To Resist or Not Resist

When I was a seminary student, I attended one of the great quadrennial conventions of the Student Volunteer Movement. One afternoon some seven hundred of us had a special group meeting, at which a Korean girl was asked to talk to us about her impression of American education. It was an occasion to be remembered. The Korean student was very personable and somewhat diminutive. She came to the edge of the platform and, with what seemed to be obvious emotional strain, she said, “You have asked me to talk with you about my impression of American education. But there is only one thing that a Korean has any right to talk about, and that is freedom from Japan.” For about 20 minutes she made an impassioned plea for the freedom of her people, ending her speech with this sentence: “If you see a little American boy and you ask him what he wants, he says, ‘I want a penny to put in my bank or to buy a whistle or a piece of candy.’ But if you see a little Korean boy and ask him what he wants, he says, ‘I want freedom from Japan.’”

It was this kind of atmosphere that characterized the life of the Jewish community when Jesus was a youth in Palestine. The urgent question was what must be the attitude toward Rome. Was any attitude possible that would be morally tolerable and at the same time preserve a basic self-esteem—without which life could not possibly have any meaning? The question was not academic. It was the most crucial of questions. In essence, Rome was the enemy; Rome symbolized total frustration; Rome was the great barrier to peace of mind. And Rome was everywhere. No Jewish person of the period could deal with the question of his practical life, his vocation, his place in society, until first he had settled deep within himself this critical issue.

This is the position of the disinherited in every age. What must be the attitude toward the rulers, the controllers of political, social, and economic life? This is the question of the Negro in American life. Until he has faced and settled that question, he cannot inform his environment with reference to his own life, whatever may be his preparation or his pretensions.

In the main, there were two alternatives faced by the Jewish minority of which Jesus was a part. Simply stated, these were to resist or not to resist.

(For the Inward Journey: the writings of Howard Thurman.
Selected by Anne Spencer Thurman. pages 128-129
Originally published in Jesus and the Disinherited)

Thurman says the question of Rome was “the most crucial of questions.” And when he says “The question was not academic,” I’m thinking of the academy in America today where institutions (and people!) are being penalized because at least some of the people there felt that the long-delayed self-determination of the Palestinian people is, for some, the most crucial of questions.

I am making my way, at least in part, in New York. The group of young radicals in my borough with whom I have the privilege to work includes students and instructors who were vocal in their opposition to the attacks by Israel on the people of Gaza. Beyond the astonishing and cruel attack by Hamas on Israeli military and civilians on October 7, 2023, the catastrophic continuation of warfare by Israel became a “most crucial question” for so many diasporic Palestinians and their allies, including at the colleges in New York City (and beyond). That this uprising of demand began to be labelled anti-Semitism makes all kinds of friends “shake their heads.”

When my beloved colleague Rev. Chris Long prayed during the service yesterday at the Shelter Rock UU congregation for the suffering in Gaza, and the suffering felt in Israel and Palestine, my heart broke open. How often do I speak in generalities that do not name the specifics of the politics of pain for fear of being labelled, of alienating some of my people? How often do I choose not to address “the disinherited,” let alone the Jesus who speaks to them and to me? Rev. Long’s insistence on his place among UU leadership, his willingness to share the fullness of his faith, the breadth of his scholarship, the body-engaging culture of “this joy that I feel, the world didn't give it to me.” These were the demands of one who might be disinherited: Black in an anti-Black cluture; gay in a “straight” affirming culture; working class in a culture that gives preference to intellectual labor above physical labor. And in a polite suburban culture, to declare that, in the first days of Passover, we may—or must—speak the name of Gaza and the notion that there is pain throughout the warfare system, brought tears to my heart..

Rev. Long once served the Community Church of New York, founded by John Haynes Holmes. Rev. Holmes once wrote “War is the quintessence of evil” because he saw that war contained other evils within itself. This reality that war—even what seems to some “war hawks” a necessary war—contains within itself the evils of environmental destruction, the destruction of democracy, the deaths of a productive generation, and all kinds of suffering. The construction of the permanent war-time economy is a way by which more and more of us are disinherited; and, I bet Thurman would argue, more and more of us may need the Jesus of the Disinherited. (We need, too, to grow beyond the understanding of the Jesus of the Powerful, the Jesus of the Dominant Culture, etc.)

To see my colleague, who could not stop thanking people for the opportunity co-created to be in worship together, was to see someone who had great joy. His Admonition to Joy reminded me of Maxine Klein’s argument that one gives of themself not for the other to take away from them, but to use what is given to engender the growth in and of the recipient.(or is it “borrower?) Rev. Long gave of his joy to us so that we might use that gift not to diminish him but to find the joy that is offered to us, that is already being born in us. And to remember—with hand clapping, foot stomping and waving to the heavens—this joy that I have. this love that I have, this hope that I have, this faith that I have, “the world didn't give it to me, the world can’t take it away.”