There’s a spot in the Book of Acts where the Apostle Paul is speaking before the philosophers of ancient Athens, sharing the Gospel on the slopes of the Acropolis, and he says this almost throw away line about the origin of the species. “The Lord God,” he says, “gives life and breath and everything else to every human on the face of the earth” (paraphrase). Because (direct quote), “From one man he made all the nations (pan ethnos anthropōn—lit. “every ‘ethnicity’ of men”), that they should inhabit the whole earth.”
In Paul’s mind, all human beings, regardless their racial distinctions, share the same common ancestor, and the whole human race is the single creation of the same one God, descended together from one mother and father. Bear in mind, too, that Paul is speaking as a Jew before Gentiles when he says this, and as such he has all kinds of reasons to make all kinds of claims to racial distinctiveness. Instead of doing that, however, he appeals to his common humanity with his Greek audience.
No doubt he is thinking primarily of the Book of Genesis here, which traces everyone back to the same single set of parents. Notably, though, he does not quote the Hebrew Bible to convince his Greek interlocutors of this truth, rather he quotes their own pagan poets. “Didn’t the Stoic Philosopher Aratus say it, back in 300 BC, that we are all God's offspring?” he asks, with a bit of rhetorical flare.
Yes Aratus did say that; but this is more than just rhetoric for Paul. This touches on a truth that is absolutely essential to his understanding of the Gospel, a truth that, he believes, God has written on the hearts of every ethnic group on the planet, whether they have the sacred scriptures to remind them of it or not: that we are all members of the same human family.
In pointing all this out, Paul is simply expressing the natural corollary of the Hebrew creation story itself. One of the main points that Genesis 1 and 2 is making when it says that God created Adam and Eve in the beginning, is that every people group on the planet must therefore be descended from the same mom and dad. This is one of the reasons the Book of Genesis is so obsessed with genealogies, incidentally. We tend to gloss over them, but echoing in every mention of who begat whom in the genealogies of Genesis is the conviction that each of us are therefore blood brothers and sisters with everyone else. In this light, the convoluted table of nations in Genesis 10 could very well be one of the most beautiful anti-racist texts ever penned, because whatever else it does it underscores this truth: that no one’s not related.
When I was in Seminary I did a project where I traced out a complete map of the family tree of Adam and Eve, including every character, every marriage, every birth that gets mentioned in the book of Genesis. The results were pretty fascinating, reminding me not only that human beings really did make good on Genesis 1:28’s directive to multiply and fill the earth, but that in doing so we formed a beautifully inter-connected web of humanity, one that ties us all together with each other.
While I believe this with all my heart, we have to be very careful how we handle this truth, because it can actually point us two different directions, one of them very helpful, the other decidedly not so.
On the one hand—the not-so-helpful-hand—we can look at the family tree in Genesis and say, essentially, well there you go: there’s no point making a big deal about race, racial distinctions, racial injustices, because after all, we’re all part of the same single humanity. People are saying this very thing, I think, when they say stuff like “All lives matter,” or “There’s only one race: the human race.” Even if these statements are fundamentally true, they are, I would argue, misadventures in missing the point. The fact that we are all part of the same human race and therefore all equal in God’s eyes doesn’t mean that we can’t speak specifically about particular ethnic groups that make up the human family, if by doing so we can redress past wrongs or current injustices.
Because there’s this other hand—the more helpful other hand—where we allow the family tree in Genesis to teach us how to feel the pain of another human being who is suffering racial injustice, as though it were our own pain. Because it is; or it should be. If it’s true, for instance, that the Native American child who was torn from his family and forced to attend a racist residential school was literally my brother, then I should feel as outraged and traumatized by what happened to him as I would be if it had happened to my biological father or my very own son.
I’m saying this in part because this morning for the first time I saw a photograph of Derek Chauvin, kneeling on the neck of George Floyd during the arrest that resulted in his murder. Words fail me. It was disgusting, brutal, heart-wrenching, infuriating, but none of those words actually capture what I felt. Because as I looked at it, that strange family tree from the book of Genesis, the one I’d drawn back in seminary, came up in my mind’s eye, and it was as if God was saying: if that was your son, or grandson, or father, or brother lying there in that photo, how would you respond in this moment?
Because in theological terms, it was.
My grief, of course, will never match the grief of those who were George Floyd’s immediate family and closest friends, and it would trivialize their pain, I think, to somehow suggest it even comes close. But anyone who can look at that photograph and not feel the grief, the anger, the heartbreak, and the ache for justice that they would feel, if it was their own flesh and blood under that knee, has not learned the first lesson of the Book of Genesis, or, indeed, of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.
0 comments:
Post a Comment