DISCRIMINATION IN THE CHURCH

Martin Luther, the founder of the Reformation, was famously opinionated and once called the letter of James ‘a right strawy epistle’, which I think is medieval code for shallow. Luther believed that God accepts us by faith alone and that James came too close to saying that God accepts us by how well we behave. But most people think that St James was just spelling out that faith in Jesus should result in changed lives. That love is shown in practical action.

 

The epistle also shows how our thoughts influence our behaviour. In chapter 2, James talks about a rich person and a poor person coming into a gathering of worshipping Christians. The rich person is privileged by the others, shown to a nice seat and given the ancient world’s equivalent of corporate hospitality. It’s the clothes that make the difference – the outward signs, not the inward character. The designer labels are the subtle indicator and passcode. Meanwhile, the poor person is told what to do and where to sit. As usual, they are bossed around.

 

This story of favouritism feels crude and simple, but it is repeated in practice in millions of ways across the world – and it is repeated in the Church. It shows that conscious and unconscious bias are as old as humanity. That we are all finely attuned to status: who has it, who doesn’t, how we can get it and how we can hold on to it as a way of bolstering our fragile self-esteem.

 

It also says uncomfortable things about how we idolise wealth and those who possess it. A number of careful studies have shown the inherent bias people have towards those who are wealthy. They get more attention than others. We can see this in our media, online and offline. The wealthy are celebrated. One of the notable changes in our generation has been the glorification of stupendous wealth, where people spend outrageous sums of money on themselves without any shame attaching. Instead, a strange kind of virtue is afforded them. Maybe this is rooted in the old trope that if you are wealthy you deserve it, but we all know the truth is more complicated than that.

 

There is something else very modern about St James’ story, and that’s the hint of perfection that goes with being wealthy. The best of everything can be afforded, to create the outward impression of an impeccable life lived with fashionable, expensive possessions. The outcome of this is that many people feel the need to curate their life online to make them look as wonderful as possible, as if this is the way to get acceptance and acclaim. It has become an approved goal in life.

 

By contrast, people tend to see poverty as ugly. Poverty doesn’t sell magazines or get social media likes; people avoid programmes and articles about it. It is, quite simply, not talked about. The implications of this are huge. Of all the issues people said they cared about during the UK’s 2024 general election campaign, poverty hardly figured, even though reports show that four million children go to school hungry every day.

 

In reality, we have all made lots of unkind distinctions in life. Ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age each figure in our world, but here St James is telling us that distinctions of any kind are not God’s will. The Church should not be like this. When we approach the throne of grace, no-one takes precedence, there is no VIP lane. We walk in step together. There is only radical equality with God.

 

So what do we do with that reading from Mark 7 where a Gentile woman asks Jesus to heal her daughter and the response she gets is:

 

It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.

 

There is no easy answer to this, but there are things that need to be said. The first is that every generation judges previous eras and finds fault in how they spoke about others. We are at a distance of two thousand years from this story. We don’t know the context: what it looked and felt like; the way these words are said and what lay behind them. Jesus talked about throwing food to the ‘dogs’ and the word ‘dog’ was a normal, accepted way for Jewish people to speak about Gentiles. It may have got him cancelled in 2025, but he inhabited a different world, a place that made hard distinctions between Jews and Gentiles.

 

And yet, Jesus was also the man who spoke with the Samaritan woman at the well and healed the Roman centurion’s servant, praising his faith; who asked his friends to go and make disciples of all nations. Whose first disciples tore down the barriers between slave and free, male and female, Jew and Greek. There is no doubt what Jesus intended, as his healing of the Gentile woman’s daughter showed.

 

The Canadian author, Douglas Coupland once said his greatest fear in life is that God exists but that he’s actually nasty. We are so familiar with the Bible telling us about God’s goodness and of his concern for the impoverished, defenceless and marginalised that we can forget how powerfully different this is to the loud voices we hear today. Voices that idolise wealth and discriminate against poorer people. God is a fan of the poor, and when he walks into a room is the kind of God who first seeks out those who have mentally been written off by others.

And I think he asks that of us, too.