How Do We Love Like Jesus?

This is the third reading in the joint program “Black History 2020: Looking Back to Live Forward” led by Rev. LaDonna Nkosi, the new Director of Intercultural Ministries and Alexandra Toms, Racial Justice Associate in the Office of Peacebuilding and Policy. We are offering various blogs, videos, and articles throughout the month of February exploring the intersections of faith, Black history, and current day racism. We hope you join us this month to read, listen, and reflect as we look back through history, so we can better live into Christ.

By Alexandra Toms, Racial Justice Associate in OPP


“How do you deal with Jesus the man, the Christ? Do you take him seriously? His life – his words – his death – his victory? The more I have studied of Jesus the more I realize you cannot take him lightly. What he did was not just for the people in his century, not only Jews or Gentiles, but for men of all ages and all races…. Can I as a Christian and an American remain neutral on the subject? Can I show love for Christ if I do not show love for all of the people for whom he lived and died? Can I show love for God if I do not show love for my neighbor? How can I love God whom I have not seen, if I do not show love for my brother whom I have seen?” – Jay Gibble

The above quote was preached by Jay Gibble to the Altoona Church of the Brethren at the height of the Civil Rights movement in 1965. And yet, these prophetic words are still relevant to racism in the United States today in 2020. In fact, it might be even harder to live out these words in current day. During the Civil Rights movement, many around the country rallied together to oppose Jim Crow, segregation, and overt discrimination against people of color. There were organized marches, sit-ins, and protests of unfair discriminatory laws and policies. It was clear what it meant to love your neighbor.

Loving your neighbor meant opposing overt discrimination. Loving your neighbor meant opposing laws that oppressed based on skin color. Loving your neighbor meant, for many Brethren, protesting alongside people of color in the March of Washington and participating in sit-ins at lunch counters. It meant standing in solidarity with fellow Black Americans and fighting for their freedom.

Since the Civil Rights movement, there have been laws passed to prevent overt discrimination based on one’s race. However, there are still many Black Americans who experience regular discrimination and the after-effects of slavery and Jim Crow. Only now it is much harder to see because we often believe the laws fully prevent discrimination. It is harder to see because, while some of the discrimination is based on blatant racial prejudice, sometimes it is based on our own implicit biases that we are unaware of influencing decisions that we make. If you pass a black man on the street, do you happen to clutch your purse a little tighter or cross to the other side of the road? Do you do this more often when it is a black man than a white man?

I caught myself doing this recently. I was taking the metro, and as I was getting off and riding up the escalator, a couple college age students passed by me and bumped into my bag. I started looking through my bag to make sure that nothing was taken, that nothing would have been out in the open that could be snatched, and that all was accounted for. The person who bumped into me was a well-dressed young black man. I caught myself. Have I had multiple people bump into me on the metro? Oh my yes. It is a crowded space. If I frantically looked through my bag every time I got bumped, that is all I would be doing getting on and off the train. So why did I freak out this time? I could tell myself it was just the situation. It could have been the overall behavior of the group or because they were walking past me, not just standing alongside when I was bumped. Though I do not know for sure, it was likely influenced by the fact he was a young black man. What I do know is that because of racial stereotypes, I have to question why I had that thought. Because of implicit prejudice, this young man has probably had many people have a similar reaction that I, as a white woman, will never elicit from people. No matter how much I study about race, I still catch myself in moments of implicit prejudice that I am constantly trying to unlearn.

The problem is, these small moments can lead to larger consequences for people of color. Research conducted by economists in 2004 showed prejudice toward “black sounding names” when measuring callbacks for interviews after sending out 5,000 resumes.[1] When identical resumes were submitted to various jobs, those with black sounding names received fewer callbacks than those with white sounding names, even though the resumes had the same qualifications. In fact, those with white sounding names and a criminal record still received more call backs than those with black sounding names and no criminal record. This type of discrimination leads to long lasting consequences where Black Americans make on average less money than white Americans even when education is accounted for, and Black Americans have 1/10 the amount of wealth as their white counterparts.[2]

So how do we love our neighbors amidst these implicit prejudices? How do we love our neighbors when these circumstances seem beyond our control? When I think of Jesus’ life on earth, I think of the man who did not just love by being nice to the people he was around. Jesus loved by changing people’s worlds. Many of the people Jesus healed were outcasts of society, discriminated against because of some physical quality. An example that comes to my mind is the woman who bled for 12 years (Mark 5:25-34). Quite often when we hear her story, we focus on her faith. All she had to do was touch Jesus’ cloak, and she was made well. Her faith in this Scripture is evident, but let us look at a slightly different angle.

Why was she so desperate for Christ’s healing? Not only had she bled for 12 years straight, something no one wants to endure, but she was also outcasted from society because of her condition. When a woman was on her menstrual cycle, she was unable to touch anybody, or else they would be deemed unclean. Anything she sat on would be deemed unclean, and if someone touched an object that she had touched, that would cause them to be unclean.[3] This woman would have spent 12 years unable to have human contact, and unable to be in a public space. Anyone she would have been around would have been suspect and anything she may have touched would have been suspect. The healing Jesus provided not only healed the physical ailment of the issue of blood but also reconciled her relationship with society, giving her new life where she was no longer an outcast.

What if our racist policies and our prejudices are the “issue of blood” that support Black Americans being outcasted in society, causing us to question things they touch; question who they are with; question their presence? What if instead of praying for healing of discrimination in the US as a healing of the Black situation that keeps them pushed down, we pray for a healing in our hearts and the hearts of people, and we pray for healing in our policies to support Black Americans? We pray that God moves us to action like Jesus was moved to action because of the woman’s faith. Maybe loving our neighbors, who are of different races, is a process of confronting our own racial prejudices, learning about racial discrimination that is still occurring, and working toward making change; working toward Jesus’ healing in ourselves and in our country. 

Activity and Reflection

As part of working toward healing, it is important to know what implicit prejudices may influence us. Below is a link to the Implicit Associations Test (IAT) developed by Harvard University. The IAT is intended to measure how quickly we may associate certain words with others. The idea is that we tend to associate words more quickly if we believe they are similar. To learn more about the IAT, click here. The IAT usually takes about 10 minutes to complete. If you are interested in completing one of the tests, please click here and choose one of the IAT’s on race.

Read Mark 5:25-34

  1. Beyond the examples provided above, what were some ways people would have interacted with the woman because of her condition?
  2. How would this have impacted her relationships with others? How would this have impacted her ability to provide for a family?
  3. What did your IAT score come back as? Are you surprised by the score?
  4. According to Harvard, most of the race-based IAT results show preference for white over black in some capacity. How does this pattern result in similar outcomes for people of color as seen in biblical times for the bleeding woman before her healing?

[1] Marianne Bertrand Marianne and Sendhil Mullainathan. “Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination.” American Economic Review 94 (2004): 991-1013.

[2] A. Javier Trevino, Investigating Social Problem, 2nd edition (California: Sage Publishing, 2019), 61-62

[3] Leviticus 15:19-33

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