Month: March 2021

Acts 10:34–43

Peter’s sermon-creed in Acts 10 contains a powerful message of resurrection. What can we gain from this many-faceted text of relevance to abolition? Four things: Peter’s sermon promises God’s good news about inclusion, resurrection, judgment, and forgiveness.

No partiality

The opening phrase — “I truly understand that God shows no partiality” — is a creedal statement of radical inclusion. In the context of Acts, Peter is talking about the inclusion of Gentiles into God’s covenant with God’s people. But the radical inclusion of God goes further. “God shows no partiality, but in every nation everyone who fears God and does right is acceptable to God.” God is not bound, in other words, by our structures of exclusion, prejudice, and criminalization.

We know that the prison-industrial complex is predicated on racism, especially anti-Black and anti-indigenous racism in the United States. We know, as Rev. Dr. Nikia Smith Robert has written, that mass incarceration forms a system of sacrifice that destroys Black and Brown bodies for the sake of upholding social structures that benefit those with power and privilege. We know that one defining reality of the prison is that it excludes — in Mariame Kaba’s words, it provides a “Somewhere Else” to put people our society doesn’t want to deal with in community and relationship. 

For God to show no partiality, then, is a resounding rejection of such practices of exclusion, especially as they work themselves out in racialized ways. The social construction of criminality is a form of exclusion and partiality which God sets God’s self against.

Vindication of the victim

Next, God promises resurrection: “God raised Jesus on the third day.” The promise of resurrection of the dead is not just a promise of life (although it is that). Instead, as Jürgen Moltmann and Jon Sobrino and others have written, the resurrection of the dead is the promise of vindication for victims. As Moltmann and Sobrino put it, it is the promise that ultimately “the executioner will not ultimately triumph over the victim.” The resurrection of the dead is the vindication of every person who is oppressed and victimized, and of every one of us insofar as we have suffered harm, injustice, or oppression. It is fundamentally the setting right of oppression, the restorative and transformative justice-making that begins with meeting the needs of those who have been harmed. The promise of resurrection is a promise of vindication, in particular, for all those who have been criminalized, tortured, caged, and murdered by the state — and it is a promise of better forms of justice, of a reality driven by transformation rather than retribution.

The oppressed becomes the judge

In fact, Peter promises next that Jesus has been raised “as the one ordained by God to judge the living and the dead.” The revolutionary promise here is that judgment does not come from some outside or hierarchical authority, but for Jesus who was crucified in solidarity with all the criminalized and guilty people of the world. Jesus, executed by the state, a victim of the violence of the Roman predecessor of our prison-industrial complex — this Jesus the oppressed and vindicated one is the judge of all. How is justice transformed when it is developed “from below” by people finding new ways to transform systems of harm through their own communities? As Lee Griffith puts it, how does it affect our understanding of judgment that Jesus the Prisoner (Matthew 25) is now also the judge? The overturning of courtroom roles here provides a new and abolitionist picture of justice and judgment: a vision of justice in which those who have been most harmed by systems of oppression are prioritized going forward, a vision of justice driven by solidarity with those criminalized, incarcerated, and marginalized.

Forgiveness of sins

Finally, Peter gives the promise of forgiveness: “All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

My point here is not to suggest any sort of Christian exclusivism, or to insist that forgiveness can come only through belief in Jesus. Instead, it is to emphasize the hope of forgiveness for harm done in the gospel message of Easter. Jesus the Prisoner, raised and vindicated, becomes the judge of all, so that no one is excluded: and the promise of his judgment is that it is merciful, aiming for forgiveness. As we might put it in more explicitly “abolitionist” terms, the promise of the resurrection is that we can find our way to a transformative justice that eschews punishment and instead envisions true non-punitive accountability and restoration where possible. 

Inclusion provides a starting point for true transformative judgment — the kind of judgment that vindicates those who have been harmed, judges from their perspective, and perhaps even brings the hope of real accountability in relationship and restoration and healing where possible. These are the resonances between Peter’s Easter sermon and abolitionist praxis. An abolitionist lens draws these elements out of the text to present the story of Jesus’ resurrection afresh as good news for our struggle against the powers of the prison in this world.

Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.

As we enter into Holy Week, I want to re-share the devotional Healing Justice and the Paschal Mystery, written in 2019.

This devotional uses the traditional liturgies for Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter as opportunities to reflect on the ways we practice healing justice in our own lives.

It includes questions about ongoing practices: of invitation, mercy, lament, confession, closure, remaining, and the hope of reconciliation. It also includes an invitation to consider applying these practices, gently and in individual contemplation, to conflicts in our own lives.

What this devotional is not is an attempt to “force” a process of reconciliation. The conflicts and healing in our lives do not naturally follow an easy narrative through the events of Holy Week to Easter Sunday! You are not expected to reach Easter healed, reconciled, and at peace. Healing is more complicated than that.

Instead, the goal is to use the events of Holy Week as a lens for reflecting on our own lives and being present to the emotions that arise: joyful and uncomfortable ones. And we always remember that where things are still painful, unhealed, and unreconciled, we can be present and compassionate to those feelings. Holy Week comes around again next year, and our feelings may be different then. This devotional is simply a way of imagining our feelings, reactions, and practices of healing justice at this moment in time.

Holy Week blessings! The devotional is available here: Healing Justice and the Paschal Mystery.

Mark 14:1–15:47

In Mark 15, as Jesus is before Pilate and only moments away from his own crucifixion, there is a moment where Jesus serves again as Christ the liberator. Through his commitment to nonviolence, through his submission to God’s will, Jesus frees Barabbas. 

This is not the story I was taught to believe. In my upbringing, I was taught that Barabbas was an animal, the personification of all that is bad. I was taught that he was a murderer, likely a rapist, a violent threat to the community. 

I was taught about Barabbas the things that are taught to us about all prisoners: they deserve to be cast out, thrown away, and discarded, because they are not worthy of being released into our community. 

Along with this, I was taught this story in ways that reinforce anti-Semitism — that the Jewish crowd would have chosen a violent and present danger to the Messiah. 

These falsehoods, or at best exaggerations, are not found in scripture. At best, Barabbas was a “notorious prisoner” who had been involved in riots against the Roman government, and probably killed in the process. Despite Pilate’s surprise at the crowd’s insistence that Jesus Barabbas be freed and Jesus of Nazareth crucified, the text gives us no proof that this was out of concern for their communal safety.

Unsurprisingly, the label of “prisoner” serves to make it much easier to see these actions as unforgivable and monstrous. Compare how you were taught to feel about Barabbas to how you were taught to feel about Moses killing the Egyptian. 

In Jesus we have an example of peace, nonviolent resistance, a following of God’s desire (a desire Jesus names as liberating those who are oppressed), which in the process frees a prisoner.

It’s actually beautiful, in a way. As you go forward, imagine Barabbas as someone shocked at his chance for freedom not because he is bloodthirsty, but because he misses his family. Imagine him looking at Jesus of Nazareth and wondering why this resistor is not resisting with violence, and perhaps believing that there might be a better way. Imagine Barabbas as a victim of the oppressive government he is under. Extend to Barabbas a mercy that Christ extended. Let him go free, and let go of our compulsion to see the incarcerated as we do. 

May we instead see them as Christ, as God in the flesh. May we practice good religion, visiting them and caring for their needs. May we follow Christ into liberation, practicing abolition in our politics and economy. 

Mitchell Atencio (he/him/his) is a discalced writer and photographer based in Washington, D.C.

Jeremiah 31:31–34

Today’s reading from the prophet Jeremiah promises a “new covenant,” one “not like the covenant with our ancestors, which they broke.”

The promise of the new covenant to Jeremiah is of a closer relationship than God has ever had before with God’s people. It is also, explicitly, the promise of a covenant different than the Deuteronomic one. Why the difference?

Reading this through the lens of accountability over punishment suggests an interpretation of the difference: a renewed understanding of the covenant in terms of restoration and accountability instead of punishment.

The Deuteronomic history in the Bible (Deuteronomy, Judges, 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings) shows the cycle of covenant-breaking, punishment, and return. This cycle points to the complexity of accountability: the dialectic of punishment and return is an attempt, perhaps, to convey the difficulties of building spaces for accountability; the pain of taking accountability, even in a non-punitive context; the fundamental disruption of power relations that comes with holding space for accountability. In the Deuteronomic history, bad kings are overthrown — and that’s good! But at the same time, the Deuteronomic portrayal of God shows us a God who still relies on retribution, even if that punishment is aimed toward restoration. I am not saying we should entertain  the anti-Jewish claim that “the Old Testament God is retributive and the New Testament God is not” or anything like that. Indeed, we must reject such claims! Rather the Deuteronomic portrayal of justice is an approximation of God’s justice, an approximation of the hard but life-giving and restorative work of accountability, and the (still Old Testament!) promise to Jeremiah is part of refining that approximation toward a better understanding.

Perhaps this refinement is one way in which the new covenant promised to Jeremiah is different. In the new covenant, God tells Jeremiah, “they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest”; “I will forgive their iniquity”; “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” The image here is of a new way of practicing accountability to the covenant. 

No longer will punishment be part of an attempt to approximate accountability, God tells us. Instead, we can imagine accountability free of punishment. No longer will exclusion be an attempt to approximate justice: instead, God’s commitment to us and our commitment to one another in community will be the basis of accountability work because “we shall all know God.” The promise that God’s law shall be written on our hearts is an image of the kind of personal transformation that is ultimately the goal of accountability work: to become the kind of person who won’t do the same harm again. This sort of accountability work is close to the Jewish concept of teshuvah, as Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg explains.

What do we learn if we interpret the new covenant as a new way of imagining accountability and justice — not as a rejection of what came before, but as a realistic assessment of the ways in which it approximated justice, and a corrective to bring us closer and closer to a non-punitive understanding of accountability? How might we live out that accountability, and be partakers of the new covenant, today?

Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for the Abolition of Prisons.

Ephesians 2:1–10

Our past does not define our future. As Paul says in one of the readings for this Sunday: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9). But as a church and as individual Christians, we must grapple with how far we think grace goes.

Is grace just a Sunday morning thing? Is grace just a ‘people who look like me’ thing? Is grace just for people who don’t do really terrible things? I mean, Jesus eats with sinners, but he doesn’t eat with “rapists or child molesters,” right? We may think that grace has to stop somewhere. The limits we put on grace are the exact same limits we put on God. If we think grace must stop somewhere, we must imagine the stoppage of God’s love. It is easier to see the work of grace in individual cases than in a system. As the saying goes that was attributed to Stalin, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.” The carceral state has turned us all Stalinists of sorts. Churches can have campaigns for individuals. Can let individuals give testimonies about God’s love and grace. Church’s can start half-way houses on small scales and work to helping people “turn their life around.”

If we leave grace to the individual and to the great personal anecdotes, we point to a deep lack of faith in God’s transforming power. Grace is not just offered to the deserving. In fact, were grace only for the deserving, it would not be grace. It would just be works, which is where a lot of Christians end up. Works-righteousness really is the backbone of the Prison Industrial Complex. “People need to work. People need punishment. Society needs restitution.” As Paul would say: by no means. Let us live into God’s grace and be unafraid to work towards systems that acknowledge the possibility of transformation and that grace and mercy is not offered to a few but to all. 

Rev. Wilson Pruitt is a Methodist pastor and translator in Spicewood, TX.

Exodus 20:1–17

As we continue our time in Lent, with many of us marking a year in isolation due to the pandemic, our attention turns to the ten commandments in Exodus 20. While it’s easy to skip past the second verse of this section, the commandments must all be read in the light of this declaration.

“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”

This setting, the God who brings people out of slavery, is the setting for what follows. These are not random and arbitrary rules, nor are they codes that provide a personal path to individual righteousness. These are commandments for those who follow the God that brings people out of the house of slavery. (And what else can prisons be described as except a house of slavery?)

Growing up, I was taught that the commandments could be bifurcated into two categories: relationship with God; and relationships with others. As I got older, and was taught better, I came to see that these are false bifurcations, and that relationship with God flows into relationship with others flows into relationship with God and on and on. Jesus expresses this when he tells the crowd that “what you do for the least of these, you do for me.” 

As abolitionists, we look at these commandments, all commandments, through the lens of the God who liberates. Standing on the shoulders of James Cone, Gustavo Gutierrez, and many others who have formed liberation theology, we insist that the good news of the Gospel is the liberation of the oppressed, and how we treat others is how we treat God, who places Godself with the oppressed. 

“God is taking sides with those who are voiceless and weak, and he is empowering them to know that they were not made for slavery, not made for exploitation, but was made for freedom, just like everybody else in the world,” James Cone said in an NPR interview describing Black Liberation Theology. 

When we read the ten commandments, keep first the idea that these are commandments from God, the liberator. 

Mitchell Atencio (he/him/his) is a discalced writer and photographer based in Washington, D.C.