Mark 8:31–38
“Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him…”
When Jesus shares with his disciples that the Messiah will suffer in solidarity with the guilty and the criminalized, Peter finds it unimaginable. How often do we find the concept of abolition unimaginable? How often do we find ourselves unable to imagine that real, material liberation and abolition in concrete terms, not just spiritual ones, might be God’s plan? When we doubt the possibility of abolition or find ourselves unable to see outside the carceral structures we’ve constructed, are we “setting our minds not on divine things but human things?”
The answers to these questions are not obvious — this is an application of a specific text about Jesus’ life to our current situation, which requires us to wrestle with the text and its applicability. But abolition forces us to consider such unsettling questions and new interpretations of familiar biblical texts. (That is, after all, the point of this series!) Abolition forces us to ask whether the human responses we have to violence and harm are really consistent with God’s desire for justice among us. Abolition is the work of unsettling our assumptions.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore says that “abolition requires that we change only one thing, which is everything.” There is nothing in our society which isn’t open to questioning — to unsettling — in light of abolitionist convictions. Every part of our lives, from economic and political systems to interpersonal relationships, requires analysis and critique and repentance in order for us to build a world without prisons.
Such a radical re-visioning of how we live our lives is frightening. It may require that we give up every cherished understanding we’ve held in the past. Abolition changes us. But this text from Mark also provides us with a promise about such change. Jesus says: “Those who want to save their life with lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” If we try to hold on to the structures and values that have brought us to the deadly status quo of mass incarceration, we will give up the possibility of new life and new ways of being offered by abolition. But if we are willing to question everything — if we are willing to give up old unjust security out of secure faith in the new work of abolition God is bringing about — then, perhaps we will discover in the liberation of all the new and abundant life promised by Jesus.
Following Jesus requires only that we offer up everything. Abolition requires only that we change everything. Freedom is on the other side.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for the Abolition of Prisons.