Month: October 2023

The “Greatest Commandment” that Jesus identifies in Matthew 22 and its parallels originates in the Torah (even the precise combination Jesus makes is found in earlier Jewish sources*), and its presence in the reading from Leviticus for this week sits the command to love your neighbor as yourself next to a series of other social-oriented instructions. Here’s a simplified list: 

• Do not base your judicial outcomes on defendant’s income (19:15)
• Do not slander each other (v. 16)
• Do not profit based off other’s pain (v. 16)
• Do not hate each other (v. 17)
• Do not let injustice slide (v. 17)
• Do not center retribution in your relationships with one another (v. 18)

All of these are surmised in vv. 2 and 18 with general commands: “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” and “love your neighbor as yourself” (NRSV). I’ve adjusted the wording for the others from direct translation in hopes that we see how obviously our society fails to live up to even the spirit of these commands, particularly in the criminal justice system. 

 Our judicial outcomes are absolutely driven by defendants’ income. Innumerable people take plea deals for crimes they didn’t commit because they can’t afford a lawyer with enough bandwidth to defend them and they don’t want to risk even more punishment and prison time. The public defense system is woefully inadequate (Maine doesn’t even have one, other states are governed by state and county funding, which is far from equitable across geographies) and the plea deal is often the least worst way out. At the same time, the rich have no trouble avoiding lawsuits, punishment, and other consequences for regular wrongdoing. When they fail to avoid it, in fact, it makes news.

The accused and convicted (guilty or not) face immense slander, including barriers to employment, the ballot box, and other critical re-entry needs. The American system very much uses them as scapegoats and heap upon them social ills that many conveniently ignore in light of presumed guilt. 

In 2017, the Prison Policy Initiative estimated that the cost to state and federal governments (and impacted families!) for our incarceration system is upwards of $182 billion. Billions of those dollars go to private prisons, as well. Whatever way you cut it, extraordinary amounts of people are making extraordinary amounts of money off the pain of those who suffer in our prison system (guilty or innocent). This structure certainly falls woefully short of Leviticus 19:16’s injunction against “profit by the blood of your neighbor.” 

The remaining commands are also easily seen as violated. The prison industrial complex only multiplies hate. Our collective (often willful) ignorance of its evil points to our own guilt. The entire system also centers on retribution rather than love for neighbors. Preaching on Leviticus usually isn’t popular, but the Torah is radical in its reproach of our society and preachers should feel empowered to use it as a matrix for judgment. No genuine conscience can look at the prison industrial complex, read these words from Leviticus, and walk away comfortable or at ease. Sometimes, that’s how we need to leave church on Sunday morning—at a fundamental dis-ease with the world around us.   

Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his) is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina.

* – See notes on Matthew 22 in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, ed. Levine. 

This Gospel passage tells us that the Pharisees and Herodians were trying to entrap Jesus. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” (Matt 22:17, NRSV). With this question, they tried to force Jesus to choose between loyalty to his people and loyalty to his government. Paying taxes meant supporting the oppressive Roman regime, with its military-police who bully and abuse residents; incarcerate, torture and execute dissidents; and wage wars of colonial expansion. That was a betrayal to the colonized people of Judea. Encouraging people not to pay taxes was a surefire way to provoke Roman wrath and be labeled a criminal who deserves to be incarcerated, tortured, and executed — as Jesus would soon experience. (Remember that this text is set during Jesus’ final week, between his triumphal entry into Jerusalem and his Last Supper, arrest, and crucifixion.) Jesus very deftly skirted the trap by telling his interrogators to show him a denarius coin and asking them, “Whose image and inscription is this?” (Matt 21:20, CEB). They identified Caesar Tiberius’ face on the coin. Jesus famously told them, “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God” (Matt 22:21, CEB). 

The key word that the Common English Bible translation makes plain for us is “image” in verse 20 (Gk. eikōn, literally “icon”). The 3rd century north African theologian Tertullian interpreted this to mean that we should give “the image of Caesar, which is on the coin, to Caesar, and the image of God, which is on [humans], to God; so as to render to Caesar indeed money, to God yourself” (Tertullian, On Idolatry, chp. 15). In other words, we owe God our very lives because we human beings are made in the image of God.

What does this have to do with the abolition of prisons and police? First of all, this question about taxation is very relevant to contemporary conversations about defunding and divesting from prisons, police, and other harmful aspects of the criminal-legal system. As Jesus teaches elsewhere, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt 6:21). It is right to question the morality of paying into systems that control, abuse, and destroy lives. 

Secondly and relatedly, the way we treat the accused and incarcerated is dehumanizing. It defaces the image of God in each one of its victims. Police and prisons function to strip so-called “criminals” of their God-given dignity and human rights. But Jesus calls us to offer our whole selves, souls, and bodies to God because we belong to God. Belonging to God means that we do not belong to jailers, wardens, judges, governors, presidents, or Caesars. Even if they take our money, they should not and cannot take the image of God that is fundamental to who we are. 

It is easy to use dehumanizing and demonizing language to describe criminals and enemies to justify the evils of police, prisons, and war. Demons and monsters don’t need to be treated with mercy or respect, after all; they simply must be destroyed at all costs. Right now, we are hearing about the dehumanization of Palestinians and Israelis alike (depending on your source) in the reports coming from this month’s brewing war . We are regularly exposed to the dehumanization of criminals in sensationalist, fear-mongering local news. But even those who commit heinous, dreadful, evil behaviors are not monsters. They are no less our siblings because we were all made in the image of God and God declared all of us “very good” (Genesis 1:27, 31, NRSV). God does not allow us to distance ourselves from other members of the human family. Offering ourselves up to God must lead to a recognition of the divine spark in every other person on earth. It must lead us to more compassionate responses to violence and crime in our neighborhoods and around the globe. It must lead to abolition of the United States’ violent, dehumanizing prison and police systems.

The Rev. Guillermo A. Arboleda is the rector of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Savannah, GA, and the Missioner for Racial Justice of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia.

Isaiah 25:1–9

As we prepare for worship on Sunday, especially those of us who preach, I know that each one of us is wrestling with what word to offer regarding the war in Palestine. For anyone who speaks of good and evil publicly—and with social media, that is all of us—we can easily become overwhelmed with the anxiety of choosing the right words, anticipating the counter-arguments, and not disappearing into empty discourse. 

This week my social media offered me a plethora of positions. First, the ‘stand with Israel’ crowd which itself ranged from ‘Israel has the right to self-defense’ to explicit calls for genocide. Second came ‘we grieve the violence on both sides,’ that ahistorical appeal to ‘peace.’ To the left of that are organizations and individuals trying to hold the grief and suffering of Israelis alongside a larger critique of the occupation and apartheid and/or Israel as a settler-colony. And finally, some have called for liberation by any means necessary, considering murdered Israeli civilians unavoidable collateral in the anti-imperial struggle.  

How we talk about violence, resistance, colonialism, anti-semitism, anti-Arab racism, genocide, the US war machine, and Christian Zionism matters a great deal, but in times like this our words (and our infographics) feel deeply inadequate for the task of creating justice.

Instead of moral righteousness, mostly I feel grief and complicity. This past Sunday, I told my church that the blessing and burden of pacifism (we’re Mennonites) is that we grieve all violence, and we grieve our own complicity and our failure to prevent death and suffering. 

This Isaiah passage is deeply disturbing and timely in its vision: ‘For you have made the city a heap…. you have been a refuge to the poor, a refuge to the needy in their distress…. And God will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever.’ I am wrestling with Isaiah, alternately moved and horrified.

I cannot read these words without picturing Gaza bombed. I cannot read these words without picturing the shroud of fear cast over children in Gaza, or my friends trapped in their homes in Al Khalil, or my Jewish friends grieving relatives in Israel who have been killed. I cannot read these words without wondering where this God of refuge was when early US settlers displaced and ethnically cleansed the Lenape people on whose land I currently sit. I cannot read these words without feeling the ties of complicity and solidarity that bind my body and heart to the white phosphorus being dropped by the Israeli parents, the grieving parents on both sides, or the Gaza children climbing over the broken prison walls to touch the dirt of a homeland they have only known in stories. 

Hope is hard to come by right now. Rather than replacing it with righteousness, I am seeking out a God who will ‘wipe away the tears from all faces’  while still proclaiming the inbreaking end of settler-colonial violence. This God does not keep me passive—as I finish this, I am preparing to head downtown to a Palestine solidarity rally. But hopefully my wrestling with Isaiah and my seeking of God will lead me to humble action on the side of liberation for all people, that larger vision of God swallowing up death forever. May it be so.

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.

In a field not too far from my home, a grapevine struggles to survive. The field wasn’t always just a field; wildflowers and fruit trees grew there not too long ago. At one time, the landowner allowed others to plant vegetable gardens there as well. But eventually he decided he preferred the look of golf courses instead. The gardeners were told to leave. The fruit trees were cut down. The flowers were replaced with grass. That single grape vine still lives at the edge of the property. Occasionally, one of the former gardeners sneaks by to harvest some of the grapes, but the vine isn’t as fruitful as it used to be due to neglect. Where there was once abundance, the landowner’s abuse has produced barrenness. 

In Isaiah’s parable, the prophet sings of his beloved who planted a vineyard and did not neglect the vines, but nurtured them with care and provision. Despite the love and nourishment poured into the vineyard, though, something went wrong. The vines produced wild and rotting grapes. Eventually, the one who planted the vines, seeing they were not fruitful, allowed them to go to waste. 

If the metaphor is unclear to his readers, Isaiah explains in verse 7 that the vineyard and grape vines represent Israel and the people of Judah, but where the Lord expected justice (mishpat) among them, there was bloodshed (mispakh), and where God expected righteousness (tsedaqah), there was a cry of need (tse’aqah). God loved and nurtured God’s people and expected fruitfulness from them but found corruption instead. Where God intended abundance, instead there was violence and oppression.

Perhaps we can see examples in our own communities of the ways in which God’s abundant provision has been neglected in favor of oppressive violence. Where there could be community centers and community gardens, instead there are prison cells. Funding that could support municipal housing pads police budgets. Resources that could provide for mental health services are redirected to systems of incarceration. Where God desires abundance, we find injustice. 

And there, a prophetic word is needed to spark the imaginations of God’s people. In barren landscapes, can we envision abundance again? Where we hear desperate cries of need, can we proclaim hope? I have heard that if you spread some seeds in the corner of a grassy field, the birds and wind will spread them even further until that field is covered in wildflowers (although I’ll never admit to having done that myself). How might we spread seeds of hope that invite God’s people to imagine and help build a world with fewer prisons and more vineyards?

Jed Tate is a United Methodist pastor in North Carolina.