Wow! I just finished Jesus and the Disinherited, and I find myself spellbound by the profundity and intrigue encountered by the very first turn of the page.

“To those who need profound succor and strength to enable them to live in the present with dignity and creativity, Christianity often has been sterile and of little avail. The conventional Christian word is muffled, confused, and vague.”

The force of such wisdom and whit evaded me until I found myself deeply confronted with Thurman’s “hounds of hell” and incisively rebuked for my fear, deception, and hatred (and thereby enlightened to the prevalence of such vices in the society around me).

To my regret, I do not know much about Howard Thurman. I found within the pages of this book, however, a man writing from a deep and insightful understanding of Jesus and the power of His transformative love. This love encourages fearful hearts, expunging the core of cowardice with mature confidence in the prevailing good pleasure and care of God. This love, insists on sincerity, on speaking and living the truth, at whatever cost.

“Unwavering sincerity says that man should always recognize the fact that he lives always in the presence of God, always under the divine scrutiny, and that there is no really significant living for a man, whatever may be his status, until he has turned and faced the divine scrutiny. Here all men stand stripped to the literal substance of themselves, without disguise, without pretension, without seeming whatsoever. No man can fool God. For him nothing is hidden.”

To Thurman, this love-ethic is the precise word Christianity offers a world of unbalance and injustice. It’s the offer of Jesus to the disinherited, to the weak, to the discouraged, disfavored, and ill-treated. This empowering concern for the least of these throughout the book, won by proximity and experience, captured me: “Times without number I have learned that life is hard, as hard as crucible steel.”

Thurman’s receptivity to the pain of a people, alongside the experience of sacred love, also seems to have produced a familiarity with the visages of the very forces by which such pain is inflected, aggravated, and entrenched — as well as the antidote to such destructive forces.

Though penned sometime before the 1950s, Jesus and the Disinherited is transformative and timely.

Insights into the power of Christ-love solidified my appreciation for Thurman, which mounted as late-night hours sped by, back in those late March evenings, along with the sense that time had not passed at all as I read.

Those evenings gave way to the complicated, motivation-robbing, socially-distant days gone by in a COVID-19 beleaguered world. I set the book down just as it began to reach its pinnacle. But not a day has gone by when Thurman’s wrestling with the ministry of Jesus in his own fractured and divided context hasn’t come to mind. So I dove back into the book, now mid-June, raced to the finish, and found a word fit for today.

To every soul, Thurman’s word — and less his own than the one to whom Thurman points — is the same. Love. Picking up this short yet powerful book enables one to grasp how potent and practical this offer can be. In it, Thurman speaks to the primacy of truth. He examines the phenomena of protest. He explores survival and freedom, calling us beyond the former into the most real sense of the latter. He sets privilege alongside grace, intent alongside relationship, and “enemy-status” alongside common fellowship. He challenges the reader, citizens of hostile times, to the hope of renewal.

“The great stretches of barren places in the soul must be revitalized, brought to life, before they can be challenged.”

He speaks a timely word to the infirm and healthy alike in a world of pandemic, characterized by the fear of an invisible disease — one which threatens to labor the breath of the vulnerable before extinguishing their lives. He is useful to the engaged and indifferent the same, deceived, and malformed by the swirling cacophony of discordant opinions, voices, and narrations that presently rage. Fit are his assessments for the one afflicted by vestiges of hatred, as well as the one suspicious to the claim of racism’s contemporary place in modern life — for black lives and blue livelihoods, for red voters and democratic devotees, for those whose present sentiment is annoyance or agreement.

But Thurman goes beyond present manifestations of the perennial struggles of the societal sin of division.

“For the privileged and underprivileged alike, if the individual puts at the disposal of the Spirit the needful dedication and disciple, he can live effectively in the chaos of the present the high destiny of a son of God.”

Jesus and the Disinherited is a book your enemy needs to read, as well as your friends. But only after you have read, reflected, and passed it along to them. And if you find yourself spellbound, encouraged, or challenged like me — I imagine I would be equally as enriched by your thoughts.