Violence, Oppression, Love, and Belonging
Reflections on the Lectionary for May 5th
Where do we belong? What does it mean to belong? What makes it possible to belong, and who gets to belong, and with whom?
Although the New Testament is often thought about as a compendium of texts about salvation, or Jesus, or sin and redemption, or love, I think it might make the most sense to think about it as a set of reflections on belonging. From start to finish, the New Testament dwells on questions of belonging—questions of inclusion and exclusion, and the experience of being an insider or an outsider or both at once. The New Testament is working out in real time what it might mean to be together and apart.
From our perspective in 2024, some questions about identity and belonging seem to be settled. Even though there are many different understandings of how and why one might belong to a Christian denomination, for instance, most people within that denomination probably find the terms and benefits of belonging to be self-evident. The same is probably true for political parties, sports fandoms, and families—we maybe don’t think too hard about why and how we belong to the things we belong to. But then there are transformational moments in which belonging is really contested and upended, and the terms of our belonging are suddenly subject to change. Maybe the denomination changes its stance on something, or the sports team moves cities, or therapy helps us see something new about our family, and our sense of belonging is thrown into confusion, or at least it’s open to new reflection.
The New Testament was written during a moment like that—a time of intense change and turmoil, and therefore a time of multiple opportunities to contest the terms of belonging. Jesus’ life and ministry itself was likely an upheaval for those who were directly involved in it, and also for those in later generations who were trying to make sense of it. The Jewish War of 66-70 CE was a huge disruption to the status quo in the eastern Mediterranean, and it precipitated big changes in how people thought of their belonging to various ethnic and political entities. And of course as Christianity spread geographically, new groups of people were brought into old forms of belonging, and vice versa, causing quite a lot of reconsideration of boundary lines.
I was struck, in reading the passages in the lectionary for May 5th, how many times belonging is just below the surface of the readings. Belonging shows up in different ways in different passages, and it reverberates differently in 2024 than it might have in the first century. The circumstances of our particular moment in time are different from the circumstances of first century, to be sure. But we share some things in common with the first century context of the biblical authors, too. We too live in a time of religious reconfiguration, as denominations think about and debate the boundaries of their communities. We live in a time of political and geopolitical turmoil, with lines becoming drawn more sharply than before and rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion ratcheting up. Our moment of new belonging is different from the ones preserved in the New Testament, but perhaps we can learn something from their reflections and struggles.
In Acts 10:44-48 we are dropped into an intense moment of negotiating belonging. Notice how the passage begins: “the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word.” This inclusion—this common belonging—surprised some (and perhaps all) of the people there that day. The difference or distinction between different groups of people is described in this text in terms of Israelite (or Jewish) belonging: there are “circumcised believers” and there are “Gentiles.” I should say off the bat that I disagree with the choice to capitalize the word “Gentiles,” and I always write it in lower case—and that has to do with precisely this question of belonging. When we capitalize “Gentiles,” it makes it seem as if gentiles are a people group—an ethnic group, or a religious group, or something like that. But gentiles are not a defined group at all, but rather the absence of a defined group. The word “gentile” translates a word in Greek that you might recognize even if you don’t know Greek: ethnos. Ethnos is the root of our words ethnic and ethnicity, and it simply means “nation.” Ethnos or gentile is the way Jews described non-Jews: as “the nations.” This is really important to grasp; a gentile is not a specific type of person, it is a not-specific type of person. A gentile is everyone who is not a Jew. When the New Testament uses the word gentile, it’s referencing a view of the world from the perspective of Jews and Judaism. If the category of “Jews” included people from Judea and their diaspora relatives everywhere, then the category of “gentiles” included, literally, everyone else.
That’s why this passage from Acts 10 turns on the surprise about gentiles receiving the Holy Spirit—because it represents a moment when the presence of the God of Israel is said to have gone beyond the people of Israel. (You can see an expression of Israel’s traditional understanding of God’s presence in the Psalm for this week, Psalm 98, which describes God’s “steadfast love and faithfulness to the house of Israel”). This is in many ways the central plot of a lot of the New Testament—the extension of the presence and patronage of the God of Israel to everyone else (to gentiles), and the ways people made sense of that. In this passage in particular, the Jews (who are described as “the circumcised believers” in reference to their adherence to Jewish covenant with God) express surprise but not dismay that God was now speaking to gentiles. They seem to be taken aback but open to a new moment of God’s presence. Peter places the seal on that attitude by suggesting baptism (a characteristic ritual of the Jesus movement, rooted in Jewish practice) for the gentiles, and he orders it to be done.
The question of belonging behind this passage—the question of whether God might be revealed to gentiles, and whether gentiles might be brought into the family of God—was huge in the first century Jesus movement. You can see it in Jesus’ own ministry, to some degree, in his encounters with the Syrophoenician woman and the Samaritan woman at the well. You can see it in Paul’s letters, which are mostly written to gentile communities of Jesus-followers, and you can see it in Paul’s fiery defenses of his apostolic calling to speak to gentiles specifically. And perhaps most acutely, you can see it in the Book of Acts, where a few passages like this one show us that the debate over gentile inclusion was alive and fiery throughout the first decades of the Jesus movement. Acts at times almost seems to be trying to talk itself into gentile inclusion—telling itself a story about how gentiles belong, in order to convince itself that it’s true.
Notice, then, how both the passage from 1 John and the one from the Gospel of John construe belonging. These two passages likely come from the same broad tradition—the tradition of the so-called “Johannine community” or the “community of the beloved disciple” that gave rise to both the Gospel of John and the letters of John. The gospel is placing belonging in love; it is suggesting that love is the connective tissue of belonging. Jesus loves God (and keeps God’s commandments), and the ones who keep Jesus’ commandments and love him are bound to Jesus in the same way Jesus is bound to God. It’s a compelling argument for belonging, to be sure. But there’s an underside to it. Notice in verse 15 that this love-based belonging has boundaries. The NRSV translates this passage in its characteristically sanitizing way, speaking of “servants,” but in my opinion it’s best to translate by keeping the Greek’s embedded oppression in full view. So verse 15 would read, “I do not call you slaves any longer, because the slave does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” As is the case so often in the New Testament, the logics of salvation and inclusion use the vocabulary of oppression and separation. When searching for a way to establish what it means to belong, Jesus lands on a negative example, and points out that slaves explicitly do not belong. This should give us pause. What if our forms of belonging, which seem to us to be rooted in love, are actually also rooted in oppression? What do we make of love that requires someone else to be excluded?
1 John also takes love as a starting point, and adds complexity to it. For 1 John, it’s not only love but also belief that establish belonging, and in this case it’s a religio-political kind of belief—the belief that “Jesus is the Christ,” that is, the messiah. Two millennia of Christian theology have moved “messiah” into the abstract, making the Greek-derived word “Christ” into a name and letting us forget that it was a title. But in the first century, a Christ or a messiah was a revolutionary figure, an idea set against the Roman order—a presumed heir to a lost Davidic kingly lineage. If some of the reconstructions of the Johannine community are correct, and this passage from 1 John was written from the perspective of people who had fled their homeland and had seen it crushed by imperial force, then the claim that “everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God” takes on added meaning. It’s a very intense form of belonging.
But 1 John keeps going, mixing the sharp rhetoric of geopolitical messianism with the rounded rhetoric of love, creating a potent kind of belonging. Like we saw in the gospel, 1 John links the keeping of commandments with love, and it links both of those things with belonging. “For whatever is born of God conquers the world,” the letter says, putting a fine point on all of its claims about loving the children of God and believing that Jesus is a messiah.
The New Testament contains many different forms of belonging, some of which have survived to our own day, and others of which have been discarded along the way. And in 2024, we have other, newer forms of belonging, many of which don’t show up in the New Testament at all. But we feel the same kinds of pulls in multiple directions that the ancient authors and hearers of the New Testament would have felt—pulls toward many different forms of allegiance, affiliation, and belonging. We often judge our belonging more by how it feels than by what it explicitly means; we know, instinctively, when and where we belong, or not. The people of the New Testament were working those things out too, trying to discern for themselves how and where they belonged in a changing and shifting world. Even if we don’t find homes in the world in quite the same ways they did, we can still take lessons from them about what it means to search out a place to belong.