Day 2: Choose Life
In choosing life for my Others, am I willing to heed Jesus’ call that I may risk losing my own?
Jeannine Hill Fletcher is Professor of Theology at Fordham University, Bronx, NY. Her upcoming book The Sin of White Supremacy: Christianity, Racism and Religious Diversity will be published by Orbis (fall 2017).
In choosing life for my Others, am I willing to heed Jesus’ call that I may risk losing my own?
In today’s first reading, the people are suffering from an affliction by serpents (which they seemed to have brought on themselves) and they look to Moses for a cure. Following the directions God gives, Moses makes a bronze serpent and mounts it on a pole and “whenever anyone who had been bitten by a serpent looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.” God hears the cries of the people, providing them with a visual source of their salvation.
White America’s interpretation of today’s reading has rendered it a text of terror with destruction in its wake. The idea “that you may live, and may enter in and take possession of the land which the LORD, the God of your fathers, is giving you” (Deut. 4:1), provided scriptural warrant for Christians to claim the land that would become the United States. This presumably God-given blessing provided powerful symbolic justification for conquest, echoing throughout Christian reasoning to dispossess First Nations peoples and build America as a white Christian nation.
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