Month: September 2022

Luke 17:5–10

Jesus’ words on faith teach us an insight essential to abolition: faith is an act of praxis.

Restorative justice is evident in the context of this passage. Rev. James M. Donohue points out that the disciples’ request for Jesus to increase their faith comes in response to his teaching on forgiveness: it is because forgiveness, even in the face of sincere repentance, is so difficult!

But I think Jesus’ teaching on faith here offers a response to the complaint often posed to abolitionists that abolition seems like an impractical, utopian dream. Abolition is an act of faith because it is not yet obvious what a world without prisons looks like, it’s true. At the same time, Jesus does not focus on how we imagine a future we cannot yet see. Instead, he turns faith back to the question of practice: faith is simply acting in accordance with what is right, without knowing how it will work out. Acting in faith, he tells us, is “only doing what we ought to have done.”

I would be remiss not to mention the truly difficult nature of Jesus’ words here, given his reference to us as “worthless slaves” — I hesitate to draw on this parable, as I often do when Jesus uses the language of slavery, especially in ways that, inconceivably and immorally, compare God to a slaveholder. At the same time, I find his turn to the idea of faith as following the commandments of God still resonates for me: Faith is not the knowing or the imagining of the future, but simply the doing. And the doing is, in fact, doing the work which is opposed to every form of bondage, captivity, and enslavement, not reifying structures of bondage even through their metaphorical application to our relationship to God. The text works against itself here as we recommit ourselves to the work of liberation.

What this means for abolition is that our faith comes not in being able to answer questions about how a world without police and prisons will be possible, but instead recommitting to acting in resistance to police and prisons simply because that’s the right thing to do. We work for abolition because the inhumanity and barbarity of our carceral state cannot stand. As Micah Herskind summarizes one of Mariame Kaba’s points: “You don’t need to have an answer to every question posed to abolitionists — i.e. ‘what about someone who did fill in the blank‘ — to work toward the demolition of the PIC. We create safety in community with each other; we work out answers to these questions in the same way.”

Faith is not even about being able to imagine answers to these questions. Faith is simply about doing the work placed in front of us. Abolition is a moral imperative. We commit ourselves to abolition because it is right and say “we have done only what we ought to have done!”

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

Luke 16:19–31

The name Lazarus is a Greek version of the Hebrew name, Eleazar, which means ‘God will help’. The most famous Lazarus in the Bible is a friend of Jesus in the Gospel of John. He is the brother of Mary and Martha. He becomes ill and dies before Jesus cane arrive. Jesus weeps. Jesus grieves. And then Jesus calls him and he lives again.

Another Biblical Lazarus is the subject of this parable of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. In these twelve verses, Jesus covers a lot of ground: poverty, wealth, class, death, eternal life. At the beginning of the parable, the rich man lives richly, and Lazarus, the poor man, is sick and hungry, laying at the gates of the rich man. They both die and there is a great reversal. Lazarus is carried to the bosom of Abraham, while the rich man goes to Hades for torment. And yet both locations (Abraham’s bosom and Hades) are visible to each other and the rich man cries out about his pain, to which Abraham responds.

As I said, Jesus covers a lot in this parable. It is rich with meaning. But what I want to focus on is the last verse and how this call directly connects to abolition. The rich man asks Abraham for permission to go warn his family about the consequences of their actions. Eventually, Abraham says the following: ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’

Because of how our modern world is structured towards the violence of the state and the separation of humanity through jails and prisons, it can feel like we need an extra word from Jesus to convince people of the error of their thoughts. We may think, “if only Jesus could tell the governors and the legislators and wardens, then they would really know.”

And yet, Moses and the prophets already speaks to abolition. The Gospel of Jesus Christ already speaks to abolition. Someone rising from the dead is not going to add anything to what is already present in the Bible. The word of God for freedom and humanity is already there. Hope is not found in the extra thing but in carrying out faithfully the words God has already put on God’s people to break the chains of this world. We don’t need to wait for a new message to act. 

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

Luke 16:1–13

Ok, let’s be honest. This parable is weird. Parables often elude easy interpretation, but this one seems to keep twisting and turning.

First things first: It seems unlikely that Jesus meant for the “master” to stand in for God. Let’s take that interpretation off the table.

With that out of the way, what is happening here? While the Roman imperial class system was very different from contemporary capitalism, one possibility is that we could have a parallel here about the choices faced by those in “middle management.” We have a parable about a manager who has to choose whether to put his trust in his boss, or in the people he has been trasked with extracting wealth from. He has to choose who he will serve: God, or money.

Earlier this month, the renowned organizer and journalist Barbara Ehrenreich passed away. Among her many contributions to contemporary liberation movements is her concept of the “professional managerial class”—those whose social function is as an intermediary between workers and owners.

While people have endlessly debated the meaning of this term in the forty-five years since she introduced it, Ehrenreich wanted us to understand how people’s class aspirations can undermine solidarity. In an interview before her death, she said,

“Sometimes, like in healthcare, it’s very hard to get nurses to form alliances with the technicians and even the lower-level nursing staff. And that’s because nurses have such a fragile grip on professionalism themselves. They’re still not taken seriously by doctors and administrators. I can understand it, but these are the things organizers have to work on step by step.”

Who do we build with—our bosses, or workers? Who do we serve—God, or money? While people in the PMC are rarely given as clear a choice as this parable presents, there are myriad small choices every day. And we must choose who to serve.

Rev. Jay Bergen is a pastor at Germantown Mennonite Church in Philadelphia, and a volunteer organizer with the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI), a campaign fighting to end life sentences and heal communities across Pennsylvania.

Luke 15:1–10

The parables of Luke 15 are some of the most famous in the Bible. We have the Parable of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin. Each parable shows an inefficient God who doesn’t look at the big picture. The big picture is that 99 of 100 is a great success rate; nine out of ten is fantastic. Why would the lady spend all that time for one coin?

Earlier this week, my children lost our Apple TV remote in the couch. I spent twenty minutes trying to shake it out or find it some way. No luck. I gave up and moved on with my life. The coin, though, didn’t get lost on its own. The lone sheep, in fact, did.

There are a number of questions we could ask about the sheep. What if that lost sheep deserved it? What if they wanted to be lost. What if they were trying to run away? What if they were just a bad sheep and if we kept him in the flock, he would just make other sheep turn bad? If we rescue the sheep, isn’t that what economists call moral hazard? Wouldn’t the sheep just go out and get lost again in order to get more attention from the shepherd?

The parables are framed around the grumbling of Jesus’ opponents as they see sinners come close to Jesus. They make the ever ancient/ever new claim about who deserves the attention of Jesus and who does not. They imply that because Jesus spends time with sinners, he must be a sinner. And yet the parables cut through this wicked logic of separating humanity between the deserving and the undeserving.

This separation of deserving and undeserving is at the heart of the continuance of criminal justice and the prison industrial complex. There are those who deserve to be punished and those who don’t. It is a logic completely at odds with the Good News of Jesus Christ. It is a logic at odds with the teaching of Jesus Christ. When churches acquiesce to this cruel logic of separation, we let go of Good News for the sake of expediency and efficiency.

There is another hope found in these parables. The church that has turned away from the Good News of Jesus to embrace the carceral state is lost and Jesus is coming to bring us home. 

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