Mark 8:27–38
In this famous passage from Mark’s gospel, Jesus first admits that he is the messiah — and then immediately declares his intention of solidarity with those who are criminalized.
Perhaps we are used to seeing Jesus’ injunction to “take up your cross” in more spiritualized terms, as a call to self-giving love or selflessness. Yet what Jesus is describing is his imminent imprisonment and execution. As Dr. Nikia Smith Robert puts it: “Jesus died a criminalized person — but transcended criminality on the cross.” It is the truth of his criminalization, conviction, punishment, and death, that causes Peter to rebuke him — solidarity with the incarcerated, perhaps, unpopular then as now. (You can read a deep dive on Robert’s “liberation theology for lockdown America” here.) Solidarity is dangerous, and powerful.
What does it open for us in the text to read this familiar line about “taking up the cross” in light of solidarity with incarcerated people? How might it help us resist the ways this notion has been used to promote “redemptive suffering,” especially for marginalized people? What if solidarity is the fundamental reality behind the words of Jesus that so many are “ashamed of” (Mark 8:38)?
This is the inversion of the gospel, the inversion of every sort of respectability politics and the insistence on divine solidarity with the criminalized, punished, incarcerated — whether innocent or guilty, likeable or not. Divine solidarity with those who are punished and imprisoned is the basis of Christian support of abolition and the shocking truth about the messiah.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.