If They Had Known…

Luke 22:7-23

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While we talk about community and its value, it may very well be that we do not understand community as did Jesus.

A community is defined as “a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.” It is also defined as a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.”

Presumably, then, we have a narrow understanding of it and only include those who honor our beliefs, shared experiences, and ideologies, but it seems that Jesus’ understanding of community was much broader than that. It seems that “community” for Jesus included anyone who shared the capacity to breathe, to take in air, and thus experience all that life throws at us. And while that kind of community might be uncomfortable, it was the way, Jesus was teaching us, that God wanted us to live.

The only time we experience “community” in this larger, broader context is in the time of tragedy. There are sometimes when nobody has the time to worry about your race, gender, socio-economic status, or sexuality. Tragedy yanks us out of communal complacency and forces us to see each other as human beings. 

A tragedy was unfolding at the time of the Last Supper recorded in Luke. Jesus had given specific directions on how his last gathering with his disciples was to take place. It was as though he had written the order of worship for his own homegoing celebration. They would eat together. They would eat and talk and laugh, and that would have been easy because they believed they were a community, in the classic sense defined earlier in this essay.

But if they had known that there was a person there who was so troubled that he had agreed to exchange Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, they would have prevented him from participating. If they had known that he was pretending to be what he perhaps really wanted to be – a true follower of Jesus– they would have “told” on him, if not to Jesus then to each other to get a posse riled up against him. If they had known what Judas was about, he would not have been allowed to sit at that table.

The fact that Jesus did know is the key to what he was trying to teach, even as he had literally hours before he would be killed. God’s mandate was that we were to “love our neighbors as ourselves,” and no, we did not have the right, as the late Sen. Robert Byrd D-W.VA said, to “get to choose who our neighbors are.” Jesus wanted us to have eyes to see as God did, and that meant receiving as members of the community even those about whom we had great misgivings.

Jesus taught that we were to treat the lives, and the needs of people – not some, but all people - as holy, as Dr. Obery Hendricks wrote in The Politics of Jesus. Our repulsion at that lesson causes us to reject it, but we are capable of following it, as our interactions during tragedy prove.

Who else was at that table? Who else had been following Jesus because they needed to feel affirmed and confirmed in a world where people have made an art form out of ostracizing people? Who else was sitting at that table who felt that while Jesus healed everyone else, he hadn’t healed them, and who else at that table resented and perhaps mumbled under their breath that because Jesus had not healed them, they believed Jesus was a fraud? 

Maybe that’s why they began to ask each other who the betrayer was. Maybe they knew that in their hearts, they had justifiable reasons to turn on and away from Jesus and walk away. They were not innocent.

In our growing up as Black women in particular and Black people in general, we are taught that there are many tables to which we will never be invited because of our race or gender, but that we are not to hold that against anyone who might need to be at a specific table in times of tragedy. Who else had a mama like me who warned me that if I turned away from anyone – including a white person – who was in need, “ I was going to hell, not the person or persons I would not help in their time of need because of what they had done to me or my people?"

The late Katie Cannon, who grew up in Kannapolis, North Carolina, knew about the capacity to want to exclude persons because of what they had done. She lived during a time when racist exclusion was the norm in American society. The perception she had of herself, and her abilities was stilted because of who she was, where she had lived, and how she grew up. She was Black. She was female. And she had been poor. Many communities had rejected her and she had seen the barriers that had been put in front of her mother, who struggled to make ends meet. Though they lived in a town, they were not invited to the tables of privilege. And so she began to look for herself and she knew she had to leave her hometown to find it. She flew all over the world, looking for herself, and finally realized that her “self” was inside of her. What she had to do was “admit that identity and wholeness come with reconnection as well as retreat. She was ready to accept the richness of her impoverished past.” (Katie’s Cannon; Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community, page 13). Once she accepted herself and got in touch with her feelings, she was able to handle situations differently because her spiritual eyesight was keener, and she could see people and situations as flawed, yes, but not deserving of being excluded from the presence and power of God.

Any and everyone who wanted to be in the community of believers was welcome. The great tragedy of her life was that belief in white supremacy and racism held more power than belief in God, and whenever we live like that, we move God’s will to the periphery of our lives and give chaos, hatred, and anger seats at tables that should have been ours.

But it’s not clear that the disciples had experienced a soul-cleanse as did Katie Cannon. What they did have was a sense of privilege that they got to be in the company of the man who healed the sick and made the blind see. They could not see that their allegiance to their privilege made it impossible for them to see themselves fully. 

So of course, they would be incensed at the idea that anyone who planned to betray Jesus would have the audacity to sit at this table, and they did not understand that Jesus knew he was there. Jesus was trying to show them what “community” looked like, a lesson made more prescient due to the tragedy that they would all experience in a matter of hours. Even Judas was a member of the community. Would they realize that the greatest tragedy in this world is the human incapacity and unwillingness to embrace even those with whom we have little in common?

To have the capacity to embrace and accept this concept of community we are required to get in touch with our feelings. We have to seek and then embrace what Dr. Cannon called “internal freedom.” When we have that kind of freedom we can stare at oppression and then laser-focus God’s love through it so that God can excise what humans cannot. We can make room for ourselves at tables not meant for us by recognizing the evil focused on us while we make room for them at God’s table despite our desire that they never have the opportunity to sit there. Internal freedom is what our foremothers had and it helped them teach us, their children, how to move in a world that did not want us. We should be wise to the ways of the wicked, but respectful of the ways of God and thus, be able to respect the presence of racism and sexism while simultaneously rejecting them. We were taught to recognize the tragedy of white supremacy but not let it consume us, and make room in our spirits to accept those who hurt us to sit at the table that Jesus the Christ has prepared for all of us.

If Jesus’ disciples had known what Judas was up to, he would have been disinvited from the Last Supper – but what was revealed through their concern about who Jesus was talking about was that they had issues that Jesus knew about, too. On this Holy Thursday, we are sitting at a table with Jesus who would still teach us that “whosoever” is at the table and always will be. We have the audacity to sit at the table while we try to overlook what is in our hearts and spirits - and Jesus knows it. If we do not accept our failings, we, too, sit in Judas’ seat, and therefore, can betray him as Judas did.

If they had known that the one who would betray Jesus was sitting with them, they would have thrown him out. But Jesus invited him in and kept him in, and we must ask ourselves why and what that means for us as Black women in these days of social, political, and spiritual chaos.

Rev. Dr. Susan K. Smith, formerly the senior pastor of Advent United Church of Christ in Columbus, Ohio, is a 1986 graduate of Yale Divinity School, where she earned her M.Div. She received her BA in English Literature from Occidental College and her D. Min. from United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, studying under the late Rev. Dr. Samuel Proctor. 

A former reporter, Rev. Smith worked for newspapers in Baltimore and Texas before entering seminary. She also served as an associate producer for WJZ News, as an on-air news reporter for WEAA, the radio station affiliated with Morgan State University in Baltimore, and as a talk show host for "Columbus Today," a locally heard radio program in Columbus, and as an on-air political commentator for a news magazine television program, also produced in Columbus. 

Following graduation from Yale Divinity School, where she served as the first woman to be president of the student body, Dr. Smith served as associate minister at Trinity United Church of Christ, studying under the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A Wright, Jr. She served at Trinity for three years before accepting the call to be pastor at Advent UCC. 

Rev. Smith is a past co-president of BREAD, (Building Responsibility, Equity and Dignity), a multi-racial, multi-ethnic social justice organization comprised of over 50 different religious denominations in the city of Columbus. aaUnder her leadership, that organization was recently instrumental in getting the Ohio Legislature to sign into law a measure which prevents pay day lenders from charging its clients exorbitant interest rates. 

She was recently invited to be a participant in the Oxford Roundtable, an event held at Oxford University in England, where she presented a paper on the tension in America between the United States Constitution and the Holy Bible. 

She is the author of five books, "Carla and Annie," "From Calvary to Victory," "Forgive WHO?" and, "Crazy Faith: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives," which is currently in its second printing. Her newest book, recently published by the Pilgrim Press, The Book of Jeremiah: The Life and Ministry of Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., examines the work and ministry of Jeremiah Wright. Her work has also appeared weekly on The Washington Post, as a member of a panel of theologians, scholars and writers on a panel for that newspaper which comments on issues pertinent to religion. She also has her own blog, "Candid Observations," which concentrates on the intersection of race, politics and religion.