Month: October 2021

Mark 12:28–34

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Practically all Christians can recite to you the Greatest Commandment, but often we let it remain an aphorism: “Love God, love others.” Or there’s the insistence on self-care inherent in the second half: “You can’t love others if you don’t love yourself.” Or, perhaps, we focus on the “who is my neighbor question” that plays a role in Luke’s telling of this passage. All of those reflections have truth to them, all tell a part of what the Greatest Commandment demands of us, and all are generally good things to believe and reflect upon. However, when I read Mark’s version of this story this week, I saw what wasn’t there. 

The gospels do not assume a fundamental practice of our prison industrial complex: the practice of un-neighboring. Criminal justice systems in the United States and around the world depend on the process of removing people from their community, dislocating them to a penal context, and making return to their former community as difficult as possible. The system attempts to un-neighbor them, to make them no one’s neighbor. The system attempts to destroy familial and communal bonds that maintain the integrity and thriving of our communities by un-neighboring people the system classified as criminals. That’s what prisons are for. 

That could not be further from a Christlike example or the just society the Scriptures envision. Jesus and his contemporaries knew something about un-neighboring. Ancient empires used deportation as a tactic to break apart conquered communities. The best and brightest were sent to imperial centers not just to benefit the ruling class, but to disintegrate their homelands. We know Romans used prisons, as well, and Jesus begins his ministry in Luke’s Gospel by saying it is part of God’s mission to free captives from said prisons. And yet, Christians often support this process of un-neighboring, of stripping someone of their community, family, and friends as a form of punishment for what they have done. 

Even in a world where the criminal justice system wasn’t racist, ableist, and otherwise prejudiced, why would this process of un-neighboring be entertained by Christians in any context? It cuts against the core of Christian teaching that says to love our neighbors as ourselves. The only way to make this kind of system palatable for Christians is to make it so people convicted of crimes aren’t their neighbors anymore. Perhaps that’s why we have such remote and inaccessible prisons–they want to make sure the incarcerated are no one’s neighbor, because otherwise God might call people to care for them. 

Many Christians accept this system by default. It’s a matter of inheritance. Many fail to question it at all. But if we even aspire to the Greatest Commandment’s demands on our lives, the abolition of prisons is an absolute necessity.  

Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his) is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina.

Mark 10:46–52

Jesus’ response to Bartimaeus in this story, although at first glance not about criminal justice, offers lessons for transformative and creative responses to harm.

Bartimaeus calls out for Jesus seeking mercy and liberation — seeking the new and abundant life promised by Jesus. His call to Jesus as the “son of David” is a recognition of Jesus’ messianic status (at a moment when Jesus is about to enter Jerusalem in triumph and resistance against the powers of oppression). Perhaps his call for mercy, in this context, is not only a desire for personal healing but also a prayer for communal liberation.

The promise of transformative justice is that personal healing after harm occurs in the context of communal liberation. The healing of structures — including ableist structures that stigmatize disability — can be as important as physical or psychological healing.

But what strikes me as most essential in this story is Jesus’ response after the disciples bring Bartimaeus to him: “What do you want me to do for you?”

One of the central differences between the responses of the criminal legal system and restorative/transformative responses to harm is that restorative and transformative justice responses are survivor-centered. The key question that an RJ process starts with — what are the needs of the person who was harmed? — reflects Jesus’ question to Bartimaeus: “What do you want me to do for you?”

The criminal legal system, by contrast, assumes the answer to every harm is punishment and exclusion. It ignores survivors who do not want harsh punishment, and can treat them with hostility and even retraumatize them. This is one reason, among many, that 70% of survivors of sexual assault choose not to report it to the police. Retributive state systems cannot meet the needs of those who have been harmed when they do not exist to ask: “What do you want me to do for you?”

“What do you want me to do for you?” What would bring you healing and liberation? What would make you feel that you had received restitution or reparations for the harm done to you? The answer may be different in every situation, which is one reason why there is not one alternative to the prison-industrial complex. Abolition means building on the variety of needs that those who have been harmed (which is all of us!) have, and building a variety of solutions to meet the needs of people by transforming relational and systemic structures.

“What do you want me to do for you?” is an essential question to ask when searching for ways to help those who are poor or unhoused as well — it is the basis of mutual aid. The criminalization of poverty, homelessness, and survival arise from systems that insist on top-down, controlling solutions to social problems; that see those who are in need of care as somehow unable to exercise agency and make their own decisions. When care comes with agency — as it does in this story — it brings not only physical healing, but liberation. Perhaps in the space for Bartimaeus’ agency that Jesus holds, we see foreshadowing of the systemic change to a liberated world of mutuality that Bartimaeus imagines when he calls Jesus “son of David.”

Of course, some survivors of harm do desire vengeance. “What do you want me to do for you?” can never be the only question driving our communal responses to harm. Yet what Jesus models here — a true relational listening to someone in need, making the space of healing a space for exercising agency — is an illustration and a goal of where transformative responses to violence, harm, and need can begin.

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

Mark 10:35–45

It is understandable to want to be on Jesus’s good side. James and John had been following Jesus from almost the beginning of his ministry, and they had one small request. As usual, instead of saying yes to them, Jesus confounds both the brothers and the rest of the disciples by saying ‘you do not know what you are asking.’

Throughout the Gospel of Mark, Jesus often lets these metaphors stay mysterious, but he lays it out for us here. There is no Messianic secret going on. “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.” The Greek word used is doulos. Slave. There is no ambiguity going on. To drink the cup is to be slave to all because that is how Jesus lived and offered himself to us. So to sit at the right hand of Jesus is to be a servant to all.

The church today often lives like James and John. We want to be on the side of Jesus but we don’t want to drink the cup that he drinks. We talk about service and mission with our lips but then make a lot of exceptions about what that means. This is directly related to the possibility of abolition. The imagination that allows for the abolition of prison is not held captive by the motivations of this world, and yet the church, so often, cannot see the ‘all’ that Jesus came to serve as including all. We may have a prison ministry but not a prison ending ministry. That would be meddling, but that is the cup of Jesus. We as individuals, as churches, as Christians, can choose to drink it or not. God will be there with us. We are not alone, but it is not easy, and can’t be made with a simple request.

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

Mark 10:17–31

Jesus is approached by a man who kneels before him, and addresses him as “Good Teacher” (v. 17). The man asks Jesus how to “inherit eternal life” (v. 17), and Jesus responds that he must keep the commandments. The man says that he has kept them faithfully since he was a child. Jesus instructs the man lovingly. He must do one more thing: sell all his possessions, give the money to the poor, and then come to follow Jesus. The man walks away, saddened because he owned so many possessions. I imagine Jesus shaking his head and sighing to himself as he turns to the disciples, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” (v. 23).

The disciples, surprised and confused, wonder how the wealthy – who have the resources and means to accomplish most things – could have such difficulty entering into the Kingdom of God. If salvation were this difficult for the rich, then what hope do the rest of us have? Jesus explains that while salvation is impossible to achieve by mortals through their own power, “for God all things are possible” (v. 27). God’s saving and liberating grace is for all people. In the Kingdom of God, the poor are liberated from poverty and oppression, while the rich are liberated from their wealth and power. According to Jesus, the first will be last, and the last will be first. This announcement is good news for all, but especially for the poor.

Perhaps some or many of the people in your congregation know what it’s like to experience poverty. People who are poor are frequently punished for the “crime” of lacking wealth and power. Alec Karakatsanis tells the story of a woman who was shackled, taken from her children, and thrown in jail because she couldn’t afford to pay debts the city claimed she owed for old traffic violations. The city had turned her debts over to a for-profit collection agency. She was arrested, imprisoned, and forced into demeaning labor. Her story is, sadly, not uncommon. Karakatsanis notes:

There are 2.2 million human beings confined in prison and jail cells in the United States tonight. About 500,000 of those people are presumptively innocent people awaiting trial, the vast majority of whom are confined by the government solely because they cannot pay enough money to buy their release… Between eighty and ninety percent of the people charged with crimes are so poor that they cannot afford a lawyer. [1]

Our systems of separation, imprisonment, and forced labor oppress the poor while enriching companies that profit from their incarceration. But Jesus announces and inaugurates a reorientation of the world in which the poor are liberated, oppressive systems are dismantled, and people are restored into right relationship with God and each other. Depending on your context, your proclamation of this good news may offer a prophetic challenge to the wealthy or a message of hope for the poor. How might God be calling upon your congregation to participate in God’s liberative work in your community and the world?

[1] https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-punishment-bureaucracy

Jed Tate is a Methodist pastor in North Carolina.