Luke 13:10–17
But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.”
When it comes to freedom, we have a lot of excuses. Whenever any proposals for life-saving, life-sustaining, or otherwise substantial change arises in our public discourse we find ourselves drowning in excuses. Climate proposals? Think of the lost jobs! Healthcare reform? It’s too expensive! Expansion of the social safety net? We can’t incentivize people not to work! The same is undoubtedly true whenever police and prison abolition is brought up. Look no further than the elite-driven public freakout when activists proposed shifting money from inflated police budgets to social services.
Likewise, when Jesus presumes to expand the healing reach of God, his contemporaries were full of excuses. The excuse that receives notice in Luke’s Gospel is a protest over timing. It’s the sabbath. No work should be done on the sabbath day. The sabbath is a time set aside from the grinding gears of production, the exchange of goods and services, and the machinations of all the things that make up “the economy.” The sabbath is a liberating social framework designed to help God’s people thrive. But here, it is an excuse.
Our social frameworks aren’t often meant for our thriving (unlike the sabbath) but they are still used as an excuse for change. If you question one aspect of how we live, other aspects (just or not) are used to get in the way. Abolitionists are often told things like: What would happen to all the people currently in our prisons? Where would they go? How would we reduce crime without police? Wouldn’t we be unsafe? These objections are often masks for unpleasant realities: To drastically reduce our prison population (around 2 million people), we would have to do something about our housing shortage (we are around 3.8 million homes short). To reduce crime, if not through reducing criminalization, we would need to address things like food security (38 million people were food insecure in 2020) and wages (stagnant for decades until very recently). Toppling those dominos seems like an insurmountable challenge, one most people would rather not confront. Freedom, we’re told, just creates more problems.
This is part of why Mariame Kaba calls abolition not just a “negative project” but a “vision of a restructured society.” Imagining abolition requires imagining “a world where we have everything we need: food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean water, and more.” That’s the mistake of Jesus’ detractors in this story. They miss the point of sabbath, which is itself a vision of a restructured society in which everyone has what they need. The point of sabbath is our thriving, not our suffering. It is a positive, not so much a negative. Our social structures should be geared toward our collective wellbeing, not the prohibition of this or that activity or punishment as the only recourse for wrongdoing.
Abolition is fundamentally an act of organized imagination of a better world. When considering the Gospel text this week, let it provoke your imagination about what is possible (what Jesus did rarely seemed possible) and communicate a message of possibility to your community. If you only hear excuses in response to the gospel of abolition, take those excuses as an opportunity for imagination. How could everything be different?
Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his)is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina. You can find more of his work at wespearsnewsome.com.