Jesus gives us a parable of an unjust judge in Luke 18. At first glance, we might think that the judge is going to be torn down by the end of the parable, but Jesus, instead, lifts him up.
It would be convenient, from an abolitionist perspective, to have Jesus directly exhort unjust judges to change their ways. Then, we could map the parable directly on to our legal system and point to how unjust judges need to change their ways today. But something else is going on here.
Jesus does not lift up the unjust judge as an example to which we should aspire. The unjust judge marks a reality to which we must face. Jesus, instead, lifts up the widow who comes back to the judge again and again. She doesn’t tear him down or remark about how ill-suited he is for his position. Instead she seeks justice. She asks, again and again, grant me justice.
We don’t know how long it took for the unjust judge to respond and finally be sick of her and grant her claim. It was probably a long time, yet she continued.
Jesus lifts up this parable as a call for us to seek justice from the God who is just and good. We are to seek justice continually, not just now and then. We are to seek justice until justice comes.
This parable offers us an example of how to seek justice. To seek it from God first of all. As well, to seek it from structures in this world that lack justice. This parable offers us encouragement to continue even when faced with an unjust judge, and that if our call is first to God, justice will be done.
Let us be encouraged in seeking prison abolition. Our goal is not to find the perfect judge on earth and use them to further our ends. Our goal is to seek justice with the just and the unjust of this world. To seek God’s righteousness faithfully and continually and to receive Christ’s encouragement in this. God is with us and God will hear us.
Wilson Pruitt is a Methodist pastor and translator in Spicewood, TX.
Jeremiah’s prophecies are both disturbing and inspiring. They remind us of how embedded we are to systems of injustice and idolatry, and how difficult it is to untangle and release ourselves from these webs of oppression. Jeremiah preaches through-out the reign of five Judean kings. The first king, Josiah, was a reformer. The Judean people had fallen away from God, adopting the customs and practices of the oppressive Assyrians while under their rule, but King Josiah recognized his people’s faithlessness, instituting and promoting reforms outlined in Deuteronomy. Though initially encouraged (see Jer. 11:1-8) Jeremiah viewed these reforms as too superficial, too little and too late. When King Josiah died, Judah fell back into idolatry. Subsequent kings would not work to uproot the oppressive, idolatrous systems in Judah and radically re-orient the Judeans towards a faithful covenantal relationship with God and one another. Jeremiah warned that this would lead to the total destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the rising Babylonian Empire, the death of thousands of people, and the exile of the Judah’s political and religious leaders into Babylon. Relatively powerless and poor or rich and powerful, it didn’t matter, all suffered–in part–due to the political and religious leaders unwillingness to call their people to repentance and enact systemic change.
And yet, I write “in part,” because Babylon was just as complicit in oppression as the Judeans. Despite Jeremiah’s recognition that the overthrow of Jerusalem and exile was a result of Judah’s imitation of Assyria, and despite God’s providential use of Babylon, no one in this drama is faithful or justified. Jeremiah also preaches God’s condemnation against the Babylonians. This prompts Daniel Berrigan in his book Jeremiah: the World, the Wound of God to wonder what difference there really was between idolatrous Judah and Babylon, speculating that “perhaps… psychologically, spiritually, a form of exile was underway long before the Babylonians ‘came like a wolf on the fold,’” (Fortress Press: 1999, 107). If Judah was acting like Babylon they may as well be ruled by Babylonians… Which leads us to the verse in our lectionary today, often referred to as “a disturbing hope,” where the exiled Judeans are encouraged to humbly accept their defeat, their status as exiles, and settle in Babylon for at least a generation, even praying for the well-being of the city of exile. This would not have been a comforting word for political leaders who were actively planning their next revolt.
For the abolitionist preacher this context needs to be supplied to understand how this can preach in our time. While the Judeans are certainly an oppressed people in relation to Babylon, they are a people whose minds have been shaped by Imperial rule. The leaders are scheming with other powerful nations. They might seek reform and speak “peace, peace,” but their words are empty when the people are not committed to repentance and repair. The rule of Babylon is more blatant oppression, but it isn’t altogether different. And yet, in the midst of all of this, the poor suffer under political and military maneuvering. God is ultimately putting an end to this violent farce when he encourages the exiled leaders to accept their fate. God will work to renew and vindicate Jerusalem in a new generation under humbled leadership.
Though it would be a mistake to totally equate King Josiah’s reforms with current reformist policies, Jeremiah reminds us that reforms are not enough if they don’t transform the root of a problem. For abolitionist organizers, this relates to the need to totally reimagine what community care and justice look like. Jeremiah also reminds us that we must be willing to speak truth about political maneuvering that ultimately is using the oppressed for political gain. Consider, for example, leaders who will claim to be concerned about the well-being of prisoners as a pretext for building bigger jails or police reform that simply increases police budgets. Our naysaying to these reforms might, like Jeremiah’s word, feel overly strident and condemnatory, and our predictions of how these reforms will only lead to further violence and systematic oppression might feel as unreasonably dire as Jeremiah’s predictions sounded, but may his example embolden us as we preach against the systems of oppression and idolatry we are enmeshed in today.
Sarah Lynne Gershon (she/her) is an MDiv/MTS student, DOC pastor, and lives at the Bloomington Catholic Worker.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now large crowds were traveling with Jesus; and he turned and said to them, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, `This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”
As I read through the Luke’s gospel preparing for this lectionary, I was struck by the increasing number of people that flocked to hear and see Jesus. They witnessed his power to heal and willingness to challenge oppressive systems and they wanted in. They heard him preach a gospel that turned the social order upside-down, preaching blessing on those who usually experienced woes and woes for the privileged. When we get to chapter 14, Luke says that many crowds were following Jesus.
For the abolitionist preacher, Jesus’ response provides insight into how we respond to increased interest in prison and police abolition. Instead of downplaying the social and material costs of pursuing his gospel, even the physical risks, Jesus admonishes them to face the radicalness of his message head on. This reminds me of Mariame Kaba’s response to the increased interest in police abolition after George Floyd’s murder: “Yes, We Really Mean Abolish the Police.” Kaba’s writing on abolition is always nuanced, acknowledging that we are working within a system we seek to abolish, but she is also careful to make sure we hold clearly within our work the need to completely uproot this oppressive system.
What Jesus and Mariame Kaba remind us, is that we cannot allow ourselves to remain attached to prisons or policing or confuse reform with abolition. This might alienate friends or family. It might not make for the best marketing. It certainly threatens economies that rely on the prison-industrial complex and raises fears (well-founded or not) for many people around their physical safety and their ability to keep their personal property secure. While some of these concerns are addressed within abolitionist organizing (not profiting off of prisoners, but certainly valuing people’s physical well-being), they are addressed within a framework that wholly disavows punitive and violent methods of addressing harm. In the same way, Jesus is clear that we must completely detach from and disavow the oppressive systems of this world in order to be his disciple. We put our faith in the promise of God’s kingdom, even when it seems foolish. We continue to pursue new ways of living in the world, meeting each other’s needs, and dealing with conflict, even when it feels risky. At times it might really be risky and it will demand a lot of our time and resources. If we advocate for transformative justice and are not willing to put in this work, we will certainly fail and look like fools. For this reason, Jesus doesn’t encourage the crowds by minimizing these costs. Instead, he admonishes them to “count the cost” and seeks followers that will whole-heartedly put their faith in the gospel he is preaching. When we share the good news of transformative justice may we do likewise.
Sarah Lynne Gershon (she/her) is an MDiv/MTS student, DOC pastor, and lives at the Bloomington Catholic Worker.
Who should I invite to my birthday party? This is a serious question for most children. Who is in? Who is out? Who do I want to see? Aging changes the focus for people, but the categorization rarely changes. Who is in my in-group? Who is in my out-group?
The words of Jesus cut right across this tendency. In Luke 14, Jesus begins by tearing apart the desire to be in the seat of honor of ‘important people.’ He then inverts this so that no one is off the hook. Instead of just talking about those moments when you are invited to a meal, Jesus speaks to the host of the meal he is attending and then teaches, by saying how when you are in the position of inviting others “_When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind._”
For the churches of North America, the in-groups and out-groups are often as static as for individuals. The words of Jesus cut against those static assumptions and blind acceptance of status quo institutions, like jails and prisons. Jesus pushes for a radical dissolution of the in-group and out-group categories people use, and this push goes all the way to the institutional level. When society declares people ‘good’ or ‘bad’, this is contrary to the Good News of Jesus Christ. When churches acquiesce to such categories, we ignore the Good News of Jesus Christ. We lie to ourselves by seeking “important” places in society, and we lie by not inviting those whom Jesus calls us to invite to the table.
May we receive the words of Jesus with clear eyes. May we see how our institutions keep us from living the life God calls us to live. And may we work towards freeing our neighbors from such institutions and offering a true seat at the table.
Wilson Pruittis a Methodist pastor and translator in Spicewood, TX.
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.
For the past month, I have been reading Jeremiah every morning, one chapter at a time. It largely makes for depressing reading, a lone and lonely radical railing against the leaders of a nation overrun by internal division and external invasion. As the structures of Judah’s civil society collapse, Jeremiah cries out, “How long?” And as the people despair and turn on each other, he seeks out clarity amidst the chaos: “Is not my word like fire, says the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?”
My social media timeline is full of despair. Many of our movements struggle to maintain hope and a plan that can mobilize the people to action. White Christian nationalism solidifies its wins. Jeremiah might have felt very at home here.
But Jeremiah is not a nihilist, not a cynic who celebrates “being right” as the world burns. Because flickering under the ashes of Jeremiah’s grief is a fierce ember of hope. He still believes that it is worthwhile to speak the truth faithfully, damn the consequences. He still believes in the capacity of the people to do right. Jeremiah’s hope is not just in dreams of a better world, but in the truth of a word like fire, a word that can warm the spirit of the people.
Faith like this may seem small in the face of all this death and destruction. At the end of the book, Jerusalem is destroyed, the people displaced, and Jeremiah is in exile. What has he accomplished? Jeremiah himself wonders about this, constantly worrying, “Will the hearts of the prophets ever turn back?” And yet his students and his descendants knew there was something here, some mustard seed-size faith that still has the power to break the rocks of oppression into pieces.
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.
