The Golden Ass

In group discussion on Michael Gonzalez’s sermon on Matt 23: 1-12, he noted that, in election season, he sees a lot of pastors saying things like, “God is sovereign and in control.” They are trying to be helpful, but that can often serve to avoid entering into the struggle of shared life together, which involves and requires shared struggle, shared grieving, and shared endurance (Michael is African American, btw). What Jesus actually calls, beckons, and invites - in a word, ELECTS - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another. For more on this, see my reflection on Day 1, Sunday.

Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23.
“And, the greater among you shall be your servant. And whoever will exalt himself will be humbled, and whoever will humble himself will be exalted. But alas for you, scribes and Pharisees…” – Matthew 23: 11-13 So, if I consider my own place in relationship between Matthew 23 and my white friends more as my entering into the narrative voiced by Jesus, as our placing ourselves inside the story, and less as my speaking at and criticizing my white friends for not entering, then what? Can distant criticizing become invitation and beckoning into divine joining? Can we enter in, with fear and trembling, with sacred awe? With the practices of confession and lament, along with repentance?

It is with this context and these questions in mind that I have a reflection on a portion of Matthew 23 for each day of the week of “Election 2020.” Of note, I wrote all of these before “the election,” so my reflections aren’t in reaction to the results. If you would like to go back and engage with my reflection on Day 2, click here.

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Tuesday, Day 3 - ELECTION DAY:

You shut the Kingdom of the heavens in men’s faces…nor do you allow others going in to enter. – Matthew 23: 13

As I hated my job as a server, and didn’t want to be there, and worked and scraped and clawed my way out, you see, I was seeking another kingdom. The NRSV translates it as, “when others are going in, you stop them.” I was leaving them behind. I was shutting the door of my life to them, and locking it behind me. I was not desiring a divine joining in shared life, because I was driven by desire for something else.

Because I was never in that situation, I am not sure if, bearing the fruit of my life of dissoluteness, I would have cared that a woman had gotten pregnant and been able to choose to get an abortion. Would I have cared that the door to life was shut in my unborn baby’s face? Perhaps that would have beckoned me out of my blindness and compulsively disordered desires? But I know I didn’t care that black people couldn’t exactly choose not to be black – at least not without choosing to participate in and tyrannically give their allegiance to the principalities and powers constructed, legitimized, and enforced by White power. I will give this more context to this duplicity of mine in my reflection on Day 6, on Matt 23: 25-25.

Pictured here is an icon into the history of my duplicity. The broken relationship between these white men and this enslaved chef went on to shape how I identified myself and saw my world.

How does the identity you choose, the person on offer to you by and in our marketplace or our political forum, shape your desires? How do those desires shape your image of how you relate to others in the world? To other persons with other identities, whether those identities are perceived as such by them or by you? Whether we “help” them or not, whether we imagine them as “above” or “below” us, do we identify with them in Christ? Are we, in the concrete particulars of our everyday lives (not just “spiritually”), beckoned to divine union with them in Christ?