Jesus then said, “I came into the world to bring everything into the clear light of day, making all the distinctions clear, so that those who have never seen will see, and those who have made a great pretense of seeing will be exposed as blind.” (Jn. 19:39 TLB)
Jesus declares this directive in the context of a moment when a man whose eyes don’t function does see the truth about Jesus, but religious leaders whose eyes do function don’t see the truth about Jesus. In other words, there’s blindness, and then … well … there’s blindness. One of the reasons Jesus came was to “bring everything into the clear light of day.” Ancient Christians called this “awakening” and “illumination.”1 The gift of Jesus is a gift of true sight, the capacity to see truth which most, even the religious, miss.
It’s a gift desperately needed these days, because so many of us seem to be in the dark about so much. In an article summarizing vital missteps early in the American response to Covid-19, Sunday’s The New York Times concluded on its front page:2
Americans were left largely blind to the scale of a looming public health catastrophe.
We in the US have only very recently awakened to just how consequential the corona virus is and just how seriously we must fight its spread. As the disease marched across other continents, we remained blind to its deadliness, in part due to failures from our national leaders, and in part due to our own hubris. Eyes are opening now, however.
Tragically, however, many of us have also been blind to an equally disturbing catastrophe. Not only have we been asleep to the public health danger of a raging virus. We’ve also been asleep to the public health danger of racist violence happening in the context of corona. This disease has brought with it many forms of discrimination. And we’ve been even slower to awaken to this pathogen of prejudice than we were to awaken to the contamination of corona.
For example, federal investigators have revealed that white supremacist groups are discussing plans to use Covid-19 as a bioweapon, targeting law enforcement, people of Jewish ethnicity and people of color.3 Racist groups are intending to infect people in minority groups with the virus, hoping to decimate their populations. They are telling their memberships that, if any of them should contract Covid-19, they have an “obligation” to spread the virus to people of color and others.
In addition, groups with racist ideologies are striving to exploit the social isolation that’s happening through social distancing. With millions now stuck at home, and spending significantly more time online, hate groups hope to use this opportunity to draw people into their poorly regulated Internet forums. Through social media, white supremacist groups are providing the scapegoat which some sheltering in place now desire, identifying marginalized and/or ethnic groups as the cause of this contamination.4
Since the outbreak, acts of racism toward East Asian groups have dramatically increased.5 A piece in The New York Times reports this:6
Chinese-Americans and other Asians lumped together with them by racists are being beaten, spat on, yelled at and insulted from coast to coast, driving some members of the maligned minority to purchase firearms in the fear of worse to come as the pandemic deepens.
Despite this, President Trump and other officials persist in calling this the “Chinese Virus.” The xenophobia arising from the virus is worse than the virus itself.
Covid-19 has become an excuse for furthering already racist perspectives among world leaderships:7
Right-wing parties in Europe, for example, have latched onto the outbreak to reiterate their calls for tougher immigration restrictions—Italy’s far-right leader Matteo Salvini was among the first to exploit the virus for his own kind of pandemic populism, erroneously linking the outbreak to African asylum seekers and urging border closures. Similar calls to suspend Europe’s open-border system, known as the Schengen Area, have been made by far-right politicians in Germany, France, and Spain. In the U.S., President Donald Trump pointed to the outbreak as further reason to construct a wall at the Mexico border.
Sadly, this is not unusual when outbreaks happen. A recent article in The Atlantic summarizes:8
During the 1853 yellow-fever epidemic in the United States, European immigrants, who were perceived to be more vulnerable to the disease, were the primary targets of stigmatization. During the SARS outbreak, which originated in China, East Asians bore the brunt. When the Ebola outbreak emerged in 2014, Africans were targeted. For this reason, the World Health Organization, which has overseen the global response to the coronavirus outbreak, opted against denoting a geographic location when officially naming the new virus, as it did with Ebola (named after the river in the Congo, where it was first detected) and the 2012 Middle East respiratory syndrome, known simply as MERS. “Stigma, to be honest, is more dangerous than the virus itself,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general, stated recently.
Sadly, disease and discrimination have a long history of linking arms for the cause of devaluing human life.
But we, the followers of the Crucified One, are called to something radically different. We’re called to awaken to atrocities like these. We’re called to see that to which many remain blind. We’re called to unite with those being targeted. The cross is a place of solidarity and it calls us to stand with and fight for those who, in our day, are now suffering at the hands and hatred of others. M. Shawn Copeland, in Knowing Christ Crucified, writes that we “find ourselves standing in a crucified world and standing before a crucified people.” And therefore …9
To know and to follow Christ crucified is to know and love those children, women, and men who are poor, excluded, and despised, made different and unwelcome, lynched and crucified in our world. To now and follow Christ crucified is to know and love these women and men … If we would follow Christ crucified with attention, reverence, and devotion, we would recognize that the tears and blood and moans of the innocent have been absorbed into the air we breath, have seeped into our streams and rivers and swamps and seas and oceans, into the earth in which we plant and from which we harvest and eat. If we follow with attention, reverence, and devotion the moans and tears of the brutalized and burned, raped and mutilated, enslaved and captive across the centuries, we are led to the ground beneath the cross of the crucified Jewish Jesus of Nazareth.”
As discrimination rises in the wake of the corona disease, we who follow Jesus of Nazareth must now side with those who are despised. We must awaken and take action against the ailments of alienation and animosity.
Diane Langberg writes of visiting the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana where hundreds of thousands of Africans were forced into its dungeons and then onto its slave ships.10 Two hundred men would live chained together in the cramped dungeon before being shipped across the Atlantic. Her guide led her group down into the dungeons and told horrific tales. Then, he pointed up, at the low ceiling just above their heads. “Do you know what is above this dungeon?” he asked. “The chapel.” Immediately above them was the space where Christians gathered for praise and prayer. And literally beneath their feet the most traumatic of trials was taking place. Can you imagine, she asks, what could have happened if those Christians had left their comfortable place of worship and descended into the dungeons to stop the despair?
While many of us shelter in place in spaces of relative comfort and safety, right next to us, very near to us, are people enduring traumatic trials because of the discrimination accompanying this disease. We cannot remain blind to this.
In 1959, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the commencement address at Morehouse College.11 He urged listeners to wake up. He would preach this sermon often, including at the National Cathedral the Sunday before coming to Memphis, where he was killed.
In the sermon, King told the story of Rip Van Winkle. What most remember about that story is that Rip Van Winkle slept for twenty years. There was, however, another important part of the story–the change that happened while he slept. In a little inn, when Rip Van Winkle fell asleep, there hung a picture of King George III of England. Twenty years later, when he awoke, the picture had changed. Now it was a picture of George Washington. King notes:
When he started his quiet sleep America was still under the domination of the British Empire. When he came down she was a free and independent nation. This incident suggests that the most striking thing about the story of Rip Van Winkle was not that he slept twenty years, but that he slept through a great revolution … There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.
Jesus came as part of God’s righteous revolution. He came to illuminate us and invite us to act based on what we see. All around us right now there is a revolution taking place in medical labs, hospitals, and scientific communities as the resources of the world are used to purge this pandemic. Jesus has come to enact a similarly robust revolution in the hearts of people and in the halls of power. A revolution that would incite us to bring to bear every resource for the eradication of the epidemic of racism.
And there’s nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.
REFERENCE:
1 Bernard McGinn, The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism.
2 “The Lost Month: How a Failure to Test Blinded the US to Covid-19,” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/us/testing-coronavirus-pandemic.html
3 “White supremacists discussed using the coronavirus as a bioweapon, explosive internal document reveals,” https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-white-supremacists-discussed-using-covid-19-as-bioweapon-2020-3 / “Federal law enforcement document reveals white supremacists discussed using coronavirus as a bioweapon,” https://news.yahoo.com/federal-law-enforcement-document-reveals-white-supremacists-discussed-using-coronavirus-as-a-bioweapon-212031308.html?guccounter=1 / “White supremacists encouraging their members to spread coronavirus to cops, Jews, FBI says,”
https://abcnews.go.com/US/white-supremacists-encouraging-members-spread-coronavirus-cops-jews/story?id=69737522
4 “’Right Now, People Are Pretty Fragile.’ How Coronavirus Creates the Perfect Breeding Ground for Online Extremism,” https://time.com/5810774/extremist-groups-coronavirus/
5 “The Other Problematic Outbreak: As the coronavirus spreads across the globe, so too does racism,” https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-covid19-xenophobia-racism/607816/
6 “Call It ‘Coronavirus’: Disease and prejudice have long gone hand in hand. We can do better in 2020,” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/opinion/china-coronavirus-racism.html
7 “The Other Problematic Outbreak: As the coronavirus spreads across the globe, so too does racism,” https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-covid19-xenophobia-racism/607816/
8 https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-covid19-xenophobia-racism/607816/
9 M. Shawn Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified, 133-135.
10 Diane Langberg, Suffering and the Heart of God, 9.
11 “”Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” Address at Morehouse College Commencement,” https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/remaining-awake-through-great-revolution-address-morehouse-college
