#Ferguson Reflections: “He Don’t Mean Sh*T To Us!”

While I have never been one much drawn to theological meanderings emerging from the vantage point of a “high” Christology, they are sometimes helpful. Here, again, noticing a distinction is important. Generally, high Christologies locate the importance of the Incarnation in the passion and resurrection of Christ. For this camp these moments reveal something important about ourselves, who we really are in relation to who we were meant to be, and about God’s real inclination and hope for us. These theologies take only passing notice of the things that Jesus did because the far more important thing is to notice what the Incarnation reveals. This does have it merits because folks like me who hold onto the other Christology, a “low” Christology, have to be apologists for a Savior who made it a practice of looting the grain fields of land owners with his crew, destroying the businesses of merchants in his own and others communities, always looking to have more wine at the party so he and his boys could get crunked, and always, I mean always, hanging with shorties. There are times though, that a high Christology has a value beyond absolving one of the need to apologize for the “person” of Jesus. That value is that it draws our gaze to the terms of the passion and therefore, what it is that God is precisely doing in the resurrection.

It is good for us to remember that the passion happened on a cross, which means the political authorities were finally the authors of Jesus’s death. Given what we now understand to be the ubiquity of crucifixion in the Roman Empire it is clear that this mode of execution demonstrated that he was “just another Jew” to them. We should also remember that our scripture really magnifies the importance of Jesus to the local religious authorities beyond what was probably the case. For, if he had been that important, the authorities would have stoned him as they did Stephen. The fact that they did not means that in their eyes he was “a Jew that don’t mean sh*t to us.” So, keeping our eye on the passion recalls for us that whatever else God was doing in the resurrection She was responding to the state sanctioned killing of a cat whose only importance was to the people who loved him; who was eschewed by the “respectable” people in his own community, and who in death was the subject of all manner of calumny and slander; and who in the end had brought all of this on himself.

Whatever else God was doing in the resurrection, we do know that Her response to the killing of just another Jew that didn’t mean sh*t to important religious people was made materially real by the calling into being of a rag tag community of the privileged and the poor, the upright and the ambiguous, the weak and the strong whose only common conviction (a conviction by the way that gave them strength to walk into the teeth of the greatest empire of the moment and the reigning religious authorities of the hour) was that what Jesus the Christ had revealed in his passion and resurrection was this: If God got us, we gon’ be alright.

Rev. Dr. Stephen G. Ray, Jr., serves as the Neal F. and Ila A. Fisher professor of systematic theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. He is also the author of Do No Harm: Social Sin and Christian Responsibility.