How do you feel about the book of Romans? Whether you were raised in dominant American Christianity or just absorbed it through osmosis, it is very hard to open Paul’s letter to the church in Rome and not hear it in the voice of modern evangelicalism, contrasting “faith” and “works” and proclaiming a Jesus who “frees us from ‘the law.’” The supersessionist replacement theology of Paul the American Christian would be confusing to Paul the 1st-Century Jew, and to his Gentile and Jewish audience.
Thankfully, in recent decades there has been an abundance of scholarship asking, in essence, “What if Paul wasn’t a self-hating Jew?” At the risk of summarizing an entire academic library in a few sentences, this new perspective argues that for Paul, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus acts to welcome Gentiles into God’s family without replacing or reducing the Chosen-ness of the Jewish people. And this happens, crucially, not because of our own “righteousness” in faith (as the NRSV translates this passage), but because of God’s righteous commitment to us. Our faith doesn’t “save” us Gentiles, God’s love has already redeemed us. God leaves no one behind.
We can continue to debate this, but for me this reading helps us see and understand Paul the incarcerated organizer. Here, God does not ordain punishment—human or divine—for our unbelief or our bad works. If all people are now inheritors of God’s Chosen-ness, we all “inherit the world” through the righteousness of God’s belief in us. Whether or not we keep the faith or behave well, God has faith in us. God is rooting for all of us, collectively as a species. As Jewish poet Aurora Levins Morales writes,
This time we’re tied at the ankles.
We cannot cross until we carry each other,
all of us refugees, all of us prophets.
No more taking turns on history’s wheel,
trying to collect old debts no-one can pay.
The sea will not open that way.
This time that country
is what we promise each other,
our rage pressed cheek to cheek
until tears flood the space between,
until there are no enemies left,
because this time no one will be left to drown
and all of us must be chosen.
This time it’s all of us or none.
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.
As we enter Lent, Psalm 32 offers a beautiful picture of confession and forgiveness. Besides the classically-theological elements of this psalm, such as its emphasis on God’s mercy, the psalm shows us a way into the pathways of accountability as a positive practice that is helpful for building alternatives to carceral ways of thinking, being, and responding to harm.
After the psalmist tells the truth about their sin to God, God responds not only with deliverance (v. 7) but also with instruction and counsel (v. 8). God’s response is not to forgive, but to guide the sinner into paths of accountability. Following God’s counsel is (theologically) a form of repentance; it is also an empowerment for an accountable way of living in community.
It feels important to always emphasize that accountability is an ongoing practice, and one which is fundamentally about how we live in ways responsible to one another, and to God. Even the more direct work of taking accountability for harm we do is grounded in the ongoing practices of accountability to each other, as Mia Mingus describes. As she poignantly asks, “What if accountability wasn’t scary?”
I think Psalm 32 offers, in theological language, a picture of accountability that isn’t scary. It shows one way of practicing accountability in “joy” and “steadfast love” (v. 10–11).
A further resource for thinking about accountability specifically in response to harm is Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s book On Repentance and Repair, and this guide for Christians studying that book during Lent is a helpful resource. Each of these tools exist to help us conceive of accountability as a liberating, joyful way of moving forward when we have done harm. They let us feel, along with the author of Psalm 32, the joyous, powerful response of God to each of our tiny, halting attempts to turn from harm and make things right.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.
What the author of Matthew is trying to do in his gospel is actually quite simple. He is interested in establishing Jesus’ authority for a largely Jewish audience. This particular section does this by showing how Jesus is the fulfillment of the work of Moses and Elijah: the law and the prophets. Jesus’ trip up the mountain with Peter, James, and John mirrors Moses’ trip up Mt. Sinai with Israelite leaders. Moses spends 40 days on the mountain shrouded by a cloud that looks like devouring fire. This was the glory of the Lord, and within that cloud God teaches Moses how they are to live together and worship God in covenantal relationship. When Moses returns his face is shining, reflecting the presence of God. Like Moses, Jesus shines on the mountain-top. Like Moses, a bright, glowing cloud overtakes them. In case readers have gotten the message yet, a voice from the cloud says ““This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”
There is more that readers have gleaned from this text though. Several commentators emphasize the theophany aspect of the transfiguration and suggest that this points to Jesus’ divine status. Multiple commenters in Feasting on the Word focus on Jesus’ divinity and Hauerwas notes that Moses simply reflects God’s glory after being in the cloud for 40 days, but Jesus’ whole body shines from within. Yet other commenters, like Douglas Hare in the Interpretation commentary, argue that this is certainly not an expression of Jesus’ divinity. Hare states that Jesus “is presented not as a non-human, but as a transformed human who will be the pioneer and perfecter of those who will share his heavenly experience.”1
These are actually not contradictory ideas. The union of divinity and humanity in Jesus should not distance him from us in any way. It is precisely the union of the divine and human in Christ that assures us that we will experience a similar divinized humanity. When we are divinized in Christ, our humanity isn’t annihilated, instead we become more fully human and more deeply humane. For example, for one of the early Cappadocian fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, our divinization in Christ is how the Imago Dei is realized in humanity; what was intended in our creation. This led Gregory to condemn slavery. Any violent division among humans is opposed to the Imago Dei that is at the heart of our collective humanity.2 Our god-like-ness is reflected in how humane we are. It is realized in our ability to love each other well. It is realized in our ability to delight in and advocate for one another’s well-being.
Objections to Jesus’ divine-human status are often related to how inconceivable this notion is. It is not uncommon in the Bible for people to respond to the divine with fear. The divine is so foreign, powerful, beautiful… so beyond us, that it feels threatening. Likewise, we often respond to the foreign other in fear. Our fear perverts our expression of divine attributes. We pervert beauty by hoarding it and pervert power by oppressing others. This is not what divine power and beauty are like. Christ touches us and reminds us “do not be afraid.” The beauty and power of the divine is for us. It is in the divine that we become fully ourselves, in harmonious relation with one another.
While the author of Matthew wasn’t commenting on Trinitarian doctrine, Jesus is mediating the divine in a unique way in this text. God is doing something new in Jesus. Jesus doesn’t tell us what God said, God tells us to listen to what Jesus says. Jesus doesn’t give us the word of God, he is the word of God. Yet, Jesus doesn’t want his authority established on a beatific vision. Peter, James, and John may be given some private encouragement as they enter into Jesus’ last days, but it isn’t until he becomes an executed criminal and is raised from the dead that Jesus wants people to hear about this moment of glorification. Ultimately his authority lies in his overcoming of condemnation and punishment, death and hell.
The cosmic, beautiful, divine Christ is often contrasted with the earthly suffering Jesus, but in the transfiguration the divine and human are drawn together. The man who glows with a beautiful light and is called the beloved son of God is also the Son of Man who is hung on a cross and whose flesh is eternally scarred. Courts, prisons, and execution chambers are ugly places, but this is where God goes and when God tells us to “listen to him!” God is commanding us to listen to and obey a man who suffered in these ugly places. Though our world hoards beauty and power at the expense of the weak, God’s power is not something to be afraid of, and God’s glory will descend into the ugliest places, to raise people up into their own beauty and power with transfigured scars that speak to their authority. This eschatological vision is both an encouragement for those imprisoned right now and a condemnation of the systems that imprison them today.
1 Hare, Douglas R. A.. Matthew (Interpretation, a Bible commentary for teaching and preaching). (1993) Louisville, Ky: John Knox Press, 199.
2 See Hart, D. Bentley. “The ‘Whole Humanity’: Gregory of Nyssa’s Critique of Slavery in Light of His Eschatology.” Scottish Journal of Theology 54, no. 1 (2001): 51–69. doi:10.1017/S0036930600051188.
Sarah Lynne Gershon (she/her) is an MDiv/MTS student, DOC pastor, and lives at the Bloomington Catholic Worker.
This passage from Deuteronomy which promises “life and death, blessings and curses” is often a challenging one from a restorative-justice or abolitionist perspective. The stark contrast made here in Deuteronomy and the promise of reward and punishment for human action drive the Deuteronomic History of Israel, the telling of Israel’s history which unfolds over the books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings which sees Israel prosper when they are faithful and be punished when they do wrong. Such a simplistic narrative of reward and punishment is at first glance opposed to the more transformative understandings of accountability which derive from transformative justice practices.
I think this is a misunderstanding of the Deuteronomic History, which in fact offers a more nuanced and dialectical attempt to point towards the difficult-to-express reality of accountability without punishment. I’ve written more about that, in connection with the prophet Jeremiah, in this post.
But I also think there is value in facing the stark choice between life and death in this passage as an existential reality, reading it on its own terms and not just in light of how later authors use it to interpret Israel’s history. Because abolition, fundamentally, requires us to make a stark choice between life and death.
Prisons and policing are “death-making institutions,” as Mariame Kaba says. Ruth Wilson Gilore defines racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” in Golden Gulag. To uphold these systems is to support death-dealing. In place of them, abolitionists demand solutions aimed at life: caregiving, community. As Kaba and Andrea Ritchie put it, abolitionists demand “safety,” which depends on strengthening all the things in communities that can help promote well-being, rather than “security” provided by the exclusion and violence enforced by carceral systems.
The difference between safety and security is perhaps why the solutions abolition provides to violence don’t always compute within a carceral framework. Safety requires holistic approaches. It requires strengthening communities and practicing safety and accountability in small and partial ways, as Mia Mingus suggests, not simply looking for solutions that immediately remove or make invisible harm when crises occur. Supporters of police and prisons sometimes seem to think abolitionist responses are unserious because the response to violence is the ongoing production of care and safety, rather than insisting on violence in return for violence. But this turn to such deep, lasting work that can prevent violence in communities and defend against it is precisely the work of “choosing life,” the work of building beautiful things, which is — as we see in Deuteronomy — opposed to death-dealing systems, which are idolatry.
Ultimately, Deuteronomy poses an existential challenge we cannot avoid. To choose safety instead of security, to choose life over death, requires complete and unreserved commitment on our part.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.
