Rhetoric Race and Religion
This post is part of the Ferguson Reflection: One Year Later series. If you have a reflection on Ferguson, please share it with us at [email protected]
While he has never been far from my mind, this weekend’s trip to Ferguson vividly brought Michael Brown Jr. to my consciousness in a different way. Oddly, princes and icons also came to my mind.
Generally, in the feudal system the primary place for a prince is to remind the people, the aristocracy, and other monarchs that this dynasty has a future. A future in which this kingdom, this people will not be cut off from the earth. Consequently, to kill the Prince was to seal the future against any hope which the people might have. This idea extends beyond the feudal world to the doings of common men. I think that the early gambit by Satan to kill Job’s children in his ongoing wager with God may well have been predicated on this notion. Without his children Job understood he had no future and his name would be cut off from the earth. This despair beyond all the others rent his soul and left him a heap of suffering and despair; seeming proof that perhaps God had misread the table.
As noted in an earlier piece Orthodox theologies center the importance of the Incarnation in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. In them something true is revealed about us. While we are familiar with the idea that the truth they reveal is that the power of Sin is broken and our bondage to Death is likewise put asunder, a dimension rarely noticed is that these dark powers of dominion are broken because Death simply could not contain the power of Life which was manifest in the Incarnation. According to Origen (one of those African guys in the Early Church), this was a case of the Devil overplaying his hand. In Origen’s thought, God had baited the Devil with this man who shone forth the power of Life. Satan knew full well that this was no ordinary flesh bearer and that it was indeed the Prince of the kingdom, but he thought so little of the flesh which the Prince bore that he saw this as his moment. Thinking he would consume the Prince, made insignificant by the flesh he bore, and therefore break the future of kingdom which Christ heralded Satan, as he had done with Job, orchestrated things such that Jesus was killed.
While fully expecting this bold stroke of using the power of Death would leave God a heap of suffering and despair and the vision of a New Jerusalem in ruins, he found otherwise. Satan discovered that not only was the power of Life so great in this One that it broke every bond of Death but, it also communicated itself to the quick and the dead. Far from being made weak and insignificant by the particular flesh he bore, Christ was enabled by it to gather a community of witnesses that would herald Life’s victory through time and through which this power might be communicated to all. On the account of Orthodox traditions icons (pictures of the Christ and the saints) have the power to communicate this victory of Life and to give us a glimpse into the reign of God in which that victory is complete. By gazing into their eyes what we learn of ourselves is that this flesh that we bear is destined for eternity with God. Beyond teaching, their gaze envelops us in that power of Life which is the resurrection; a power never defeated by death.
On my return from Ferguson I have been struck by the way that pictures of Michael Brown Jr. feel as if they are drawing me into a gaze which communicates some power beyond the photos. Having been in the midst of the community gathered by his death I fully expected that my theological inclinations would lead me to see pictures of Michael Brown Jr. as a martyr to the evil of white supremacy in a more powerful way. What I was not expecting was that his eyes would draw me into an encounter with my own Black flesh that would invite me to experience it in a salvific way which I had not before.
As with Christ, the flesh of Michael Brown Jr. was both invitation to violation and mitigation of the power of Life which shone forth from him. His Black flesh made him imminently killable in the eyes of many and mitigated any claim of empathy on the hearts of too many others. In my own living it was this invitation to violation which was most real to me but, when I experienced the community called into being by the Spirit which was gathered precisely around Mike Mike’s Black flesh, our Black flesh, I knew that God had used his death to communicate something to us all. That communication? Simply put, in the unfolding of God’s salvific plan for all of creation Black Lives Matter.
Michael Brown Jr. is and will be our shining Black Prince for from his death God has brought Life to us all and in his gaze we are enveloped its power.
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.
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