each other. He offers us the chance to die to our old selves and rise in the new. Jesus says to white Americans, “I made you well, and you are forgiven for what whiteness has meant in this country. Come and live a new story in me. Come and be a freedom fighter.”
Over the past several years, I have had the opportunity to pray blessings over white men and women and to ask forgiveness for settling for an identity of shame for white people instead of an identity of hope. As black, Asian, Native, and Latino leaders of color pray over white sisters and brothers, their response is often shock, speechlessness, or weeping. One white person said, “I’m afraid to believe it because it sounds too good to be true.” Another wept as he said, “Today was the first day that I sang the words ‘people of every nation and tongue’ and saw myself as one of them.” A colleague said, “I knew that this was for real . . . because of the multiethnic group of people who prayed blessing and forgiveness. I don’t know if there was any other way I could have understood that I was actually able to be redeemed as a white man.”
It’s amazing to watch these white men and women go back to their contexts and courageously engage in conversations about race, justice, and reconciliation. They look for people not being reached or served in their faith communities. They don’t become courageous leaders by being ashamed of being white or trying to sound like a “hip” white person. They are called to be stewards of their ethnic identity, power, and privilege. They are more effective leaders and evangelists when they wield their white ethnic identities intentionally and humbly, instead of trying to ignore it, react defensively, or respond in shame.
It may be difficult for some, especially those who have suffered from unjust systems that benefited white people, to embrace a new name for white women and men. But just as Corrie ten Boom prayed in obedience, we must ask Jesus, “Please, help me to try.”
I was leading worship during a season when the news told the death of an unarmed black person at the hands of police almost every other day. In a brief prayer, I acknowledged the pain in our country and the pain of our black brothers and sisters. After the service, I was accosted by an elderly white woman who was angry that I brought up race and accused me of dragging politics into worship, even though I had taken great care to avoid advocating for any political party during my prayer. She went on a long rant as I tried to engage her questions respectfully but firmly, but she seemed angry enough to hit me. Realizing that she wasn’t interested in dialogue, I finally gently placed my hands on her shoulders and said quietly, “You are not my enemy. We might not agree on all things. But you are my sister in Christ.” Looking taken aback, she paused and said that she would talk to the pastors leading the service about this instead. I cried later, at the shock of the encounter and the anger that came out of her lips. I prayed for her, even though much of me didn’t want anything to do with her.
Many months later, I was surprised to see the woman at a prayer vigil for black men and police who had died in Baton Rouge, Philadelphia, and Dallas in the summer of 2016. She had gone from angrily colorblind to . . . open. During our previous encounter, she engaged me as an enemy and thought I would return the same. I wonder what would have happened if I had hit her back with my own words during that encounter. Would she have shown up to the vigil? I don’t know if she and I will ever see eye-to-eye on all things, but Jesus may be turning her heart after all.
Daryl Davis is a black musician who decided to befriend members of the Ku Klux Klan after a chance encounter with a member at a club. He interviewed Klansmen, asking them the question, “How can you hate me when you don’t know me?” Though Daryl is criticized for his methods by some, befriending the men led to trust-building between them, and Klansmen started handing over their robes to Daryl as a symbolic gesture. His friendship and engagement with Klansmen helped them see through the cracks in their reasoning into the common humanity that linked them both. More than two hundred men have left the Klan as the result.7
If we really believe what Paul writes, that Christ tore down the dividing wall between ethnic enemies, then we need to call white people to Jesus, God of hope. Instead of making white people feel bad for everything that was and is broken, we need to extend grace and forgiveness of the past. Then we can call them to the costly act of stewarding their whiteness for justice and mission.
In Luke 10:25-37, Jesus tells the story of a man attacked by robbers and left for dead who was helped by a Samaritan instead of his fellow Israelites. A Samaritan is the last person Jesus’ audience would expect to defy the norms to help a stranger in need. By all rules that both Samaritans and Israelites lived by, he was not bound to help an Israelite, his ethnic enemy. And yet, the Samaritan risked his life on the winding roads from Jerusalem to Jericho as he moved slowly with a wounded man in full view of the robbers who awaited in the foothills; he paid several days’ wages to an innkeeper to make sure that this stranger would survive.
Jesus isn’t idolizing the Samaritan as better than the Israelites. He’s describing a new kind of person—a new kind of humanity with a redeemed understanding of ethnic identity that can result when people choose to follow Jesus. The spiritual formation writer Joan Chittister says, “The Samaritan shows us that when I heal the other, I heal something in myself as well.”8 In binding the Israelite’s wounds, the Samaritan was binding his own. What kind of scars and wounds would he have had to submit to Jesus, to pray and weep over, and to ask for healing before he could embody this counterculturally different way of being a Samaritan?
During a conference, I shared the story of a black woman living in South Africa during the time of apartheid who witnessed both her son and husband being burned alive by a white officer and his squadron. Years later, after the end of apartheid, the officer voluntarily confessed to these hate crimes in hopes of a lighter sentence. When the woman was asked about sentencing for the officer, she offered this reply: first, she wanted to visit where her husband was killed so that she could gather his ashes and bury him properly. Second, she wanted the white officer to visit her twice a month in the ghetto and to become her son, as she had no sons left. And third, she wanted the officer to know that he was forgiven because of the forgiveness she receives from Christ. As the woman walked over to embrace the officer, he fainted from the unexpected love and mercy in this “sentence.”
At the same conference during a later time of prayer, a young Thai man said, “Buddhists killed my grandfather by burning him alive. I want to forgive them.” I never would have imagined that there was someone at the conference who had lost a dear one through the same violent means. And yet the incredible story of mercy by the South African woman prompted the Thai man to also want to offer forgiveness. If one didn’t believe that the cross and resurrection of Jesus was indeed the hope of salvation for the world, such stories would seem to be a mockery of ethnic pain, injustice, and sorrow. But our Lord calls us to obey him and love our enemies.
Forgiving our enemies is the stumbling block of Christianity, making the faith almost unpalatable to those who thirst for just vengeance. But we cannot pick and choose which commands Jesus calls us to follow. When we make the costly choice to obey Jesus because of the hope we have in him, it alarms and befuddles the secular world, where ethnic enemies are never forgivable. But we can’t live as if Jesus wants us to forgive only those who look like us and share our ethnic experiences or only those who were similarly oppressed.
When we dare to consider forgiving our enemies, we are not saying that what they did was right or “not that bad.” We are saying that what was done, particularly to our people, was so bad that the only thing powerful enough to eliminate the human need for vengeance and retaliation is the cross of Jesus. We can say to the great Judge, “I release my right to be the judge. I ask you to take this away from me.”
Ethnic tension and racism affects every people group in the United States, in every country across the world. Miroslav Volf writes, “Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as exclude I myself from the community of sinners.”9 Jesus wants to heal and restore all of us, and restore us to each other, in the imago Dei he intended. Will you let him?
Make some space to prayerfully listen and ask Jesus to speak to you about the questions below.
1.What are lies or false names about your ethnicity or your people that he might want to remove?
2.Where is Jesus inviting you to forgive or be forgiven?
3.What is the new name that Jesus might be offering to you about your ethnic identity?
Check All That Apply: Finding Wholeness as a Multiracial Person by Sundee Tucker Frazier
Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation by Miroslav Volf
Following Jesus Without Dishonoring Your Parents by Jeanette Yep, Peter Cha, Susan Cho Van Riesen, Greg Jao, and Paul Tokunaga
The Heart of Racial Justice: How Soul Change Leads to Social Change by Brenda Salter McNeil and Rick Richardson
A Many Colored Kingdom: Multicultural Dynamics for Spiritual Formation by Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, S. Steve Kang, and Gary A. Parrett
Secure in God’s Embrace: Living as the Father’s Adopted Child by Ken Fong
Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering by Makoto Fujimura
InterVarsity Christian Fellowship has a Beyond Colorblind video series about ethnic identity. For a video about how Jesus brings redemption and healing to our ethnic identities, go here: http://2100.intervarsity.org/resources/beyond-colorblind-redemption.