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.