Jesus Takes a Side

Embracing the Political Demands of the Gospel

Jonny Rashid

• Publisher: Herald Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781513810454
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Jesus sides with the oppressed. Will you? In a world divided by left and right, red and blue, many Christians have upheld a "third way" approach in pursuit of moderation, harmony, and unity. But if Christians are more concerned with divisiveness than with faithfulness, we have failed to grasp the gospel's political demands. We do not see Jesus taking a "third way" between oppressor and oppressed. And as followers of Jesus, neither should we. For the sake of our faith, for the sake of the least of these among us, and for Christ's sake, Christians need to stand firmly for truth, peace, and justice. In Jesus Takes a Side, author Jonny Rashid lays out the political demands of following Jesus and offers strategies for how to engage politics practically and prophetically—even if it means taking a side.

Chapter 1

The Politics of My Body

Our church’s first love feast after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president of the United States changed me.

Our church celebrates something called the love feast, also known as an agape feast in some traditions. It is a worship meeting where we fellowship and reconcile among one another, letting our love and unity prevail. You can find references to love feasts in Jude and 1 Corinthians¹. At them, we eat together, welcome new members, and take communion.

At our love feast in January 2017, our team had assigned me to offer the words of institution and the elements of communion to the assembly. Admittedly, my mind was elsewhere. Donald Trump’s first executive action as the new president was in effect. We know it colloquially as the Muslim ban, but formally it is Executive Order 13769: Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States. It was a travel ban against people from a list of Middle Eastern countries and it had gone into effect that Saturday. It barred entry for anyone (with some exceptions) from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.² I got a notice on my phone that there were Arab immigrants in airports and they could not enter into the country because the ban was in effect. My heart sunk. As an Arab-American, it felt like my extended family was trapped there, like I was trapped there. I texted some friends and leaders in the room so they might share in my lament. I was distressed. I was enraged. I was beside myself. I could not believe the worst had happened, even though it is precisely what our new president had said he would do. He began his presidential campaign with this brazenly racist (and false) statement:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.³

It was a clear message to me that I did not belong. And to even the least politically engaged, it was worthy of repudiation. I lamented that so many White Evangelical Christians (81 percent of them, in fact⁴) led him to the White House. And in his inaugural address, Trump doubled down:

Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs.⁵

The terms “American workers and American families” explicitly exclude immigrants—people like me. Though he only makes economic points here, the idea of protecting our borders from other countries emphasizes that immigrants are a threat to the livelihood of American workers and families. But Trump was not always as careful, and I knew more institutionalized hatred against immigrants was coming. When it arrived that January weekend, I was not prepared for how much it would hurt me, as a child of immigrants.

All of this was swirling around in my mind as the love feast continued. And then it was time for communion. My heart heavy, I went up to the podium to share the words of institution. But I choked up. I have survived as an immigrant in this country by hiding my emotions and covering my shame. I did not want people to view me as even lesser by seeing how injured I was by my oppression. I only need one hand to count how many times I’ve cried in public in my ten-plus years of service as a pastor. I was always composed and controlled. But then it happened: tears streamed down my face before I could read the passage in 1 Corinthians. My heart was broken. My people were trapped. I was trapped. So I finally said that I could not offer the meal without mentioning these trapped immigrants. Those immigrants, children among them, looked like me and my children. I felt their strife within me because I have felt it in my life. I know what it is like to not be included, to be left out, just because of how I look and where I am from.

I told the gathered assembly that I needed Jesus to save me again. I needed the communion meal. I needed the reassurance of salvation that was granted to me by a suffering servant, one acquainted with the oppression that I felt as a Brown man in a White country in a predominantly White church. At the same time, I felt comfort as some of our congregation left the love feast to go protest at Philadelphia International Airport. Their protest was part of their worship that night. They took the message of the gospel to the streets, for the sake of the poor and the oppressed.

At that moment I realized once again that the cross of Jesus Christ has an undeniable political connotation. It saves captives. It frees the oppressed. It liberates. It rights all wrongs. It reconciles the world to God. Jesus dying on the cross is a political event. And the love of Christ it demonstrates compels us to be political, too.

I love how Fleming Rutledge describes the meaning of the cross in her exhaustive book on the subject, Crucifixion:

Forgiveness is not enough. Something is wrong and must be made right. . . . This setting-right is called rectification (dikaiōsis in Greek, also translated “justification”) by the apostle Paul. . . . When we read in the Old Testament that God is just and righteous, that doesn’t refer to a threatening abstract quality that God has over against us. It is much more like a verb than a noun, because it refers to the power of God to make right what has been wrong.⁶

As we shape ourselves like the cross, we also enter into this work of setting the world aright from injustice and deception. This is intrinsically political work. We do it to model Christ, we do it in partnership with Christ, and we do it because we’ve been transformed by Christ. The salvation of Christ is a worldwide phenomenon that Christians have too often reduced to an individual one. Seen as a work for all people and all of society, the political ramifications of the crucifixion are undeniable.

I knew this, but in that moment I felt it more urgently. As I connected the present political moment to the cosmic political event of Christ’s crucifixion, I did so with trepidation. While many Christians will agree that Christianity has political connotations, it is safer to name the cross’s politics as transcendent. But Jesus is not merely transcendent, he is also immanent. And in his immanence, in his presence, in his incarnation, he engages the world in all ways, including politically. You can see this clearly in the Gospels, especially around how Jesus engages in the religious-political discourse within Judaism. How Jesus rewrites the Law of Moses in the Sermon on the Mount is one example. The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ comment on the Law of Moses, on the Torah. Jesus makes it clear that following him is not just a matter of following rules, but living into them. So he intensifies the consequence of the law in the Sermon on the Mount, while also intensifying grace for his followers. We can look, too, to how he engages in political and religious debates and commentary with both the Pharisees and Sadducees, who are both religious and political.

Jesus engages in such a political way because of how society sees him, and specifically how they see his body. As a poor, Palestinian, Jewish rabbi, Jesus has skin in the game, you might say. The meaning the society around him offered his body, or his faith, his socioeconomic status, and his ethnicity, was political. When I say political, I do not mean related to governance, strictly speaking, but relating to public affairs and matters. Jesus’ body has political meaning because it had public meaning. His body connected him to the local politics of first-century Palestine, just as mine does to twenty-first-century United States. The intimate connection Jesus has with his political context is the entire point of God becoming a person, of Jesus being God incarnate, of Jesus embodying God.

While I was conscious of this as I was approaching the pulpit to offer communion, I also knew this was not a common approach to politics and faith. So even though the communion table was not the time or space to make such an argument, I could not let go of what was happening within me. In lieu of a biblical and theological exercise, I put my own body on the line. I shared my personal experience because I could not authentically offer the Lord’s Supper without saying what it meant for me in that moment.

I admit I feared I was making my skin color a problem, or at least that I would be accused of such a thing. As I said earlier, love and unity are the expressed reasons for our love feast. Questions raced through my mind: Would a politically-oriented communion meal bring division? Did I have to sacrifice my own dignity for the sake of Christian unity? Is that what Christ was calling me to? What kind of Christianity is that?

I feared that I would be accused of politicizing the moment, or worse, desecrating the table itself. My tears, and vulnerability, would certainly make it unseemly for anyone to make such a critique directly to me, but I still feared what they thought. I had to share what was happening with me if I was going to offer the meal authentically. For me to even partake, I needed to declare Jesus’ hope against the evil we had just witnessed.

Even as we partook in communion, I knew that the salvation and liberation that Jesus provided the oppressed didn’t take away their plight. It doesn’t take away my plight. Those trapped in the airport in that moment were victims of racism, regardless of whether we took communion or not. A racism that had been codified into law.

I was overtaken. I was heartbroken. This isn’t ideological, it’s personal. It’s not partisan, it’s embodied. What was happening to these immigrants was happening to me. And then I remembered what Jesus said in Matthew 25. What was happening to these immigrants wasn’t happening just to me—it was happening to Jesus, too. Jesus says, “I assure you that when you have done it for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you have done it for me.”

Jesus met me in my distress, because he has felt it, too. Jesus knows the plight of not belonging, of having “nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20). He knows what it’s like to be mocked about where he’s from, like when Nathanael mocks Nazareth, asking the question, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46). He feels for the oppressed, he is with the oppressed, because he is one of the oppressed. He brings the oppressed great joy and fills them with good news. He moves us to do the same, as he is one with them (John 17:21). Jesus’ arrival in the world signals this. He is born in a marginalized town, Bethlehem (away from the political power center of Jerusalem). He is born of a lowly woman, who praises him for seeking favor with the lowly. The people who first receive this good news are lowly, oppressed shepherds—not political powerbrokers. Jesus’ very incarnation roots him and directly connects him with the oppressed.

Throughout the Trump administration, many people thought that my overt political messaging and call to action were a problem for my witness. I heard that protesting Trump’s manifestly racist actions was divisive and excluded people. But calls for unity and inclusion that burden the most vulnerable are not unifying or inclusive. They just ask the oppressed to cope with their condition, or worse, to act like it does not exist.

I could not imagine how these Christians—who aren’t far-right conservatives, who consider themselves compassionate or committed to antiracism—could see such actions and not be convicted to resolutely repudiate them and comfort those they wounded. I wondered, Where is your outrage? Are you not witnessing the same evil I am? For me, it is not a radical political action to repudiate Donald Trump when he calls immigrants animals⁷, or when he tells U.S. Representatives to go back where they came from⁸, or when he names the countries they are from using derogatory and offensive language⁹.

Then I realized that in many cases they could not see what I did because of their own white skin and how it, too, has been politicized. Because those statements don’t directly harm them, they can interpret them as merely a different political message. What I can see as a plain moral wrong that demands a strong political response, they see only as politics as usual.

Both my faith and my skin color have formed my participation in politics. I can either deny that reality and be complicit in my own oppression, confront it within myself, or I can do my part to bring to light the dignity through which God sees all of the oppressed, and in doing so invite my Christian brothers and sisters into a fuller understanding of who God is and what the love of God actually looks like.

My experience as an ethnic minority led me to ask questions about U.S. foreign policy after September 11. Not only was I immediately concerned about the domestic treatment of Brown people, I also didn’t think bombing them overseas was an expression of the peace and love that I knew from the example and the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, even when I was in high school. So I couldn’t reconcile the Bush administration’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq because of my growing Christian conviction against war, and also the deeply personal nature of those wars, because they were targeting people who looked like me.

The Obama administration continued the wars that George W. Bush started, using the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) resolution, even expanding those wars in many ways. In 2016, Obama deployed 26 thousand bombs on seven countries with unmanned aircraft called drones. Obama used ten times the amount of drones than his predecessor did.¹⁰ Obama did this because he was interested in removing American troops from the Middle East, even if that did not mean ending the war. My embodied and lived experience informed my political understanding and reaction to these forever wars, and still does.

For me and my politicized body, the question is not whether to be a quietist, but whether to ignore parts of my lived experience, as if they don’t matter, or deceive myself into thinking that they aren’t legitimate or important. The necessity of political commitments for me as a person of color does not necessitate partisanship, but it can occasionally appear to be partisan. Minorities have a lived experience that informs their faith, and when we are fully dignified and permitted, that experience serves as a witness to Jesus and what his gospel is.

My awareness of how my body has been politicized is only apparent to me because of my lived experience; it does not make my body more political, but simply makes the politics of my body apparent. Again, people of color and other minorities are especially in tune with how their bodies have been politicized because of their lived experience. For people with power, whether they are White or men or a member of any dominant group, they need to learn from the lived experience of minorities, and then, in turn, discern how their bodies have been made political, and how that politicization compels them to act politically. It is uncomfortable to become conscious of that. If we are to live in the fullness of who we are in Christ, we must understand the meaning that our skin color is assigned so that we might consciously live beyond it.

This may not be an easy process for members of dominant groups because it requires them to observe the unearned power and privilege they have collected, and interrogate it. Oftentimes, feelings of defensiveness or denial emerge. I can relate to this as a man, but also as a Brown man. Acknowledging the fact that I had been a victim of racism is incredibly painful to me. I felt tha...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. The Politics of My Body
• 2. Jesus Sides with the Oppressed
• 3. On God’s Side
• 4. “Why Do You Have to Make Everything So Political?”
• 5. Faithfulness Requires Courage
• 6. The Lie of the Third Way
• 7. “Let Your Yes Be Yes”
• 8. The Kingdom of God Is Not Bipartisan
• 9. The Love of Christ Constrains Us to Vote
• 10. A Politically Prophetic Imagination
• 11. Practicality in Partnership with Imagination
• 12. The Disciplines of Anger and Hope
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author