Luke 4:14–21
The gospel appointed for this week is one of the texts most often used by Christian prison abolitionists, to show how Jesus, in declaring his mission, points to the liberation of captives as essential work for which he has come. Many Christian abolitionists written on this extensively elsewhere, so for this week I will just point you to a couple of resources:
Illustrated introduction to Christianity and prison abolition by Hannah Bowman (hosted here on Christians for Abolition), which includes discussion of this passage
“Prisons and the Bible,” an excerpt from Lee Griffith’s book The Fall of the Prison, made available by Black and Pink, which goes into great detail about the context and interpretation of this passage
The key questions abolitionists ask are these: why are we quick to apply Jesus’ words in this passage to spiritual captivity and not also to material ones? And — without restricting the broader vision of liberation from both material and spiritual powers presented in this text — how do we see the spiritual forces of sin, captivity, and death playing out in real material ways in our current systems of policing and prisons? The point is not to restrict Jesus’ message to the issue of abolition, but to allow Jesus’ promise of new creation and the coming reign of God to really “dwell richly” in our current material reality.
—Hannah