Inheriting the Land
"Blessed are the meek; they will inherit the land."
"Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the Earth." (Matthew 5:5) In a chapter about "The Bible and Land Colonization" in Theologies of the Land: Contested Land, Spatial Justice, and Identity, Mitri Raheb points out that Jesus is here referencing Psalm 37 which repeatedly references not "the earth" but, importantly, "the land." Reflecting on this, Raheb, a Palestinian Christian and president of Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem, writes that this beatitude would be better translated, "Blessed are the meek; they will inherit the land." The land referenced by the psalmist and, presumably, by Jesus wasn't an abstraction but a specific place, Palestine.
Does this make Jesus' difficult teaching any more compressible? Initially, no.
Listening to the words of Jesus, through Palestinian, Native North American, Black South African, or Aboriginal Australian ears, therefore, does not offer much help; it does not make more sense of Jesus' words. He must have been mistaken! It is all too obvious that the military occupation controls the land, and that it controls the land's resources. Everything is controlled by the empire. The empire inherits the land, not the meek. Jesus was mistaken because the meek are crushed.
This despair-tainted lament is one we must reckon with. In fact, if we've not tasted Raheb's bitter words in our own mouths, at least occasionally, it's likely we've accustomed ourselves to the empire's control and occupation.
It's been my experience that many Christians, at one point or another, also conclude that Jesus must have been mistaken. Consider the land you inhabit. In some places it's the small, farming families who've been pushed from their places, the collateral damage of our obsession with efficiency, growth, and status. In our city it's the forces of gentrification, urban renewal, and predatory lending which destabilizes multi-generational networks of neighbors.
The true inheritors are the powerful who consume land as a disposable resource. They are the ones who float above the land, their privileged transience distracting them from the stories, cultures, and histories which have held these places together. Insulating wealth gives some of us the ability to ignore the nearby places and people whose value has been obscured by deceptive narratives about whose lives matters and whose don't.
For some of us, the disconnect between Jesus' promise and what we observe leads to a kind of spiritual detachment. Maybe the vindication Jesus had in mind is other-worldly in nature, a postmortem promise for the meek. It's a promise meant to comfort the dispossessed and displaced but its true beneficiaries are the inheritors of the extractive status quo.
Having struggled with Jesus' promise to the meek, Raheb admits a problem many of us succumb to while reading the beatitudes. "Our mistake has been to read history only with the current empire in mind. The prevailing empire takes all our attention." But was this how Jesus viewed history? According to Raheb, Jesus would have taken the longer view, remembering not just Rome but the many empires which preceded them: Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Greece. If we take this view, "Jesus' words make perfect sense. None of these empires lasted in Palestine forever."
And who remains when, one after another, empires crumble?
When empires collapse and depart it is the poor and meek who remain. The haves from the people of the land immigrate; they seek to grow richer within the centers of empire. Those who are well-educated are brain-drained and vacuumed up by the empire. Who remains in this land? The meek, i.e., the powerless! Empires come and go, while the meek inherit the land. Jesus' wisdom is staggering.
From our immediate vantage point, the empires of our day seem destined to win the day. Raheb's insight is that Jesus is not bound to this limited perspective. The imperial powers and principalities may succeed in colonizing our imaginations, but Jesus refused to submit to their claims of intractable permanence. We might struggle to imagine a world without white supremacist hierarchies, extractive capitalism, or the carceral state but Jesus, apparently, does not.
It seems to me that this is one of the perennial challenges for the Christian. It is so easy to succumb to the logic of empire. We convince ourselves that participating in systems of exploitation is inevitable. We spiritualize our complicity with visions of heavenly vindication. We quiet the ache for goodness by consuming the latest thing which promises to dull our desire.
And then Jesus, the Beginning and the End, lifts our gaze beyond the empire's claims and we are surprised to find that it's not the powerful who are permanent; it's the meek and the land for which they have cared for which remain. Jesus' promise to the meek is meant as an encouragement to those most marginalized by empire. It is also an invitation and a warning to all of us: Imperials powers will not last but the meek will remain. With whom will make our common cause?
Photo: Separation Wall in Bethlehem by Markus Viljasalo.
Anyone else headed to Dallas next week for the Mosaix Conference? Let me know if you'll be there!