Luke 6:27–38
I never found it difficult to love my enemies until I had some. I grew up in a cozy suburb with little police presence and not a prison in sight. The most I saw of police was the inexplicably present “School Resource Officer” at my public high school. Raised among evangelicals, I remember being taught that my enemies were people whom I didn’t like or with whom I didn’t get along. The most dramatic enemy was an abstract foe in a culture war. These are not the kind of “enemies,” I think, of which Jesus spoke.
In my first years of ministry under the Trump Administration, I finally made some real enemies. One of our church members was kidnapped by law enforcement while attending what was supposed to be a routine check-in regarding his immigration paperwork. As I waited for him to come out after doing his biometrics, I received a panicked call from him that they’d put him in handcuffs and were taking him away. Then the line cut out.
I made a list of enemies over the next 45 days as we fought a losing battle against his deportation. Kelly. Kunde. Gallagher. Nielsen. Trump. Officials all up and down the authoritarian ladder, from case officers to paper pushers to the ones dictating the policy that got our friend incarcerated and ultimately deported.
The 45 days our church member spent in immigration detention should be enough to convince anyone that abolition is necessary. He was hospitalized several times because of negligence toward his medical conditions. He spent time in at least three prisons and not a care was given to his struggling body in most of them. For most of his detention, he was isolated in a remote notorious prison designed to alienate immigrants from support in rural Georgia.
But the Scripture passage this week isn’t about that. It’s about the people who made that world possible and continue to maintain it (because it did not leave office with the former administration). I can’t tell you exactly what it means to love those people. I’m still struggling to figure that out myself. But what I can say is that this passage demands we don’t wish the same depraved system of incarceration on them, even though they made and maintain it. And if we don’t wish prison on the only people who we really might think deserve it, we certainly can’t maintain that status quo for people who aren’t our enemies and certainly don’t.
For all the focus we put in this passage on turning the other cheek, I believe the answer to the vexing questions here may lie elsewhere. In v. 30, Jesus makes a remark that seems out of place when talking about enemies. “Give to everyone who begs of you.” The response to a cruel and shattered world is not to wield its own weapons against it and against your enemies. The response is abundance. The response is to make plain God’s provision and love to the world.
The project of abolition is not merely the ending of incarceration or the abolition of police. The project of abolition must necessarily involve the creation of a world that obviously has no need for such things, where the existence of these systems would seem absurd to everyone present. We need to recognize and distribute the abundance that God has given us in this world so that everyone has what they need. Then everyone can thrive and not just attempt to survive.
Even our enemies.
Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his) is a Baptist pastor and writer in North Carolina.