ECCLESIASTICAL TITBITS IV

ECCLESIASTICAL TITBITS IV



‘John’, he said to me, ‘you can’t expect a black man to have the same intelligence as a white man.’ We discussed the point, but he wouldn’t budge.

‘Jack”, I said, ‘I’ll lend you a little book’. I did. It was part of a larger volume put out by UNESCO; this portion was on Psychology and Race.

Jack read it, returning it a week later. ‘I’ll never say that again,’ he averred.

A week went by. ‘John’, he said, ‘you can’t expect a black man to have the same intelligence as a white man.’

He was a Londoner, but he could have been from anywhere. His views were common everywhere in the western world in the 1950s and showed the difficulty of changing ingrained attitudes and prejudices. We need to be clear, though on this. No race, or better, ethnic group, has a monopoly on intelligence. The range is the same for all peoples. [The technical details of this are not relevant to this piece.]

What matters is that all peoples are equal in ability, intelligence and potential. More importantly, all are equally valuable in God’s sight; all are his creation and all are one.

A long time ago a man wrote a little novel to show something of this. We know it as the book of Jonah. It is full of literary devices to gain attention and hold our interest. It’s a lovely story which can be called a fantasy – I like to think of it as the earliest science fiction fantasy. Unfortunately many folk, especially those with a literal biblical view, get hooked on the literary devices and seek to prove that, for instance, a man can be swallowed by a whale – oops, a large fish. Forget that nonsense and consider the meaning of the tale. It’s quite simple – all people, not just the Jews are God’s, even the Ninevites. This infuriates Jonah, our hero. Read the tale. Forget the prayer from the fish’s belly, it doesn’t belong. Someone who missed the point put it in later. Compare the story with the book of Ruth.

Just as the Ninevites mattered to God and were his, so too are all people, even those we don’t like and would rather see on the other side of the moon.

As God included all, so should we - not just our own sort, but those ethnically different, different in colour, belief or sexual orientation, or even economically. We are all God’s people and should accept one another and live in unity, not disunity. The Psalmist had it, ‘How good and pleasant a thing it is when God’s people live together in unity.’ Psalm 133¹ (ANZPB)

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