Jesus of the Minjung (민중)

By Isaiah Hobus

I

have always had a Bible. I have loved the Bible. I have hated the Bible. I have been numbingly perplexed by the Bible. It is the most complex book I have read. It is the most volatile book I have read. I have found no other book with more presuppositions attached to it before even opening it. I have gone through stages of reading it everyday—even multiple times a day by practicing the daily office of prayer. I have also gone through stages of having absolutely no desire to open it.

I hate how the Bible is used to justify violent systems like war, the death drive of capitalism/consumerism, and the valuing of particular human beings over others. I especially see this now in America’s current political establishment. Simultaneously, I love how the Bible is used as a means of fruitfulness, justice, joy, and flourishing for peoples across the globe and throughout history. As a Christian, I believe the Bible is one of the centerpieces of Christianity; yet, I wrestle to see the Bible as worthwhile. I see beauty and horror. I especially find the latter in our time where the loudest interpreters of the Bible—the politically powerful—are the ones producing the most violent interpretations. Nonetheless, I am still drawn to the Bible because of the beauty I continually encounter illuminating from this ancient text. For me, this beauty illuminated most profoundly when I gave space for my Korean American identity to fully interplay with the text.

I was raised in the mainstream of American Evangelicalism and the American Charismatic movement during some of its most influential years in the early 2000s. Since then, my Christianity, along with many people in my generation, has gone through evolutions, reckonings, and deconstructions. I found a shallow emotionalism masked as Christianity where emotional highs and curated emotional experiences were the foundation of Christianity. I found the shallowness of a hunger for political power that was masked as Christianity.

Through a long journey, I eventually came to the ground level of my Christianity: the social solidarity of the incarnate Jesus. We see God most clearly in Jesus among suffering and at the margins of the globe. The Gospels witness to Jesus’ existence corresponding with the masses of human history—what Koreans call the minjung (민중)—rather than the privileged sectors of human society.

I realized I held a constraining lens to the Bible that only allowed me to see who Jesus is as a substitute for sins, an absolver of guilt, and as a powerful king resembling the violent kings of the world. Jesus was reduced to an ideological signifier, a tool by which invoking Jesus’ name was weaponized for inclusion and exclusion. Biblical studies helped me understand that this Jesus was a particular cultural interpretation of the Bible, intentionally minimizing who God is in the Incarnate Jesus.

One of the primary insights biblical studies offered me was to see the act of reading the Bible as three metaphorical worlds.

1. The world behind the text: the historical world of the Bible which includes the social and historical world of the writers and narrative.

2. The world of the text: the words of the Bible which includes the translations between languages, grammar, syntax, semantics, and intertextuality. 

3. The world in front of the text: the social world, and thus concrete humanity, of the reader of the Bible.

Out of these worlds, a reader interprets the text. This third world led to a realization: All Biblical interpretation is cultural, and I was reading the Bible through a cultural lens, most often the cultural lens of affluent White male pastors. The Jesus I knew corresponded directly to the particular social world and community of the politically powerful mainstream of Evangelicalism, White affluence, and worldly American political status. This cultural interpretation neglected Jesus’ concrete humanity as a poor brown skinned working class migrant. I began to understand that the world in front of the Bible is so powerful that it can even shape what one sees in their research with the world behind and the world of the Bible. The world in front of the Bible even shapes the sources we chose to create our very interpretation.

Whether we admit it or not, it is impossible to cut off the dance that takes place between the world in front of the Bible and the world of the Bible, thus shaping interpretation. I realized I was unknowingly trained to constrain multicultural interpretations of the Bible. I realized the only way I saw the Bible was through the cultural lens of White American Evangelicalism. I truly began to understand this in my heart when I learned how Korean women saw Jesus.

At the heart of Korean women's experience is patriarchy. Based in Confucian values, Korean women are subjugated first to their father, then their husband, and eventually their son. Korean women are culturally scripted as baby makers and fodders of economic growth. Springing from this experience, Ahn Sang-Nim identifies Jesus as a mother in The Jesus of Asian Women. She does this from the feminine images of God in the Old Testament and Jesus’ own words: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (Matt. 23:37, NRSV). Ahn states, “God is like a mother! I came to understand why God came to earth, to human beings, telling them how much God loves them. Jesus offers us the image of a mother who longs to embrace her children, one who calls the wayward Jerusalem to come under her wings…Christ is the Creator God, our Redeemer and Liberator, and the Comforter who defends and takes care of us.” Also in The Jesus of Asian Women, when Chang Jung-Nim sees Jesus' crucifixion, she sees the faces of the 200,000 Korean comfort women horrifically and violently abused by the Japanese Imperial army. She cries out: “[Comfort women] are the pain-filled crucifix of earth…the crucifix of Korea…the flowers of Korea’s tears.”  She sees Jesus crying out with the comfort women of Korea: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). Jesus contrasts the patriarchal scripts of Korean society through social solidarity with these women. Through Jesus’ concrete life, Divine Love embraces these women as beloved and interwoven with immeasurable worth. It is this Jesus—a mothering Jesus crucified with the comfort women of Korea—that brings wholeness.

These women, my collective ancestors, taught me to cling to Jesus' incarnate humanity where the Triune God exists in social solidarity with the suffering of the minjung (민중) of human history. My collective ancestors guided me to see that this is the essence of who God is, revealed in the Jesus of the Gospels.

Reading through the lens of my Korean American identity, the Gospels illuminated as they never had before. I saw Jesus who socially existed as the minjung (민중). According to the Gospels, Jesus is a Galilean peasant. He is a child of poverty whose birth was performed in a feeding trough at the margins of the Roman empire (Luke 2). Jesus is a migrant between the lines of nation-states. Jesus’ parents crossed borders to get to Egypt to escape a child genocide (Matt. 2:13–23). Jesus was mocked for his social standing as a son of a poor carpenter, and he experienced the grueling life of the working class (Mark 6:3). Jesus’ hometown was a place where nothing good came from (John 1:46). Jesus himself throughout his ministry does not even have a home; he is a homeless pilgrim (Matt. 8:20).

In Luke, these are Jesus’ first public words: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18–19). This first proclamation of good news to the poor was the path of Jesus’ social existence and ministry. Jesus spends the majority of his time with people who were easy to pass over—the weeping, the sick, the poor, the broken, the invisible, the marginal, and those outside the religious establishment. The minjung (민중) flocked to him; feeling safe with him. This gained Jesus a reputation of being a drunkard, a glutton, and a friend of tax collectors and sinners (Matt. 11:8–19). The Gospels only record a few instances that Jesus is with the powerful figures of the religious political establishment of the Roman occupied land. When he is with those with status, such as the Pharisees, the lawyers, and Herod (Luke 11:37–54; 13:31–33), he is often critical. It was this radical life that led to Jesus’ excommunication from his own religion (John 9:22). This radical life led the religious leaders to hand Jesus over to the violence of the political establishment of the Romans as a political prisoner. Jesus was tortured, hung on a tree, and mockingly hailed as “the king of the Jews” (Matt. 27:28–31). Jesus died the death of an innocent victim of state violence, screaming out in abandonment (Mark 15:34).

Jesus’ life reflects the minjung (민중) of human history, life born in and concluding in unjust suffering. Incarnate Jesus resembles the deepest suffering of the immigrant experience within the diaspora of Asian Americans and beyond. In our time, the ideology of Trumpism constructed on a theology of Christian Nationalism uses the Bible as a tool of power to propagate systemic and generational violence. This distorted theology is constructed on a foundation that completely abstracts who Jesus is and his social solidarity with the minjung (민중) of the globe.

The Jesus of the Gospels who resembles nothing of the affluence and privilege that removes one from the sorrows of the world draws me back to the Bible again and again. I have discovered seeing Jesus as the minjung (민중), as I learned from my ancestors, gives me deep love for the Bible and offers glimpses of light in the pain of our time.\

Photo by Alex Noriega on Unsplash

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Isaiah Hobus is a 2nd generation Korean American and the son of a Korean adoptee. Isaiah completed his Masters of Divinity at Northern Seminary. Isaiah works as a Hospital Chaplain Duke University Hospital and is in process of becoming a Board Certified Chaplain. He and his wife reside in Durham, North Carolina and attend Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship. In his spare time, he enjoys running, writing, sticking his nose in a book, and guzzling black coffee.

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