Jesus is Charlie ... ?

I keep finding when I see the signs on television news, that some of them I catch myself reading as "Jesus is Charlie" and then having to correct myself. I guess years of interacting with texts where the letters "Jesu" are either a version of the name or actually are the majority of the name Jesus has conditioned my text processing.


So then I have found myself asking whether there is a sense in which we might assert "Jesus is Charlie"?


Now I think that one of the difficulties with the assertion can be inferred from the cautionary article here: I Am Not Charlie Hebdo - NYTimes.com: which suggests,

Most of us don’t actually engage in the sort of deliberately offensive humor that that newspaper specializes in.

And so many of us would find on the basis of that kind of characterisation that it feels difficult to associate Jesus with it. And certainly as a Christian I tend to find that, trying to work out what it is to love my neighbour, I am most often working out how not to offend because my biggest challenge in many cases is to dial down my tendency to be relatively inconsiderate of others' feelings.

But then I'm challenged by some of what the gospels show of how Jesus spoke of and spoke to some people. "Whitewashed tombs" and "hypocrites" were almost certainly offensive. At one point Jesus is told "When you say that, you insult us also" and he responds by rubbing it in for his interlocutors. So it is possible that in some ways "Jesus is Charlie" in terms of offence.

However, I think it is important to notice what seems to me an important distinction. The cartoons in Charlie Hebdo often/sometimes take a pot-shot at communities who are in a minority and are relatively powerless and marginalised. Like Muslims in France. And these same cartoons reinforce negative stereotypes in a way that we/I would find difficult (and Joe Sacco's cartoon about this is instructive) to bear were they to be about black people or Jewish people today.

On the other hand, what I think I see Jesus doing is speaking against the powerful and the wealthy and against those who, in a sense, should know better in spiritual terms and who have and inherit a history, in effect, of using their privilege hypocritically to make the lives of many people harder and to keep them from connecting with the God who cares and critiques such use of privilege. This amounts to a kind of bullying and in more corporate terms that becomes systemic violence or institutionalised prejudice and oppression. Unfortunately, if Joe Socco, is right, there were times when the satire of Charlie Hebdo bolstered the prejudices and justifications of the powerful at the expense of the marginalised. In this sense, then, Jesus is not Charlie.

I guess we should remember, though, that the point of 'Je suis Charlie' is to assert a solidarity in freedom of speech and an implied condemnation of those who take their insulted-ness to a murderous extreme. So some of this could be taken to assert that Jesus should have been free to insult as part of his teaching. However, it seems to me that the rule of love implies not adding to the burden of those who struggle with powerlessness and oppression but that it does sometimes call for pricking the bubble of those who profit (often literally) by oppression. And I guess that is where I, and probably you, differ from Jesus: our ability to give right offence is compromised by lack of self awareness, unconscious privilege-bearing, bolstering self-image through group identity ... we are likely to let such things derail our other-care into other-disrespect and stereotyping.

But I suppose that we have to deal with the question of whether insulting a group of oppressive and powerful people is loving towards them. This question amounts to asking whether Jesus was truly loving when he did such things: is it possible that we can give what I called above "right offence". It sits ill with my cultural mores: insulting someone is not 'nice'. On the other hand, letting someone get away unchallenged with making life worse for others is also not nice. In a situation where two neighbours (both of whom we are to love) are before us and we find that one of them is making life miserable for the other, we may have to say or do something which is not 'nice', we may have to commit a social faux pas in order to begin to help them to change. And, we should note, that if "your brother repents" you have loved them well. There can be no doubt that the God who loves both is delighted by one sinner who repents, both because the oppressed neighbour begins to be released from their bondage and because the oppressing neighbour becomes a better, more humane person.

In such circumstances, telling the truth in love may be insulting by the standards of prevailing social mores. However, we should note that different cultures evaluate such mores differently: Dutch, French or Israeli honesty can be excruciating in English or Indian contexts. Then too, even taking that into account, there may be times when pricking the bubble is the only way to get round the defences, justifications and ideological ramparts the oppressor has in place. So I can accept that insulting privileged people with a view to nudging or even hurrying them towards repentance is potentially a loving thing to do. (I also accept how easy it would be to let that be an excuse for downright disrespectful rudeness).

So where Charlie Hebdo attempts to prick the bubble of privilege, the Jesus is Charlie, as well as not being Charlie where Charlie gives succour to bullying by the privileged. Given my propensity to mistake my own self-justification for rightness as well as sometimes to get it right, probably moi, je suis Charlie: for good and ill.

There is one other layer that I think we should consider before leaving the topic: Jesus's bubble-popping got him killed. So there is a sense in which Jesus shares something with those assassinated last week. These deaths, whatever else we might say about them (and I lament them and feel for those bereaved by them), might be read alongside the political dynamics that got Christ killed. Interestingly, in both cases, there were religious as well as political justifications involved. Jesus was killed, in part, by religion-as-ideology. I'm not by that saying that the thinking of these men is representative of Islam any more than I would say that the Spanish inquisition represents Christianity properly: in neither case do they speak or act for the spiritual paths as a whole: they in fact fail to exemplify them at anything like their best.

PS
I've not checked this out but I've been assuming that the name of the magazine is  composed of a reference to Charlie Chaplin and an abbreviation of Hebdomedaire meaning 'weekly'.