Luke 2:1–20
“Because there was no room for them at the inn.”
An abolitionist perspective forces us to recognize prisons and policing not as a necessary consequence of trying to build safe communities, but instead as a social construction intended to draw boundaries around those who are worthy of compassion and a place in an accountable human society, and those who are excluded. The logic of prisons and police is the logic of “no room at the inn”:
- no room to hold in our communities those who have done harm as they fumble toward accountability, but only to banish them and lock them up;
- no room for those who are criminalized by the intentional acts of those in power to define harmless acts as crimes in ways driven by racial inequity and anti-Blackness;
- no room for entire communities that have been subjected to what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment,” considered unworthy of investment but only to be threats to be policed. Prisons and policing are about who counts as a community member, and who is considered “social pollution” (Rima Vesely-Flad’s term), subject to exclusion and control.
This is the story into which Jesus is born at Christmas. Christmas is the story of those who are turned away from shelter, from love, from community, because there is no room for them at the inn. The story of Christmas begins with this fact: the light shines in the darkness, but the world does not know it. How often, as a society, do we close our hearts, our country, our communities, our homes, and leave the Holy Family with no room at the inn?
But this is not the end of the Christmas story. Because the Christmas story tells us that God makes a way. When there is no room at the inn, God is born into the world in a stable and laid in a manger. When people would not receive Mother Mary and her holy child, the animals brought gifts. We sing that favorite old carol “The Friendly Beasts:”
Jesus our brother, kind and good
Was humbly laid in a stable rude
And the friendly beasts around him stood
Jesus our brother, kind and good
Thus every beast by some glad spell
In the stable dark was glad to tell
Of the gift he gave Emmanuel
The gift he gave Emmanuel.
In the story of this hymn, every animal offers the baby Jesus a gift: the cow the manger to cradle his head, the dove a song to sing him to sleep.
When human justice and community fail, God makes another way.
But this is the judgment against the ways of our world: when we ignore the way God is making and look for safety in structures that exclude and criminalize, we miss Jesus.
There’s a beautiful story by Ray Bradbury in The Illustrated Man, called “The Man.” In it, a starship captain arrives on a faraway planet – but the people there are not interested in him, because a far more important man, a miraculous healer bringing peace, has just been there. At first the captain is skeptical that anything so good could be true. But when he is finally convinced that the coming of “the Man” has been real, he demands to know where he went, and how he can catch up with him. Refusing to stay behind in the healed community of peace he has found, he gets back in his spaceship, determined to catch up to “the Man.” But as one of the bystanders says after the captain leaves:
“Poor man, he’s gone. And he’ll go on, planet after planet, seeking and seeking, and always and always he will be an hour late, or a half hour late, or ten minutes late, or a minute late. And finally he will miss out by only a few seconds. And when he has visited three hundred worlds and is seventy or eighty years old he will miss out by only a fraction of a second, and then a smaller fraction of a second. And he will go on and on, thinking to find that very thing which he left behind here, on this planet, in this city—” [The Illustrated Man, p. 52]
We are always too late. There is no room for the holy child Jesus in the inn of our hearts.
But God makes another way. God’s way is the way of that healed community of peace left behind by the Man. God’s way is the way of abolition: the way that does not look up to heaven, or beyond the sea for the word of God, but recognizes that “the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart” (Deut. 30:14). The presence and peace of God occur when we live out God’s justice in our own communities of reconciliation. The hard work of community accountability for harm — of restorative, compassionate accountability — which allows us to imagine a world without prisons is the work where God becomes present to us.
And, God promises, he is present as well, in a special way, with those who are oppressed: with those who are poor, homeless, or imprisoned (Matt. 25:31–46). Abolition derives from our recognition of the reality that Jesus comes among us as a prisoner. Jesus is closest to those who are imprisoned, criminalized, excluded, and constructed as socially polluted. If we look to the communities of solidarity being built for liberation — in prisons and more broadly in our punitive and carceral society — we will find him there.
If we look for Jesus within the confines of communities that exclude, we will always be too late, and we will always miss him. But if we look for him among those seeking liberation—
If we look for him in the work of abolitionist accountability and reconciliation in healed communities—
Then we will surely find him there, because that is where he dwells, God with us.
Jesus is born in us, born among us, born on the side of those who are left outside, because God has made another way of liberation—because there was no room for them at the inn.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for the Abolition of Prisons.