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.