There is a
famous story that circulates in Latin America
of a peasant who was learning to read in a literacy program that used the Bible
as its principal text. Such programs
were common in Latin American in the 1960s and 1970s, during the heyday of
liberation theology. Reading aloud to
his fellow students, this peasant came to the famous passage in the book of
Galatians in which Paul declares to the Christians in Galatia
When the
peasant just learning to read came to this verse, though, he didn’t read, “En
Cristo no hay judío ni griego …” Instead
he read out loud: “En Cristo no hay jodido ni gringo
…” because where “griego”
means “Greek” – a word the peasant would have never heard of – the word “gringo”
is common vernacular for “American,” that is a citizen of the United
States. And where the word “judío” means
“Jew,” another uncommon word in rural Latin America, the word “jodido” is, again, very familiar. It means “screwed,” or, really,
something a little more frank than that.
According
to the peasant’s reading of this scripture, then, Paul was teaching that in
Christ Jesus there is neither “gringo” nor “f****d.”
Spanish-speakers
find this story funny for so many reasons they are hard to enumerate. I once told this story from the pulpit in
Calexico, and my Spanish-speaking parishioners nearly fell out of their pews
laughing. First of all the story is
funny to anyone who is aware of the historic relations between Latin America
and the United States
Even
funnier was the reaction of the translator who was supposed to take what I had
just said in Spanish and translate it for the English-speaking people in the
congregation.
Often times
we used a system of wireless headphones for simultaneous translation of the
sermon. On the Sundays I preached in
English the monolingual Spanish-speakers wore the headphones. On the Sundays I preached in Spanish the
monolingual English-speakers wore the headphones. (The majority of people in this small church
were bilingual and didn’t ever wear the headphones because they didn’t need
either language to be translated for them).
That day,
though, we were translating out loud. I
would preach a section of the sermon in one language and then the translator
would translate what I said in the other language. This allowed me to bounce back and forth
between the two languages, telling some stories in English and others in
Spanish. For the uninitiated this may
sound like chaos, but for this little congregation of predominantly bilingual
people almost any system worked.
The woman who
was translating that day was Rosalva, a woman who had been raised on
the border in a conservative family.
A profoundly bilingual person, she simply had no idea whatsoever what to
do with the word, jodido. She could not bring herself to translate it
precisely. She knew the folks who spoke
English (most of whom were reared in the proper, Anglo culture of mainline
Methodism) would not have the cultural acumen to understand the layers of
meaning that made the story funny to Latin Americans. They would have no idea
what “that word” was doing in the middle of their sermon. Rosalva sat there frozen, stammering, and
then just stopped and burst out into laughter … which made the Spanish-speakers
in the congregation laugh all the more.
Because of
the brouhaha my telling of this story caused that day in worship, I never got
to finish it. The best part of the
story, as far as I’m concerned, is the end.
The way the story is told in Latin America ,
when the campesino declared to his compañeros in the
literacy class that “In Christ Jesus there is neither jodido nor gringo,” they
all nodded solemnly their understanding and assent! After all, what could be a more profound
witness to the grace and power of God than the promise that some day this
historic relationship of inequality and oppression would be transformed?
Perhaps
unwittingly, the man who read the scripture was doing very effective job of
interpreting the word for the day. He
got the message right.
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