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This week marks the point where this project began. In 2020, we started on Advent I and now in 2023, we arrive at the same date. I wrote in the first entry for the Abolition Lectionary about Isaiah 64, one of the lections this week. “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” Isaiah wrote, begging for God’s involvement in their world. The whole passage, along with the reading from Mark this week, is a fantastical and apocalyptic vision of God’s intervention in the world. We would be so lucky for someone to describe abolition as apocalyptic, for then it would at least hold some legitimacy in communities focused on Christian Scripture. Instead, it is usually regarded as fantastical, and not in the fun Dungeons and Dragons sort of fantasy. 

Some of the words that that first entry still rings true today: Most people think abolition is a fantastical idea—they always have. Abolitionists who wanted to end slavery in the United States heard again and again about how disruptive it would be. Those who sought to abolish Jim Crow, lynching, and discrimination at the ballot box heard again and again about how unsettling it would be. Today, calls for the abolition of police and prisons hear the same thing—it’s too troublesome, unruly, and even destructive! Abolition is an impossible consideration because it would upend everything. 

I recently spent time in Northern Ireland learning about peacemaking with folks who lived through the Troubles there. Many were actively engaged in the peacemaking process that (contrary to popular belief) was always going on, struggling to break through. I was struck by two things relevant to today: (1) peacemaking was a long, often-ignored process that didn’t make the headlines until the end and (2) criminal justice reform was integral to making peace and establishing the power-sharing arrangement that exists to this day in Northern Ireland. 

Both the Isaiah text and the Mark text for this week provoke anxiety in their dramatic language. Our world, too, is full of anxiety about the future and the seemingly ever-deteriorating present. What do we do when we look upon this fragile, messed up world we live in? I think those two northern Irish truths have something to tell us.

Isaiah and Mark both speak to work that requires disruption and endurance. That kind of work typically does not make the headlines. The slow work of abolitionists in establishing non-retributive paths to justice, ministry to those harmed by our criminal justice system, and the push for alternatives to our system of policing don’t make the headlines unless they’re being used to scare people. Abolition only makes the headlines when it’s useful to those in power to stir up fear and get people to circle their wagons around them. 

Nevertheless, this disruptive work is at the core of movement toward a more just, merciful, and peaceful society. We will not change the political temperature and the escalating political violence of the United States in particular unless we disarm the criminal justice system that perpetuates both of these threats. Like in Northern Ireland, changing the way the State treats everyday people is integral to establishing a more peaceful society. How can the individual look at how the State treats people (either through policing, incarceration, or even the death penalty) and believe they shouldn’t behave likewise? 

It’s resistance to the State’s story of redemptive violence and justice through violence that is central to the slow work of abolition. Isaiah and Mark push us in that direction and many of the stories of Jesus are prime examples of how to tell a different story than this one. It’s difficult work, but it’s worth it. Keep at it, or as Mark says, “Keep awake.” 

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

Matthew 25:31-46

Reflecting on Matthew 25 during Reign of Christ Sunday gives us the opportunity to envision the kind of kingdom Jesus proclaims for the future while also seeking to understand his calling for us to live out that kingdom now. And as abolitionists we examine this text through the particular lens of ending imprisonment. Therefore, we get to wrestle with the question: what does it mean that Christ the King declares himself Jesus the prisoner?

This passage opens with the proclamation of Christ’s coming reign and judgment. He will gather all nations – all of creation – as he sits on his throne of glory. Thomas Stegman notes, “Matthew draws on imagery from Daniel 7:13–14—where the Ancient of Days, enthroned in glory, bestows on ‘one like a son of man’ (RSV) dominion and glory—to set forth the full manifestation of God’s reign.”¹ Many of us are uncomfortable with this language of dominion and judgment so the preacher may want to take care here. Perhaps it would be helpful to emphasize that the reign of God means the end of the unjust rule of present, oppressive powers. If Christ is king, then oppressors are not. And if Jesus is judge, then our systems of judgment and punishment will be replaced by something else altogether. This new kingdom will be marked instead by compassion and justice.

Care for the “least of these” (v. 40), the people Howard Thurman described as the disinherited, is central to this passage. Compassion for people who are hungry, poor, sick, and incarcerated is so important to Jesus that he says how people have treated them is how they have treated him. When Christ returns and reigns, the question of compassion will be a (the?) primary concern. Our calling, then, as Jesus’s followers is to serve people in need with works of mercy, here and now, trusting that God’s coming kingdom will bring about complete liberation for the “least of these.”

And so, with compassion and care, we visit the prisoner knowing that we are somehow visiting Jesus. This is what it looks like to live into God’s kingdom now. But I tend to believe that, in addition to compassion, Jesus is also calling us to the work of justice as well, which includes the abolition of prisons. After all, if the Son of Man, Christ the King who will one day come in glory, has chosen to be enfleshed as the prisoner, then shouldn’t we have hope that he will, in time, set the prisoner free and end incarceration itself? And as his followers, as people living into the reign of Christ right now, don’t we have a calling to participate in the building of the prison-less Kingdom? What if we built houses and hospitals and community centers and even churches with the bricks of the prisons we dismantled all because we knew that Jesus was behind those walls?

I think any preacher would do well to highlight themes of compassion in a sermon on Matthew 25; however, I believe there is also a declaration of justice. Jesus is proclaiming the good news of the coming kingdom, and inviting us to participate in its construction through the work of mercy for the oppressed. How might we, as preachers who are abolitionists, inspire wonder and spark imaginations about what it might look like to follow Christ the king who is Jesus the prisoner?

Jed Tate is a United Methodist pastor in North Carolina.

1. Thomas D. Stegman, “Exegetical Perspective on Matthew 25:31–46,” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year A, ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, vol. 4 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 333. ↩︎

Matthew 25:1–13

The parable of the bridesmaids which we read this week always presents a challenge for me. I’m angry at the wise bridesmaids for refusing to share their oil, even at the risk of everyone running out! Wouldn’t it be better to engage in mutual aid and insist that we can only all find safety and salvation together, even if we risk somehow “failing” the expectations of an outside authority figure?

I found help this week in Aaron J. Smith’s reframing of the parable. Smith’s key conclusion is that the point of the parable — Jesus’ admonition at the end — is not about the oil at all, but is to stay awake. “Staying awake would have changed the story,” he writes. It’s because all the bridesmaids fall asleep that the crisis with the oil arises at all. Maybe, then, the point of the parable isn’t about how to hoard our own oil to have “enough” — maybe it’s about how we can stay awake to each other in order to find new ways for all to have enough.

I do think the questions raised by this parable about how to have “enough” to carry on are deeply relevant to our work for abolition. A conversation with a friend and fellow organizer this week got me thinking about how so many movement campaigns and organizations seem to be struggling or slowing right now. It feels like reactionary elements are ascendant against the abolition movement. It feels like many of us are in what Carlos Saavedra calls a “winter” season in movement work: a time to regroup and focus on our own values, and a time to “keep our lamps trimmed and burning.”

The question posed by this parable is how we get through seasons of winter, seasons when the end is not in sight and victories are few and far between. Do we see the answer in the oil, and finding ways to reserve sufficient oil for ourselves by stepping back to refocus on what brings us life? Do we see the answer in doubling down on our values, insisting that what the parable provokes is really the insistence that the bridesmaids should have shared and stayed awake in faith to see what would happen? Do we see the answer, as Smith suggests, in “staying awake,” being present to one another as we make what Andrea Ritchie calls “critical connections” in her new book on abolition and emergent strategy and wait to see where they lead?

What is it, the parable of the bridesmaids asks but (I think) does not answer, that sustains us all as we wait?

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

Micah 3:5–12

The prophet Micah explicitly connects the injustice by which the rich and well-connected receive different justice than the poor as infidelity to God in today’s reading:

“Hear this, you rulers of the house of Jacob and chiefs of the house of Israel, who abhor justice and pervert all equity, who build Zion with blood and Jerusalem with wrong. Its rulers give judgment for a bribe, its priests teach for a price, its prophets give oracles for money; yet they lean upon the LORD and say, “Surely the LORD is with us! No harm shall come upon us.”

Micah promises divine judgment against Israel, its destruction allowed by God, because of this inequity: the giving of judgment for a bribe. (As well, of course, as the restriction of religious knowledge to those who can pay!)

We see this inequity in our modern justice system as well. As attorney and activist Bryan Stevenson has famously said, “We have a justice system that treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent.” Examples of the inequality in our justice system abound. Money bail is a particularly heinous example of the economic inequity in our system — poor defendants languishing in prison while rich ones do not — and one that is explicitly addressed elsewhere in scripture as an obligation.

Like the rulers of Israel who heard the words of Micah, we cannot claim not to know the inequity of the system. Abolition calls us to seek the end of systems of prisons and policing for many reasons: because of their racist basis and effects; because of the inherent inhumanity of incarceration and the affront to human dignity of punishment, exclusion, control, and state violence; because they are ineffective responses to harm. But we must always remember that inequity toward the poor is also always at the heart of systems of policing and prisons. “Good news for the poor” may be “bad news” for these systems, just like the harsh news proclaimed by Micah.

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

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.

“Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Exodus 17:6 (NRSV)

I have to admit, I’ve always been rather sympathetic to the Israelites in this story. They’ve endured slavery in Egypt, escaped by the skin of their teeth in an effort that required literal miracles, and now they’re in the middle of the desert — not a place well-known for survivability without an abundance of preparation. Moses can be forgiven for his frustration, too, but it’s hard for me to see his rejoinder seriously: “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the LORD?” (v. 2) 

Moses doesn’t seem to be taking the Israelites’ trauma and their current situation seriously. Water seems a more than reasonable request on their part. 

The demands for abolition should be as simple and reasonable as asking for water in the desert. When Black Americans are incarcerated at 5 times the rates of White Americans, it’s a reasonable thing to question the legitimacy and existence of the system. When the prison population has increased from 500,000 to 2,200,000 from 1980 to 2015 (far outpacing population growth and crime), it’s reasonable to question the system that’s locking people up. When we’re increasing the spending on prisons and jails at triple the rate as K-12 public education, it’s more than reasonable to object.  

It’s important for pastors to normalize asking these questions of our society and government from the pulpit. Consider this story from the Israelites’ perspective this week. Ask questions that seem provocative but are actually just as reasonable as asking for water in the desert. We’ve become accustomed to the evil all around us, and it sometimes falls to you to ask the questions no one else in your faith community is raising. 

Don’t be afraid to ask for water. 

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

Jonah 3:10–4:11

Today’s (late and abbreviated) Abolition Lectionary points us to the prophet Jonah. This excellent post by Rabbi Dr. Liz Shayne points out the possibilities of reading Jonah as neurodivergent, and in particular how that sheds light on his particularly dogged devotion to justice.

I love the idea of Jonah’s anger with God, at the end of the book, being a form of his insistence upon justice. Shayne concludes that God’s commitment to justice and God’s duty of care for the citizens of Nineveh are in tension at the end of the text; that God does not bring consequences upon Nineveh (as Jonah, according to Shayne, rightly calls justice) because of God’s commitment to care.

I wonder if we can see in that tension God’s gently changing Jonah’s notion of what justice is, as well. With abolitionist eyes, we can insist on the necessity of disentangling accountability from punishment, and of looking for forms of accountability which begin from a place of care and healing. I might go further than Rabbi Shayne’s conclusion to suggest that God is presenting to Jonah a different form of justice to be as fiercely committed to: a justice that relies on “reciprocal care” rather than punishment or consequences; a justice that provokes change in ways that do not necessarily satisfy our punitive impulses. In any case, Jonah’s commitment to justice helps reflect God’s own such commitment.

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