Thursday: The Mastery of Race Distinctions
WEEK 10
THURSDAY
THE MASTERY OF RACE DISTINCTIONS
Matthew 23:8-10; Luke 2:28-32
We have seen how the valleys are being filled and the mountains made low as people feel the impact of God’s kingdom. Special privilege is more and more seen as intolerable. Someone has facetiously defined the “upper crust” as the “crumbs of society held together by their dough.” Well, that crust is crumbling before the rise of humanity as a child of God. The incompatible principle is working.
There is another mastery of very great importance akin to this but going deeper—the mastery of distinctions based on race. The coming of the Holy Spirit dissolved the distinctions based on race. The new society that emerged was color-blind and race-blind—a new race made up of all races.
Race cleavages have gone deep. The Jews of Jesus’ day prayed: “Lord . . . you have said you created the oldest age for our sake . . . that the other nations . . . are like spit” (2 Esdras 6:55-56). The Judeans despised the Galileans, who were supposedly of less pure blood. One charge against Jesus was, “he agitates the people . . . starting from Galilee all the way here” (Luke 23:5). The sting was in “starting from Galilee”—beginning with that racial group instead of with them!
The Samaritans were more bitterly despised, for they were mixed: “You are a Samaritan and have a demon” (John 8:48). To be a Samaritan was to have a demon! They were one.
The Jews despised Galileans, Samaritans, and Gentiles in an ascending order of contempt. The disciples were still tainted with this contempt even when following Jesus. They wanted to call down fire on a Samaritan village because it wouldn’t receive them. And consider the disciples asking Jesus to send away the Syrophoenician woman calling after them and his reply that “it is not good to take the children’s bread and toss it to dogs” (Matt 15:26). This can be fully understood only if the disciples had used the usual word “Gentile dog” in describing the woman. So Jesus picks it out of their mouths and uses it to shock them by repeating it. His look of correction must have carried his meaning, for he treated her not as a dog but as a child of God and healed her daughter.
O Lord God, forgive us; our contempt and pride that seem so silly are worse—wicked in the light of your love for all, and equally for all. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I belong to a new race—children of the kingdom.