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Mark 12:28–34

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Practically all Christians can recite to you the Greatest Commandment, but often we let it remain an aphorism: “Love God, love others.” Or there’s the insistence on self-care inherent in the second half: “You can’t love others if you don’t love yourself.” Or, perhaps, we focus on the “who is my neighbor question” that plays a role in Luke’s telling of this passage. All of those reflections have truth to them, all tell a part of what the Greatest Commandment demands of us, and all are generally good things to believe and reflect upon. However, when I read Mark’s version of this story this week, I saw what wasn’t there. 

The gospels do not assume a fundamental practice of our prison industrial complex: the practice of un-neighboring. Criminal justice systems in the United States and around the world depend on the process of removing people from their community, dislocating them to a penal context, and making return to their former community as difficult as possible. The system attempts to un-neighbor them, to make them no one’s neighbor. The system attempts to destroy familial and communal bonds that maintain the integrity and thriving of our communities by un-neighboring people the system classified as criminals. That’s what prisons are for. 

That could not be further from a Christlike example or the just society the Scriptures envision. Jesus and his contemporaries knew something about un-neighboring. Ancient empires used deportation as a tactic to break apart conquered communities. The best and brightest were sent to imperial centers not just to benefit the ruling class, but to disintegrate their homelands. We know Romans used prisons, as well, and Jesus begins his ministry in Luke’s Gospel by saying it is part of God’s mission to free captives from said prisons. And yet, Christians often support this process of un-neighboring, of stripping someone of their community, family, and friends as a form of punishment for what they have done. 

Even in a world where the criminal justice system wasn’t racist, ableist, and otherwise prejudiced, why would this process of un-neighboring be entertained by Christians in any context? It cuts against the core of Christian teaching that says to love our neighbors as ourselves. The only way to make this kind of system palatable for Christians is to make it so people convicted of crimes aren’t their neighbors anymore. Perhaps that’s why we have such remote and inaccessible prisons–they want to make sure the incarcerated are no one’s neighbor, because otherwise God might call people to care for them. 

Many Christians accept this system by default. It’s a matter of inheritance. Many fail to question it at all. But if we even aspire to the Greatest Commandment’s demands on our lives, the abolition of prisons is an absolute necessity.  

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

Mark 10:46–52

Jesus’ response to Bartimaeus in this story, although at first glance not about criminal justice, offers lessons for transformative and creative responses to harm.

Bartimaeus calls out for Jesus seeking mercy and liberation — seeking the new and abundant life promised by Jesus. His call to Jesus as the “son of David” is a recognition of Jesus’ messianic status (at a moment when Jesus is about to enter Jerusalem in triumph and resistance against the powers of oppression). Perhaps his call for mercy, in this context, is not only a desire for personal healing but also a prayer for communal liberation.

The promise of transformative justice is that personal healing after harm occurs in the context of communal liberation. The healing of structures — including ableist structures that stigmatize disability — can be as important as physical or psychological healing.

But what strikes me as most essential in this story is Jesus’ response after the disciples bring Bartimaeus to him: “What do you want me to do for you?”

One of the central differences between the responses of the criminal legal system and restorative/transformative responses to harm is that restorative and transformative justice responses are survivor-centered. The key question that an RJ process starts with — what are the needs of the person who was harmed? — reflects Jesus’ question to Bartimaeus: “What do you want me to do for you?”

The criminal legal system, by contrast, assumes the answer to every harm is punishment and exclusion. It ignores survivors who do not want harsh punishment, and can treat them with hostility and even retraumatize them. This is one reason, among many, that 70% of survivors of sexual assault choose not to report it to the police. Retributive state systems cannot meet the needs of those who have been harmed when they do not exist to ask: “What do you want me to do for you?”

“What do you want me to do for you?” What would bring you healing and liberation? What would make you feel that you had received restitution or reparations for the harm done to you? The answer may be different in every situation, which is one reason why there is not one alternative to the prison-industrial complex. Abolition means building on the variety of needs that those who have been harmed (which is all of us!) have, and building a variety of solutions to meet the needs of people by transforming relational and systemic structures.

“What do you want me to do for you?” is an essential question to ask when searching for ways to help those who are poor or unhoused as well — it is the basis of mutual aid. The criminalization of poverty, homelessness, and survival arise from systems that insist on top-down, controlling solutions to social problems; that see those who are in need of care as somehow unable to exercise agency and make their own decisions. When care comes with agency — as it does in this story — it brings not only physical healing, but liberation. Perhaps in the space for Bartimaeus’ agency that Jesus holds, we see foreshadowing of the systemic change to a liberated world of mutuality that Bartimaeus imagines when he calls Jesus “son of David.”

Of course, some survivors of harm do desire vengeance. “What do you want me to do for you?” can never be the only question driving our communal responses to harm. Yet what Jesus models here — a true relational listening to someone in need, making the space of healing a space for exercising agency — is an illustration and a goal of where transformative responses to violence, harm, and need can begin.

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

Mark 10:35–45

It is understandable to want to be on Jesus’s good side. James and John had been following Jesus from almost the beginning of his ministry, and they had one small request. As usual, instead of saying yes to them, Jesus confounds both the brothers and the rest of the disciples by saying ‘you do not know what you are asking.’

Throughout the Gospel of Mark, Jesus often lets these metaphors stay mysterious, but he lays it out for us here. There is no Messianic secret going on. “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.” The Greek word used is doulos. Slave. There is no ambiguity going on. To drink the cup is to be slave to all because that is how Jesus lived and offered himself to us. So to sit at the right hand of Jesus is to be a servant to all.

The church today often lives like James and John. We want to be on the side of Jesus but we don’t want to drink the cup that he drinks. We talk about service and mission with our lips but then make a lot of exceptions about what that means. This is directly related to the possibility of abolition. The imagination that allows for the abolition of prison is not held captive by the motivations of this world, and yet the church, so often, cannot see the ‘all’ that Jesus came to serve as including all. We may have a prison ministry but not a prison ending ministry. That would be meddling, but that is the cup of Jesus. We as individuals, as churches, as Christians, can choose to drink it or not. God will be there with us. We are not alone, but it is not easy, and can’t be made with a simple request.

Rev. Wilson Pruitt is a Methodist pastor and translator in Spicewood, TX.

Mark 10:17–31

Jesus is approached by a man who kneels before him, and addresses him as “Good Teacher” (v. 17). The man asks Jesus how to “inherit eternal life” (v. 17), and Jesus responds that he must keep the commandments. The man says that he has kept them faithfully since he was a child. Jesus instructs the man lovingly. He must do one more thing: sell all his possessions, give the money to the poor, and then come to follow Jesus. The man walks away, saddened because he owned so many possessions. I imagine Jesus shaking his head and sighing to himself as he turns to the disciples, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” (v. 23).

The disciples, surprised and confused, wonder how the wealthy – who have the resources and means to accomplish most things – could have such difficulty entering into the Kingdom of God. If salvation were this difficult for the rich, then what hope do the rest of us have? Jesus explains that while salvation is impossible to achieve by mortals through their own power, “for God all things are possible” (v. 27). God’s saving and liberating grace is for all people. In the Kingdom of God, the poor are liberated from poverty and oppression, while the rich are liberated from their wealth and power. According to Jesus, the first will be last, and the last will be first. This announcement is good news for all, but especially for the poor.

Perhaps some or many of the people in your congregation know what it’s like to experience poverty. People who are poor are frequently punished for the “crime” of lacking wealth and power. Alec Karakatsanis tells the story of a woman who was shackled, taken from her children, and thrown in jail because she couldn’t afford to pay debts the city claimed she owed for old traffic violations. The city had turned her debts over to a for-profit collection agency. She was arrested, imprisoned, and forced into demeaning labor. Her story is, sadly, not uncommon. Karakatsanis notes:

There are 2.2 million human beings confined in prison and jail cells in the United States tonight. About 500,000 of those people are presumptively innocent people awaiting trial, the vast majority of whom are confined by the government solely because they cannot pay enough money to buy their release… Between eighty and ninety percent of the people charged with crimes are so poor that they cannot afford a lawyer. [1]

Our systems of separation, imprisonment, and forced labor oppress the poor while enriching companies that profit from their incarceration. But Jesus announces and inaugurates a reorientation of the world in which the poor are liberated, oppressive systems are dismantled, and people are restored into right relationship with God and each other. Depending on your context, your proclamation of this good news may offer a prophetic challenge to the wealthy or a message of hope for the poor. How might God be calling upon your congregation to participate in God’s liberative work in your community and the world?

[1] https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-punishment-bureaucracy

Jed Tate is a Methodist pastor in North Carolina.

Mark 10:2-16 

Almost everything to do with divorce is messy, which is probably why Jesus’ opponents have chosen the topic to test Jesus in this week’s gospel lection. Jesus has just returned to Herod’s territory, who has already beheaded John the Baptist over a public confrontation about Herod’s own divorce and remarriage. His interlocutors may be hoping to catch Jesus up in that controversy by asking whether it is lawful for a man to divorce his wife. 

In Mark’s context, it was much too easy for men to abandon their spouses through divorce, leaving them and whatever children they may have in a very vulnerable position. Some rabbis even taught that a poorly cooked meal was sufficient grounds for a man to divorce his wife. At the same time, it was nearly impossible for women to be granted a divorce under any circumstances. The question posed to Jesus doesn’t even acknowledge the possibility. This may have been rooted in the assumption that only men could be wronged in marriage. If a married woman had an affair, her husband was the victim. If a married man had an affair, the other woman’s husband (if she had one) was the victim. Women were rarely seen as victims in marital misconduct, only potential causes of strife. 

Jesus’s response to the question, however, rejects that rationale and highlights the way that marriage irreversibly intertwines at least two lives, including that of the married woman. Where some circles seemed to treat divorce as if a man was discarding an item that had lost its appeal, Jesus tells us that two people have become one flesh. Households have merged, families have mingled, finances have mixed, living space has become shared, children may have been created, emotion has been poured out, and a whole host of other habits, plans, and realities have fallen into place. Separating all of those things is like ripping a body in half. Imagine what it takes just to cut off an arm – sawing through bones, muscles, ligaments, tendons, and blood vessels, and then somehow dealing with all of those hanging bits, no longer connected to anything. Amputation may be possible in dire circumstances, but it is risky and, well, messy. 

Jesus calls upon his listeners to recognize what they are doing when breaking up a household. He demands that we recognize the wound we might be creating as we pull two lives apart that have been deeply interconnected with one another. While this should give folks pause as they consider leaving a spouse, too often this passage has been used to frighten people in bad and abusive marriages away from getting help, or to condemn people who are already reeling from the wound of a broken home life. 

Instead, maybe this passage should be considered more deeply by those who would break up a household from the outside. Perhaps judges should consider this before sentencing someone to years in prison, tearing a leg off of a household without even bothering to plan how to close the wound. Perhaps police officers should think about Jesus’ words, “What God has joined together, let no one separate” before putting someone in handcuffs and dragging them away from everything and everyone they know. Perhaps policymakers should consider the consequences of legislation that would result in more household carnage, more open wounds, and more traumatized communities. Perhaps mayors should think twice about criminalizing homelessness, ripping off freshly formed scabs from deeply wounded bodies again and again. 

There are far too many ways that things like poverty, economic disparity, mass incarceration, and violence tear apart families and other essentially connected community members. Let us continue to work toward keeping bodies and relationships from being torn asunder, toward communal healing from already-broken relationships, and toward meeting Christ and one another in our collective woundedness.  

Chris Nafis is a Nazarene Pastor and hospital chaplain in San Diego, CA. 

James 5:13–20

“Are any among you suffering? They should pray.” James 5:13

A consistent theme in this week’s lections is trust in God over and against other sources of security. Psalm 124 extols the saving power of God, claiming that death would have become Israel “if it had not been the LORD who was on our side” (v. 1, 2). One of the Old Testament readings sees the Israelites weeping at the lack of some foods, ignoring the manna right in front of them (Numbers 11:6). In the story from Mark’s Gospel, the disciples’ insecurities lead them to question others doing good deeds in Jesus’ name, instead of trusting in God’s power apart from them. In James, most of all, we have a litany of instances in which we should trust God. 

From the first commandment to this passage toward the end of the New Testament, Christian faith always involves trusting God. Carceral systems, however, do precisely the opposite. Particularly in the United States, the carceral system is an intricate and formidable complex of retributive punishment designed to keep us apart from one another. The prison-industrial complex, too, justifies this labyrinthine monstrosity with the claim that it keeps us safe. 

We could spend hours dissecting exactly how that claim is a lie. We could consider the destructive effect incarceration has on families and communities, demonstrating that it probably does more harm than good. We could wonder about the studies that show incarceration is associated with an increase in recidivism.[1] We could address the study that found sentencing someone to prison had “no effect on their chances of being convicted of a violent crime within five years of being released from prison.” We could question, too, how much money (tens of thousands of dollars per year) it costs to imprison someone compared to how much other methods of justice-seeking would cost. [2]

We could spend hours dissecting all those things to realize that “prisons make us safer” is a lie, but Christian faith shouldn’t even need to go that far. Any promise that pledges safety and security in exchange for brutalizing other human beings is not a promise of God. Instead, we should trust in God for what we need, not a sprawling profit-seeking industrial complex. Prison is an idol, one in which we cannot afford to place our trust. 

James puts forth a brief glimpse of a model of community justice. He proposes that when your sibling wanders from truth, that you bring them back (v. 19). You don’t hide them away in a capitalist’s modern plantation. You don’t inflict suffering on them, supposing that more injustice will right a wrong. No, you bring them back. And bringing them back “will cover a multitude of sins” (v. 20). 

Restorative justice and other models of justice-seeking are obviously more complex than two verses in James; however, many of the passages in the lectionary for this week propose an alternative starting point every Christian should consider. Trust in God for safety and justice, not prisons. 

[1] https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2021/04/19/prisons-dont-make-us-safe

[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-prisons-make-us-safer/

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

Mark 9:30–37

Jesus catches his disciples in the middle of an argument. He has just told them what is going to happen. He has just shared about his coming arrest and execution, but also how death will not contain him. They did not understand and began squabbling among themselves about who is the greatest. The disciples missed the point. They were focused on Jesus being a good teacher among other teachers. They wanted to position themselves in the school like kids focused on their class ranking before college. They think they are setting themselves up for important positions in the world when the world is about to be turned upside down and they have already been told this directly.
Jesus says, “whoever wants to be first must be last of all.” In this passage in Mark, Jesus uses the example of a child. A child was deemed unimportant by society. A child was forgotten, ignored until they came of age. Out of sight, out of mind. In our day, those suffering within the prison-industrial complex are out of sight, out of mind.

Since the days of Constantine, Christians have struggled with what to do with criminal justice in light of Jesus Christ. Justinian’s codes brought many systems together. Some rulers have taken Romans 13 to justify anything they want to do. Christians were a major part of the development of the modern prison system, many with the best of intentions. Each trying to show how great they are at reform or justice — or whichever phrase they wish to use. All of it seems a bit like arguing about who is the greatest after Jesus just spoke of resurrection. We miss the fact that the world has been turned upside down and God is calling us to live into a new reality. God is calling us to welcome even a child. God is calling us to welcome even those who are currently in prison. God is calling us to not jockey for position in a self-righteous crusade, but to serve and receive in light of resurrection.

Rev. Wilson Pruitt is a Methodist pastor and translator in Spicewood, TX.

Mark 8:27–38

In this famous passage from Mark’s gospel, Jesus first admits that he is the messiah — and then immediately declares his intention of solidarity with those who are criminalized.

Perhaps we are used to seeing Jesus’ injunction to “take up your cross” in more spiritualized terms, as a call to self-giving love or selflessness. Yet what Jesus is describing is his imminent imprisonment and execution. As Dr. Nikia Smith Robert puts it: “Jesus died a criminalized person — but transcended criminality on the cross.” It is the truth of his criminalization, conviction, punishment, and death, that causes Peter to rebuke him — solidarity with the incarcerated, perhaps, unpopular then as now. (You can read a deep dive on Robert’s “liberation theology for lockdown America” here.) Solidarity is dangerous, and powerful.

What does it open for us in the text to read this familiar line about “taking up the cross” in light of solidarity with incarcerated people? How might it help us resist the ways this notion has been used to promote “redemptive suffering,” especially for marginalized people? What if solidarity is the fundamental reality behind the words of Jesus that so many are “ashamed of” (Mark 8:38)?

This is the inversion of the gospel, the inversion of every sort of respectability politics and the insistence on divine solidarity with the criminalized, punished, incarcerated — whether innocent or guilty, likeable or not. Divine solidarity with those who are punished and imprisoned is the basis of Christian support of abolition and the shocking truth about the messiah.

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

Proverbs 22:1–2, 8–9, 22–23 and James 2:1–17

This week’s lectionary passages from Proverbs and James focus on God’s justice for the poor:

“Do not rob the poor because they are poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate; for the LORD pleads their cause and despoils of life those who despoil them” (Provers 22:22–23).

The rich and the poor have this in common: the LORD is the maker of them all” (Proverbs 22:2).

“My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?…You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors” (James 2:1, 8–9).

These passages condemn partiality against the poor, and reiterate that impartial justice, justice which avoids favoritism toward the rich, must look first to the needs of the poor. The reason that the church must live out a “preferential option for the poor” (in the terms of the Latin-American liberation theologians), is because the status quo, the system as it currently works, is stacked against the poor. Seeking impartial justice requires recognizing that the current power dynamics of our society will always treat the rich preferentially, and so nothing less than an option for the poor can avoid favoritism and truly treat rich and poor on equal terms.

This favoritism is evident in our criminal legal system. As Bryan Stevenson puts it, “We have a system of justice that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.” Mass incarceration is driven by what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment followed by organized violence”: first, the “organized abandonment” of poor communities, in which the interests of state and capital collude to disinvest in those communities, “robbing the poor because they are poor and despoiling them at the gate.” Then, “organized violence” in the form of policing and prisons, which disproportionately target individuals in poor and marginalized communities, usually along racial lines. (This is what Chris Hayes describes as “a colony in a nation” in his book of the same name.) In other words, the “organized violence” of policing and prisons, targeted against poor communities, is the sort of “favoritism” and “partiality” the author of James condemns.

What these passages remind us is that the prison-industrial complex is not separable from (racial) capitalism — a connection made heartbreakingly clear this week as Hurricane Ida took out power in southern Louisiana and city governments and police rushed to prevent “looting,” protecting property, rather than meeting the needs of those affected by the disaster. This is what police are FOR. Abolition requires the questioning and restructuring of the ways our society is built to disenfranchise and disempower the poor.

Ada María Isasi-Díaz insists that the church’s option for the poor must not be described as “preferential” because “a preferential option is an oxymoron, for to prefer is not the same as to opt: the two are mutually exclusive.…When the moment of option comes, one opts for this, and in doing so one opts not for that. The option for the oppressed, as is true of all options, cannot be qualified…To claim to have a preferential option is a way of rejecting the demands of what it really means to opt for the oppressed and the impoverished” (in Decolonizing Epistemologies, 57).

What does it look like for us as a church to opt for the oppressed and impoverished? What does it look like to resist, fully and wholeheartedly, the organized abandonment and organized violence of policing and prisons? The author of James tells us: anything less than such an unqualified option for the poor is a failure to obey the law to love our neighbors as ourselves. We are complicit in the partiality to the rich which forms the status quo.

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

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

When the disciples receive judgment for eating without hands thoroughly washed, Jesus transforms the judgment into a reminder that the way we live into tradition is nothing compared to how we tend to our souls.  Jesus said, “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

In this shift of thought, we are reminded of the ways in which tradition, including our laws, can be used to exact judgment against people around us, even when the inner heart of the accuser — or the systems that bring accusation — are acting outside of the ethical ways to tend to the souls of those around us.  If the seat of evil intentions comes from the human heart, then there are not people who are innocent and people who are guilty, judged and held on opposite ends by a system stewarded by people with those same evil intentions.  There are only people, each containing the same capacity for goodness and sin.  This gospel invites us into understanding the universality of our human hearts, how we are bound to one another by each having that seat of evil intentions inside of ourselves, that possibility that we could go against the laws and traditions that were not created for our flourishing.  This is not to bring judgment, like judgments were brought against Jesus and the disciples, but instead to offer compassion that is worthy of sin that we all hold in our human hearts.  

If we each have a human heart capable of evils, then we would be wise to look at those in front of us — especially those being judged as guilty alongside Jesus and the disciples — as people just like us, people who have the same capacity for both goodness and sin as we do.  If these evils come from within the heart, they are all something we are capable of, and yet the gift of grace is that God can only understand our guilt in relationship to our belovedness, because that is what we receive in salvation.  We, then, have the opportunity to share that same grace of God with those around us, choosing to see in those who are judged “guilty” a face of belovedness, knowing that any capacity they have for evil is a capacity we hold in common, and all evil is deemed defeated and resurrected by Jesus Christ.

We are all guilty, we all house that same seat of evil intentions, and yet only some of us — and usually those on the margins — bear the societal pain of systems of punishment.  In order for our world to ever feel like the kingdom of God, we will have to offer compassion to the universality of what we are capable of, begin to treat the actions of others in relationship to their belovedness, and entrust it all to the God who defeated and resurrected evil.

Erin Jean Warde (she/her/hers) is a priest, writer, spiritual director, and recovery coach in Austin, TX with more writing at www.erinjeanwarde.com.