Jesus Is Racist and Evangelicalism's Culpability in that Blasphemy

 You may have heard the claim the apostate gay pastor, Brandan Robertson, has made concerning God incarnate. According to Robertson, Jesus was racist and the Bible shows us a scene where He, the everlasting Father, Mighty God, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Prince of Peace, repents of His racism. 

Why is Jesus racist? Because in Matthew 15:21-28, Jesus excludes a Canaanite from being considered a part of His in-group due to her not being Jewish. He, therefore, is not going to give her the exclusive physical benefits of the kingdom of God that belong only to true Israel.

Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.” Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said. He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” “Yes, Lord,” she said. “But even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.

Notice that Jesus first ignores her even though He hears her. Then He tells her that He was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel, implying that everyone outside of that group will not be given the physical blessings of the kingdom that Jesus has been bestowing on other members of the kingdom, and finally explains to her that "it is not right/good to take the children's bread and cast it to dogs." He picks up a similar instruction here that He gave to His disciples in the Sermon on the Mount: "Do not give what is holy to dogs or cast your pearls before pigs . . ." (7:6). 

You see, Jesus is not inclusive in the way that the modern evangelical is. He holds back the physical blessings/resources of the kingdom from Gentiles/pagans. 

Evangelicals think that this is unloving and horrible but they make excuses for Jesus because He's the eternal Son of God so they figure He has good reasons but they themselves would never emulate Him in this practice because for everyone else it's unloving. 

What our apostate pastor here has done is simply remove the evangelical exemption for Jesus to be unloving and actually labels him as unloving, and that is what he means by racist. Racism here is exclusion based on the woman's race. Jesus is exclusive based on whether one is identified as Israel. He says it Himself. He is only coming to give compassion to the lost sheep of the house of Israel and therefore shows none toward her.

But this is where evangelicals and our gay pastor friend have got it wrong.

Where our gay pastor friend has it wrong is that Jesus is exclusively offering compassionate blessings that belong to the kingdom of God to true Israel and true Israel, according to the Gospel of Matthew, is any Jew or Gentile who believes. Gentiles/pagans, in Matthew's theology, are anyone, Jew or Gentile, who do not believe. That is what this passage is actually attempting to communicate, and that is the lesson Christ is teaching here. So the exclusion is based, not on ethnicity but faith. Her ethnicity is assumed to exclude her because her faith in foreign gods is assumed (at least by the disciples and the reader) by her ethnicity. She isn't a Jew. She becomes a Jew, true Israel, by her exercising faith in the Messiah who is the true Israel. Having now exercised that faith, Christ no longer calls her a dog but "Woman" a term of respect which He uses even for His own mother. He then tells her that all that she has asked has been done for her because her faith is great, showing that the exclusion from kingdom blessings/resources was ultimately due to religion, not race. 

Where evangelicals get it wrong, and where our apostate friend would still have a problem, is that they believe that Jesus has compassion on everyone and gives to them the gifts of love to take care of their physical problems as He runs into them because that is what a loving person does and Jesus is a loving person. In other words, evangelicals have taught everyone, largely due to their simulation into the Enlightenment's inclusivistic, religious Borg, is that love is inclusive. So they really don't know what to do with this passage, and in fact, have set up our young apostate friend with the very interpretive framework of inclusivist assumptions he needs to now judge and blaspheme Jesus as a sinner.

Jesus exclusively meets the physical needs of the covenant community, the lost sheep of the house of Israel, those who are assumed to be a part of that community or those who by faith show that they have joined it. That's why, until this woman exercises faith, she is ignored by Him, told that His works are not for her, and calls her a "dog," i.e., a pagan that is excluded from the kingdom and its blessings. These blessings include physical needs because the kingdom is ultimately not just spiritual but physical, and what Jesus gives physically is a piece of the eternal kingdom in the new heavens and earth. That's what these physical provisions given by Jesus represent.

In Matthew 13:58, we are told that "He did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith." In Mark 6:5-6, we are told why. He could not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith. He only ends up doing a few things for a few people who we assume believed. Likewise, Jesus often lets people know that these things are being done in "accordance with your faith," not apart from it. Being a member of the covenant community must be assumed (i.e., that one has faith does not always need to be explicitly stated but there must be something about the person where it can be assumed) or explicitly stated in order to receive the blessings of the kingdom, physical or otherwise. This is what evangelicalism gets wrong and sets anyone up to read these passages as sins on Jesus' part since it is a sin to be unloving, and by unloving, they mean it is a sin to be exclusive with our physical resources. Evangelicalism has indoctrinated us to believe that if we have the ability to help someone in need, we should help them no matter who they are. But that's not what Jesus does or commands, and so when they run into passages like this they need to make up some excuses for Him. Our apostate pastor just isn't doing that because although raised in an atmosphere of evangelical assumptions, he is no longer an evangelical and can stop making the excuses while still holding on to the assumptions.

In this way, evangelicals can rant and rave all they want over his statements but the truth of the matter is that they put the ideas in his head that led him there. In that regard, their failure to understand and teach Christ's love as exclusive to Christ's kingdom people has condemned even Christ Himself for not living up to their man-made religious ideals of what love looks like. 

But Jesus gets to define love, not the Enlightenment cult of inclusivism that makes the reception of Jesus as Lord secondary to acts of true love. Jesus isn't the key of God's love in Evangellyfishism. So when Jesus says that it is "not good" to give the physical help and compassion that belongs to God's people to a people who are not God's people, that's love. Love is exclusive. It is exclusive to God and it is exclusively through God's Son. Matthew 11:25-27 states:

At that time Jesus said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent, and have revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son decides to reveal him. 

The Father, His love, His blessings, all that He is, is exclusively revealed by the Son, not to everyone but only to those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him, and He is not revealed to some, as stated here explicitly. For some reason, evangelicals can't make the connection between that exclusivity and the exclusivity of physical blessings of the kingdom. Until they do, evangelicalism will always carry with it the potential to blaspheme, distort, ignore, or replace the true Jesus Christ, who loves and commands His people to exclusively love, by teaching that all men are due the love of God and His people.