Bass Note
“When they hurled their insults at Jesus, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to God who judges justly.”
1 Peter 2:23
Dear Friends,
This verse finds itself sandwiched between two challenging passages for most people: submission for slaves to masters and for wives to husbands. Yuck. But it’s important to recognize the difference between God’s eternal truths and Roman cultural household codes of the day. Christians have long equated both but this is a grave mistake that has subjected human beings and muddied the gospel.
God’s eternal truth is that you have been created in God’s image—beloved. You are beloved first and foremost before any job, role, title, cultural expectation, or household code. Your belovedness is more true about you than any weak or oppressive cultural hierarchy might say. Nothing can remove your belovedness, my friends.
As I was thinking about God’s eternal truth this morning, I wondered why I give such weight to culture? Why do I allow myself to float on through with words like, “it is what it is?” Oppressive violence backdrops American culture—mass shootings, racism, fetishization of guns and sex and violence, severe belittling, abuse of power, abuse of the powerless, dehumanization of the unborn, poverty and dehumanization of the poor. Is it really what it is? Or is there another truth under the surface? Is there a deeper reality, a bass note, that if I began to pay attention I might just feel it’s vibrations—an undercurrent of belovedness?
But I rarely do pay attention because my eyes and ears are full of noise and prosperity. Those bass note vibrations of God’s eternal truth become more subtle. Our culture today seems to absorb sound, muting that bass note of my own and other people’s belovedness, perpetuating dehumanization. Cultural power tends to subject people and mute their potential. The power of Christ empowers people, vibrating outward with equity.
Maybe this is why Jesus spent 40 days in the silent wilderness of loss and lack? Perhaps Jesus needed to reconnect with that bass note of his own belovedness because how could he lead others into God’s eternal truth without that eternal truth embedded deep within himself? I wonder if this is why Jesus tended to answer people’s questions with a question? Like he was inviting them to pay attention to the eternal truth vibrating all around them and within them.
For slaves, wives, and anyone towards the bottom of power, there wasn’t much they could do to change their circumstances or their oppressive cultural codes of the day. But they could shift their response within the system they were in. The more I live into the truth of my belovedness, no matter how ugly or yucky this world is, the more it helps me block the lies. Like Christ’s example of silence before threats and quiet before insults, there’s an invitation for us all to pause. Instead of my mind pridefully obsessed with a quick comeback and snarky or violent retaliation, I’m invited to pause.
Pausing isn’t passivity in the face of injustice. This isn’t to suppress or ignore oppressive behaviors directed at the powerless. This isn’t even “it is what it is.” The example Jesus gave with silence before his oppressors was non-violent resistance, not powerlessness. In Jesus’s non-violent resistance, in his silence, he forced his oppressors to listen, to pause, to maybe catch the bass note of God’s eternal truth vibrating all around them. A vibration of belovedness beyond the ages and beyond social and cultural codes.
Can you feel it? Can you sense it? Your belovedness beats like your heart—a vibrating pattern of truth no system or structure can remove from you because THEY. are. powerless.
Forty Lenten days of loss and lack leading us to the cross. May every step come with confidence, shaking only from the deep vibrations of Love.
With (love),
Bethany