This is part of our series of meditations on the texts of the Revised Common Lectionary.
The gospel lesson appointed for this week dives into some of the difficult teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. From an abolitionist point of view, perhaps most immediately striking is the discussion of prisons in 5:25: “Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison.”
We certainly do not need to read into this an acceptance of the necessity of prisons on Jesus’ part. He is not saying, “If you do wrong, you should be thrown into prison.”
Instead, what Jesus is doing here is presenting a sort of “two kingdoms” cosmology: he is offering a vision of a new way of being in community characterized by reconciliation, and contrasting it to the earthly, fallen system of addressing harm with imprisonment and punishment.
It is true that this is a hard teaching, however we read it. But perhaps its sting is that Jesus promises us that we will get what we ask for, and will be measured by the values we practice.
If we aim to build the community of reconciliation, then we will live in a community characterized by inclusion and peace. But if we refuse to take part in the new community of reconciliation and accountability that he is describing, but instead insist on relying on prisons and punishment to address harm, then we will be “given up” to the powers of the world, in the form of the community of vengeance and punishment that we have built for ourselves. Compare this to 1 Corinthians 5:5, and the idea that a member of the church doing continuous harm should be given up to Satan for the destruction of the flesh. Our Christian communities are places of reconciliation, but when we insist on nevertheless building structural systems of punishment and incarceration, we run the risk of becoming liable to them ourselves.
What this can show the church, perhaps, is an insight of transformative justice communities, who have by necessity found ways to do justice independently of the criminal-punishment system that has failed them: we must build structures of accountability and reconciliation that are in line with our values, rather than accepting the dominant values of our punitive culture. The church should not accept the necessity of prisons, policing, and punishment as a stand-in for justice. Rather, we should name those, as Jesus does, as tools of the dominant powers of this world, which are captive to sin. We should seek, instead, to establish a community of accountability and reconciliation, and to understand our lives and our communities to be governed by the logic of the kingdom of heaven, not the logic of this world.