Supremacy and the Bible

After preaching today on Matthew 15:21-29, someone raised a question about white supremacists citing a verse in Genesis to promote what is often called the "Theology of Ham."
In Matthew 15, Jesus spoke of how laws of ritual purity had no value in determining one's worth before God. Then he left Israel with his disciples to meet a Canaanite woman (a descendant of Ham) who had no standing or hope of standing before Yahweh from a First Century Jewish perspective. After offering her the standard Jewish responses (silence, then brushing her off as unworthy), she knelt before him asking no more than the crumbs that fall from the master's table and are eaten by dogs. It is at this point in the narrative that Matthew names Jesus as speaking, "Oh, woman, great is your faith."
The text in Genesis regarding Noah's curse of his grandson was directed at the very people to whom this woman belonged. They were the people of Canaan, the Phoenicians in other texts. Of Noah's descendants, Ham had no relationship with the southern peoples of Africa. On the other hand, Jesus did.
Jesus' ancestry was not nearly as pure as many might hope. There was Rahab, the harlot of Jericho who was part of his lineage. Then there was Ruth of Moab. Then there was the woman David took as wife after having her immigrant husband, a Hittite, killed. Bathsheba was her name, or at least the title used to refer to her. It means "Daughter of Sheba," which we would call Ethiopia, today. She was either the daughter of immigrants from Ethiopia or herself taken from there as a wife or enslaved to be Uriah's wife, perhaps as the spoils of war.
What this means is that Jesus had no pure lineage back to Abraham. His was a mixed racial heritage. He was part Canaanite (a descendant of Ham), part Moabite (a people cursed never to be part of Israel), and part Ethiopian.
If you are going to claim the supremacy of the white races, recognize that you are ruling Jesus out of that heritage. If you are going to claim a theology of Ham to defend that Black people are cursed to be slaves, recognize that Ham was not an ancestor of the peoples of southern Africa, but Jesus was both of Africa and Ham. If you are going to claim the superiority of any one people to another, recognize that Jesus called that bunk by specifically seeking out a Canaanite woman who exemplified the quality of faith he often found lacking within the religious circles of Judaism.
If we are going to propose the superiority of one people over another, we do Jesus an injustice. We ignore what he taught. We ignore who he was. We ignore whom he called us to be.
In Revelation, John speaks of a crowd of people from all nations, languages, and tribes coming together to serve and worship God. Claims to any one people's superiority actually remove us from that number.
God is not concerned with declaring one person or group of people more worthy than another. God is concerned with our unity and reconciliation. God is concerned that all who will might become the children of God.
If God were concerned with the supremacy of the Caucasian race, Jesus would never have been born in Bethlehem to a Jewish mother in a mixed-race line. When I claim to be superior to the next person, I set aside God's grace. I state that God accepts me because of who I am, not because of who God is. If I don't come to God by grace, I don't have enough self-worth to come at all.


—©Copyright 2017, Christopher B. Harbin

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