The
City, Slavery, and African-Canadians
Genesis
4:8-17
Philemon
Victor
Shepherd
11 August 2010
I:
-- “The biblical
story begins in a garden and culminates in a city,” the pamphlet
advertising Knox Summer Fellowship tells us.
The pamphlet is correct. Human
existence begins in a garden, ‘
Eden
,’ Hebrew for ‘delight.’ The
‘garden of delight’ informs us, symbolically, that everything we
humans need to thrive is given us by the God whose goodness and
generosity are boundless.
Then how did we get from the garden to the
city? God, we know, created
Eden
, garden of delight. But
where did the city come from? Cain
built the first city, and after Cain cities proliferated.
Why did Cain build a city?
Cain has slain his brother. He
thinks a city will function like a fort; that is, protect him –
protect him from the God who is now pursuing him.
In the wake of Cain’s violation of his brother God asks him,
“Where is your brother?”
“How am I supposed to know?” Cain replies; “Is he my
responsibility?” Whereupon
God puts a second question to Cain: “What have you done?”
Now Cain is squirming as God interrogates
him. Cain doesn’t enjoy
being pressured. He wants to
insulate himself against such pressure.
And so he builds a city. Why
a city? Cain has been
condemned by God to being a fugitive and a vagabond.
But Cain can’t endure being a vagabond without a home and a
fugitive anxiously looking over his shoulder.
What’s more, murderous Cain has introduced insecurity into
humankind, a taste for blood, and the pursuit of vengeance.
Muderous Cain can’t endure the anxiety of living amidst
insecurity and vindictiveness. He
thinks a city will provide him the preoccupation he needs to keep
God’s questions out of his ears and God himself out of his face.
He thinks a city’s population and a city’s distractions will
let him forget what he is, what he has done, and what he has brought to
others. He thinks he can
quiet himself and protect himself by building a city.
He thinks a city will provide the tranquillity of a home and the
security of a fort. (The
problem, of course, is that everyone else in the city is also a murderer
looking for tranquillity and security.)
Cain wasn’t the first to disobey God.
His parents were. Adam and Eve had disobeyed God at the epicentre
of their existence. They had
made a U-turn that had left them oriented away from God, dis-oriented in
every sense of the word. In
the wake of their shocking disobedience God expelled them from the
garden by God’s own judicial act, and then God had put to them the
first question scripture records: “Where are you?”
They didn’t answer. They
couldn’t. They didn’t
know where they were; they merely knew where they weren’t:
they weren’t at home amidst delight.
After God had expelled Cain’s parents
from the garden God placed an angel with a flaming sword that turned
every which way at the east end of the garden, the end from which they
had been expelled, the end through which they would attempt to re-enter.
The flaming sword ensured that humankind could never regain
Eden
. No human effort at undoing
the Fall; no human effort at righting itself before God will ever
succeed. No utopia will ever
achieve what it promises. The
angel with the flaming sword ensures that all attempts at utopias issue
in dystopias. The 20th
Century saw two attempts at utopias, one from the political right
(Nazism) and one from the political left (communism.)
Both proved murderous dystopias.
At this point the Bible unfolds the
Genesis-to-Revelation story of the city.
There are scores of cities mentioned in Scripture.
All of them have one thing in common: they are monuments to
humankind’s defiance of God, and they are barricades behind which we
think we can hide from God. “We
don’t need you,” we cry to
God, “because we have our magnificent city, and it both comforts us
and secures us. What’s
more, we have no time for you
because our city fills the horizon of our lives, waking and sleeping.”
Think of
Babel
. (Genesis 11) “Let us
make a name for ourselves. Let
us build ourselves a city, a tower with its top in the heavens.”
We aren’t happy with the name God has given us.
In Scripture ‘name’ means ‘nature’ or ‘essence.’
We aren’t happy with the nature God has given us.
Our nature: God’s faithful, obedient covenant-partners?
We don’t want that: we want to create our own nature, fashion
our own essence. We want to
be self-made people from start to finish.
If we fashion ourselves and programme ourselves then we won’t
be accountable to anyone or indebted to anyone.
Another city is built, and others after
that.
Babylon
looms.
Babylon
is a terrible city. It
carries off God’s people into exile and torments them.
Babylon
, of course, is that wicked city which shouldn’t have surprised
God’s people since they already knew, regrettably, what cities are
about.
But
Babylon
doesn’t last forever. Eventually
there’s a return to
Jerusalem
, ‘Hier Shalem,’ city of shalom, city of salvation.
Jerusalem
is surely the God-given antidote to toxic
Babylon
and all cities like it.
Hier Shalem, city of salvation?
Jerusalem
is the city that slays God’s
prophets and crucifies God’s
messiah. It isn’t the
antidote to anything.
For this reason
Jerusalem
must give way to the New Jerusalem.
The New Jerusalem is new not in the quantitative sense of ‘most
recent,’ the chronologically most recent version of ‘same old, same
old.’ The New Jerusalem is
new in the qualitative sense of ‘entirely different.’
The New Jerusalem is unlike any previous city in that it is the
first city whose sole builder is God.
It is the only city God’s Messiah adorns.
This city, be it noted, includes a garden.
The New Jerusalem recovers and restores the old, old garden,
Revelation 22 tells us. Only
now the garden’s tree of life is the occasion not of humankind’s
incomprehensible sin but of the healing of the nations.
There’s only one problem concerning the New Jerusalem: no one
has seen it. It’s been
promised, but the promise hasn’t been fulfilled.
The promised city isn’t here.
Or is it?
The city of
God
is the
kingdom
of
God
. Jesus insists that
wherever he, the king, is present, the kingdom is operative.
(After all, everyone knows there can’t be a king without a
kingdom or a kingdom without a king.)
Jesus Christ the King, risen triumphant over sin, evil and death,
now ruling and ceaselessly pouring forth the Spirit; Christ the King is
in our midst. Therefore his
kingdom is present and operative.
Then why is Christ’s kingdom still
disputed? It’s disputed
because the world lacks the spiritual qualification to see it.
The kingdom can be seen only by those who are kingdom-sighted,
just as colour can be perceived only by those who are colour-sighted.
Colour-blind people don’t see colour and aren’t expected to.
But let us be sure of one thing: those whom the king has rendered
kingdom-sighted; they most certainly recognize the presence of the
kingdom and rejoice in it.
Actually, the kingdom-sighted
see both the
kingdom
of
God
and what the apostle Paul calls “this present evil age.”
They see both, and see both simultaneously.
(In other words they aren’t naïve.)
But even as they see both simultaneously, they don’t see both
with equal vividness and clarity. Their
perception of the kingdom predominates.
When I hold a book in front of me in reading range and look at it
I see the printed page clearly, in focus, and everything else on the
periphery less clearly, less focused, less vivid.
Or I can hold a book in front of me and look not at it but rather
what’s behind it or beside it. Now
everything else is clear, focused, vivid, while the book (I can see it
and therefore know it’s there) I can’t read because it’s
unfocused.
Tell me: which is more focused, clear,
vivid for you: the
kingdom
of
God
or this present evil age? Both
are here (for now); both are occurring simultaneously.
But both can’t be our primary
focus simultaneously.
On the day that God has appointed, the city
of
God
, whose only builder is God, will shine forth beyond dispute.
Until that day the city of
God
, the
kingdom
of
God
, remains superimposed on this present evil age.
Only the kingdom-sighted can see the present kingdom; but they do
see it, and see it as the city
of God, which city of God they know will one day stand forth alone,
unobscured, no longer disputed because indisputable.
What are Christians to do in the meantime?
Our task is never to build the kingdom, build the city of
God
. (Remember, anything we
build we pervert.) Our
task is to discern the kingdom; discern it, exalt it, point to it, and
point others to it.
In the meantime Christians live in the
overlap of kingdom and present evil age; we live in the superimposition
of the city of
God
upon the cities of humankind. We
aren’t naïve; we recognize the startling contradiction between the
city whose builder is Cain and the city whose builder is God.
Yet we aren’t paralyzed by the contradiction.
We know what we are to discern and to do.
II: -- Cain violated his brother Abel.
We humans violate each other – violate each other lethally –
in many different ways. One
such violation, deadly to be sure, is slavery.
We violate our sisters and brothers who are made like us in the
image and likeness of God. Every
time someone is enslaved, anywhere in the world, Cain slays Abel afresh.
Slavery is a blatant contradiction of the city of
God
, a blatant contradiction of the kingdom.
Slavery is rampant in the world today.
At the end of 2009 there were approximately 29.2 million humans
enslaved throughout the world. The
average value of a slave (right now) is $340 (
U.S.
); the lowest market value is for debt-bondage slaves ($40-$50), while
the highest market value is for sex slaves ($1895.)
In
India
there are currently 40 million ‘bonded labour’ slaves, people of the
‘untouchable class’ in the caste system who labour to pay off debts
incurred generations ago.
Nigeria
boasts 800,000 slaves (or 8% of the nation’s population.)
As of 2002 there were 109,000 child-slaves working as forced
labourers on cocoa farms in the
Cote d’Ivoire
. Millions of people toiled
as slaves in the former Soviet Gulag system of penal labour.
Slave-trafficking remains big business, with approximately
800,000 people trafficked every year across national borders.
III:
-- Slavery is as old
as humankind. Slavery
thrived everywhere throughout the
Roman Empire
. When the apostle Paul
penned his letter to slave-holder Philemon, there were 60 million slaves
throughout the empire. We mustn’t deceive ourselves.
‘Slave’ was not then and is not now and another word for
‘employee.’ A slave was
deemed subhuman. Aristotle
spoke of slaves as animated tools.
In the Roman era slaves had no rights before the law; slaves had
no means of appeal against their masters.
The Latin expression concerning slaves was non
habens personam; that is, ‘not having a face.’
Paul wrote to Philemon in the year 62 (approximately.)
Tacitus, a first century Roman historian and senator, relates the
story of the murder of Pedanius Secundus in 61.
Pedanius Secundus happened to be murdered by one his own slaves.
Whenever a slave slew a householder the custom was that all
the slaves of that household were to be put to death – an obvious
attempt at telling slaves that if any one of them misbehaved then all of
them would be executed. All
the slaves of Pedanius Secundus’ household were executed; that is, all
400 of them, including women and children.
Slavery is
iniquitous. Slavery of any
sort means that a human being is regarded as and deployed as – as an
animal? On the contrary
animals customarily receive much better treatment than slaves.
Slavery means that a human being is regarded as less than an
animal, is regarded as a tool, stick, a stone, an implement, an object
than can be replaced by any similar object as surely as any one hammer
or screwdriver can be replaced by any other hammer or screwdriver.
The apostle Paul knew slavery to be
iniquitous. Then why
didn’t he rail against it? The
reason is simple: he knew that railing would be pointless and would do
nothing to assist the people who needed help most, the slaves
themselves. Railing would
only strengthen the resolve of slave-owners to maintain the social
arrangement that looked upon slavery as economically necessary and
socially desirable; a social arrangement, in other words, that was
impregnable.
Paul chose another approach.
Instead of attacking the institution of slavery frontally he
attacked it tangentially; he sought to undermine it covertly; he sought
to erode it, erode it little by little.
Having declared unambiguously to the Christians in Galatia,
“All are one in Christ Jesus, and therefore in Christ, before Christ,
there is neither slave nor free,” he was confident that the gospel of
the new creation in Christ wherein social class-divisions are
transcended; this new creation would emerge in the midst of a people in
whom the gospel worked as surely as yeast leavens the dough in which it
lurks.
Paul’s letter to Philemon embodies the
logic of his tangential assault on slavery; the letter also embodies the
mood of Paul’s approach (namely the appeal of love rather than loud
denunciation); and the letter embodies Paul’s confidence that the
gospel which transforms the heart is effectual and therefore
accomplishes what it declares.
While Paul customarily wrote to
congregations, in
Rome
or
Philippi
or Thessalonica, for instance, his letter to Philemon is written to an
individual, one man. (The
letter to Philemon is the only letter we have that Paul wrote to an
individual.)
Paul’s letter didn’t end the
institution of slavery overnight. At
the same time there’s widespread agreement that what this letter
embodied, working quietly like yeast for years, caused the ferment that
helped much of the world renounce and denounce slavery.
And
now to the story the letter reflects.
Onesimus was a runaway slave.
He fled to
Rome
where he lost himself in the crowded city.
While in
Rome
he met Paul. Through
Paul’s ministry Onesimus came to throbbing faith in Jesus Christ.
Paul loved Onesimus. He
spoke of Onesimus as “my child,” meaning, “someone dear to me whom
I fathered into faith.” So
dear was Onesimus to Paul that when Paul sent him back to Philemon he
wrote, “I am sending Onesimus back to you; I am sending back my
very heart.”
Since it was such a wrench for Paul to send Onesimus back, why
didn’t he keep Onesimus with him in
Rome
? Because he wanted to
preserve Onesimus’ life. Paul
knew that while Onesimus had managed to keep secret so far his status as
runaway slave, the secret couldn’t be kept forever.
Onesimus was from Colosse. People
from Colosse visited
Rome
all the time. In no time a
visitor from Colosse would come upon Onesimus, recognize him, and turn
him in. Once discovered,
Onesimus wouldn’t be sent back to Philemon; once discovered Onesimus
would be tortured by the Roman government and then executed.
As I’ve mentioned already, there were 60
million slaves throughout the
Roman Empire
at this time. In order to
discourage slaves from escaping, any runaway slave, once caught, was
executed. Anyone who helped
a slave to escape or harboured a runaway slave was also executed.
When a runaway slave was caught, a white-hot branding iron seared
the letter “F” in his forehead; “F” for Fugitivus,
“runaway.” The branding
itself was torture, and it was followed by greater torture: crucifixion.
Paul loved Onesimus and wanted him to keep him alive.
Little wonder he sent Onesimus back.
But back as what?
If Philemon received Onesimus and said nothing about the
slave’s having departed months earlier, Onesimus would be back alive,
all right, but back as a slave once again.
In other words, from the perspective of Roman officialdom,
Onesimus would be the slave he had always been.
But Paul wasn’t operating from the perspective of Roman
officialdom; Paul operated from the perspective of the gospel.
And according to the gospel – in Christ we are new creatures
who live in a new world where old distinctions and divisions mean
nothing – according to the gospel Paul was sending Onesimus back as a free man.
When Paul sent Onesimus back he asked Philemon to receive him as
a “beloved brother in the Lord.”
To make this latter point crystal clear, Paul added, “Receive
him as a beloved brother in the flesh.” To
receive anyone as a brother in the Lord ought to be enough to overcome
within the church all the social differences and distinctions that
riddle a society. Ought to be enough; but, sadly, a congregation can think itself
sincere in claiming to receive everyone as brother or sister in the Lord
while maintaining (perhaps unknowingly) the social standoffs that curse
a society. For this reason
Paul added, “Receive Onesimus as a
brother in the flesh.” In
other words, Onesimus the slave and Philemon the master were henceforth
to be looked upon, and to look upon themselves, as blood-brothers
without distinction. Not
only was Onesimus not Philemon’s spiritual inferior; henceforth
Onesimus was to be Philemon’s social equal.
Right here Paul undermined the institution of slavery.
To be sure, it would take decades before slavery was abolished in
the empire; still, it was undermined here.
Then Paul added something more.
“You and I are partners, Philemon; receive Onesimus as you
would receive me.” Philemon
was to receive Onesimus as he would receive Paul, his partner in the
gospel. Paul, we must
remember, was a Roman citizen. A
Roman citizen could never be made a slave.
Then while the Roman government would continue to look upon
Onesimus as a slave, Philemon was never to treat Onesimus as a slave.
The slave who was not only a brother in the Lord was also
virtually a brother in the flesh and also virtually a Roman citizen.
Philemon was never to look upon Onesimus as a slave again.
Paul knew himself to be an apostle and knew
himself recognized as an apostle. He
spoke with apostolic authority. Yet
when he writes to Philemon he sets his authority aside.
Gently he writes, “Although I am bold enough in Christ to
command you to do what is required, yet for love’s sake I prefer to
appeal to you.” As an
apostle he could tell Philemon, a Christian, what Christian truth
required Philemon to do. But
Paul feared that if he did this Philemon might obey him, to be sure, but
obey him grudgingly. And so
Paul writes, “For love’s sake, your
love’s sake….” Elsewhere
in the letter Paul says he knows Philemon well; he knows that Philemon
has a heart as big as a house, a heart that overflows with love for
God’s people. In the past,
Paul reminds Philemon, Philemon’s love has been an immense comfort and
joy to Paul himself. Appealing
now to Philemon’s love Paul pleads, “For love’s sake take Onesimus
back; and take him back not as a slave but more than a slave.
Take him back as beloved brother; but not merely as a brother in
the Lord but as a brother in the
flesh. Receive him as
you would receive me, a free man and a Roman citizen who can’t be
enslaved.”
Then towards the end of the letter Paul
adds “I write you, knowing that you will do even more than I say.”
What’s the “more?” The
“more” is that Philemon will go one step farther than taking back
Onesimus without punishing him; Philemon will take the ultimate step of
releasing Onesimus from slavery altogether.
In the
Roman Empire
a slave-owner could grant a slave his release at any time.
Paul has piled up reason upon reason, Christian ground upon
Christian ground not merely for humane treatment of a slave but for the
outright release of a slave. The
gospel requires that slaves be freed.
In one of the glorious paradoxes in which
the gospel abounds, Paul, a prisoner himself in
Rome
and awaiting trial, did more than the world will ever know to free
enslaved people everywhere.
IV:
-- Yet because Cain is always among us (because Cain is
always within us, slaves have
to be freed in every era, in every corner of the world.
Slaves had to be freed in
Canada
.
The first black slave to be transported
directly from Africa to
Canada
was Olivier Le Jeune, assigned a French name while crossing the
Atlantic
. The first, he was by no
means the last; slaves were regularly imported from the West Indies and
from New England; by 1759 there were 1132 slaves in New France.
When the British defeated the French in 1760, the British brought
even more slaves to
Canada
.
The American Revolutionary War found United
Empire Loyalists flocking to
Canada
and bringing black slaves with them.
In addition many slaves appeared in
Canada
who weren’t attached to Loyalists but who were simple fugitives,
hoping that the bondage they were fleeing in the
United States
they wouldn’t find in
Canada
. There appeared in
Canada
as well 3,500 free
black loyalists; they had been American-owned slaves and had been
granted their freedom by the British when they sided with the British
during the Revolutionary War. In
fact they had been promised the same privileges and rights as the white
Loyalists. These free black
loyalists settled in
New Brunswick
and
Nova Scotia
. They had been promised
land. Soon they realized
most of them would be granted no land at all.
The few who did get land were assigned land that was useless. All
they could do was deliver themselves into the hands of white people
eager to exploit them. At
the same time the black victims of broken promises were now segregated
in churches and schools or even excluded from churches and schools.
Fifty years after the American Revolutionary War the War of 1812
broke out. Thousands of
black American slaves fled to the British for protection.
Once again they were promised land and freedom in
Canada
. Formally known as “Black
Refugees,” the first of them arrived in
Halifax
in 1813. They were welcomed
enthusiastically as a large supply of cheap labour.
Immediately following the War of 1812, however, a severe economic
recession, along with a sudden influx of white immigrants from
Britain
, pushed the black people even farther down the social order and removed
the little economic opportunity they had had.
While
Britain
had abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833 (
France
in 1848) slavery continued to thrive in the
United States
. In 1850 the
USA
passed the Fugitive Slave Act, promising even harsher treatment for
runaway blacks and anyone who assisted them.
Not surprisingly, many more slaves fled to
Ontario
, whose black population now numbered 40,000.
In the same year (1850)
Ontario
reacted by passing the Common School Act.
This act permitted separate schools for blacks.
If no separate school existed, then black children could be made
to attend class at separate times from white children, or be made to sit
on segregated benches. We
must note that while black/white segregation was legal in
Ontario
only in the school system, de facto segregation
occurred everywhere else (e.g., black people in
Ontario
could neither vote nor sit on juries; interracial marrying was enough to
provoke a riot).
Between 1910 and 1912 1,300 black
persons immigrated to
Canada
. They settled in
Alberta
and
Saskatchewan
. Immediately white people
on the prairies demanded legislation to preserve the Canadian West for
Caucasians. The Canadian
government prepared the legislation but never enacted it out of fear of
damaging relations with the
USA
. Less formal means were deployed to prohibit black people from entering
Canada
; for instance, the physical and financial qualifications for black
immigrants were made insuperably difficult, while Canadian immigration
officials who disqualified blacks were surreptitiously rewarded.
The result was predictable: by 1912 all black immigration to
Canada
had been halted without
Canada
’s ever having declared a racist policy formally.
In early 20th Century
Canada
black people found they could get only the most menial jobs.
Sleeping-car porters were almost exclusively black, for instance,
while dining-car waiters were exclusively white.
Even the federal government permitted racial restrictions in
hiring and promotion practices within the civil service.
Housing discrimination abounded.
In fact when I was a teenager in the late 1950s I knew that black
players on
Toronto
’s professional minor league baseball team regularly responded to
advertisements for rental accommodation only to be turned away when they
appeared in person.
There’s a point about all of this that we
must note carefully.
Canada
(after 1867) has never enacted race-legislation; nevertheless, race-discrimination has
been upheld by Canadian courts as legally acceptable.
In 1919 a
Quebec
appellate court deemed it legal for a theatre to restrict black people
to inferior seating. In 1924
Ontario
courts upheld a restaurant which refused to serve black people.
In 1941 the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the Montreal Forum
Tavern in its refusal to serve black people.
The courts consistently upheld racial discrimination as legal in
a country that boasted of having no racial legislation.
Canadian courts have decreed that
racial discrimination is illegal. The
Canadian Bill of Rights and the Human Rights Commission have
strengthened the courts in this regard.
Passing legislation, however, does nothing to alter attitudes in
individuals. Black people,
faced with persistent discrimination, have formed the Black United Front
in
Nova Scotia
and the National Black Coalition of Canada.
Studies undertaken by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association
have revealed that most employment agencies will agree, if asked by
prospective employers, to screen out non-white job applicants.
Once hired, black people as a group appear at the lowest end of
the wage scale without regard for training or experience.
An Ontario Human Rights Commission study has disclosed that
black people who hold a Master of Business Administration degree earn
25% less than white people with the same degree and the same
professional experience.
Two hundred years ago, on
the 10th of February, 1806
, a
Toronto
newspaper carried the following advertisement:
“For sale. Two
slaves. Peggy, aged 40,
adequate cook, $150. Her
son, Jupiter, aged 15, $200.” Two
hundred dollars for a fifteen year old black boy was a great deal of
money in 1806. Whoever
purchased these slaves was clearly expecting enormous work from them,
since a horse would have cost far less.
“Why keep talking about something that
happened 200 years ago?” someone objects; “All of that is long gone;
let’s move ahead.” We
can “move ahead” only if we remember that the last racially
segregated school in
Ontario
was shut down as recently as 1965.
V:
-- Murderous
Cain built the first city. He
named the city ‘Enoch,’ named it after his son Enoch.
Ever since Cain’s ‘Enoch’ the city has been humankind’s
monument to its God-defiance. We
think that the city we build provides us a safety from the long arm of
God and security from our fellow-citizens – who, of course, are
murderous, just like us – or why else would they look to the city as a
shield against insecurity and vindictiveness?
Cain named the first city after his son.
After whose Son is the last city named?
The last city, the final city, is the New Jerusalem.
It is the kingdom of Christ the King, Son of the living God.
It is the holy city.
We who are the people of the great king can
see the holy city just because we are kingdom-sighted.
Seeing the holy city we want only to witness to it, since it is
now superimposed it on whatever earthly city we inhabit.
We want only to point to and point others to the kingdom, a city
that cannot be shaken.
We aren’t naïve.
We know the history of all earthly cities.
We know the history of
Canada
and the history of black people in
Canada
. We know the history of
Rome
and Colosse and the history of slaves in
Rome
and Colosse. But like the
apostle Paul, we have been apprehended by the king and appointed to his
kingdom. Then the truth of
God that Paul urged upon Philemon is the same truth that we must do
whenever we have opportunity to do it.
“I am sending Onesmimus back to you,
Philemon; I am sending you my very heart.
Receive him as you would receive me.”
And as Philemon does just this, the city of
Enoch
, sought-after refuge of murderous Cain but no refuge at all; the city
of
Enoch
is eclipsed by the city of
God
, named after God’s Son, in which city, John tells us, the nations of
the world are healed.
You and I have been appointed to render the
city of
God
visible as we identify and
resist the violation of any human being, anywhere.
For by God’s grace, the author of Hebrews reminds us, we have
been granted citizenship in a kingdom, the city of
God
, that cannot be shaken (Heb. 12:28).
