“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” 1 Peter 1:3 (NRSVUE)
Rarely, if ever, do our dreams really come true. In part, yes. Indirectly, yes. But the long history of radical political imagination is one of freedom dreams deferred, or at least truths told slant. The abolitionists of the 19th century dreamed of a new economic system not based on the exploitation of Black bodies; what rose from the ashes of chattel slavery was sharecropping and apartheid (not to mention the continued expansion of the US empire). The movement against the Iraq War in 2003 failed to stop that invasion, but it did make the future invasion of Iran politically impossible.
History teaches us that we see only through a glass darkly. The dialectic never resolves as we expect it to. And yet, we are called to dream. God has given us “a new birth into a living hope,” “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.” The flame of faith we are called to tend lights our way forward, though the way twists and turns, though the road may be rough and uncertain. The mystic Thomas Merton once prayed by saying, “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going…, Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You.”
We do not know what world we leave to our children and grandchildren. We can only move forward in faith, trusting that our dreaming and our acting contains a truth “more precious than gold” which will bring all people one step closer to the Kindom of God.
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.
“Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’” Matthew 28:5-7, NRSV
The connection between Easter and abolition of state-sponsored violence is quite clear when you take the story at face value, as the angel describes it in Matthew. Jesus was a victim of both brief incarceration and speedy execution at the hands of the state. And yet, God repudiates that violence and overcomes it in the resurrection. God did not defeat death for us to keep doling it out through the prison industrial complex and other state-sponsored violence like police forces and executions. God did not defeat death for us to keep killing people.
One of my favorite aspects of Matthew’s telling of this event is that Jesus doesn’t wait at the tomb for everyone to catch up with what he’s doing. He has already gone ahead to Galilee. The disciples must play catchup. The movement of the Spirit is often like that, going ahead of where we are. God goes ahead of both our comfort and our comprehension.
That reality is vital when it comes to the abolitionist imagination. So often the retort to calls to “defund the police” or “abolish prisons” is that it’s not practical or even possible. But that’s not what imagination is for. That’s not where Jesus meets us. Jesus meets us ahead of where we are and beckons us forward. Jesus meets us in the place that we can only barely imagine right now. If we can’t even entertain the idea, we will never arrive. So, Jesus calls us to Galilee where death has been defeated, the state has lost its power, and a new world has begun.
This Easter, let’s get moving. Let’s go meet Jesus. For God did not defeat death for us to tolerate it further. God defeated death that we all might live.
Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his) is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina.
Numerous scholars have noted that Jesus’ procession into Jerusalem is an oppositional one. Pontious Pilate would have entered the city, as well, but elsewhere and with a different sort of fanfare. While Jesus did not enter Jerusalem with warhorses, chariots, and the might of the Roman Empire around him like Pilate, expectations were almost certainly high among those in the crowd. Matthew explicitly connects the procession with the restoration of the Jewish people after a prolonged period of exile, after all.
In the text of Zechariah referenced by Matthew, we see a vision of a world that God is making right. God is toppling the empires of the day (Zech. 9:1-8). God is overturning hoarded wealth (vv. 3-4), arrogant and violent power (vv. 5-7), and the forces of slavery (v. 8). It’s hard not to think that Jesus is coming with the immediate power to overturn the social and political order right then and there. Only, that’s not exactly what happens is it?
Instead, what we look toward in Holy Week, culminating in Easter, is the inversion of how we expect these powers to work, all bolstered by the defeat of sin and death. In that way, what Jesus accomplishes actually embodies the text from Zechariah quite well. After this litany of nations getting their just deserts, one might expect quite the retributive toll. Only, that’s not exactly what happens.
Instead, we hear the promise of a king who is “righteous and victorious,” yes, but also “humble and riding on an ass (v. 9, CEB). He cuts off the chariot and the warhorse not just from Judah’s enemies, but from Ephraim and Jerusalem. “The bow used in battle will be cut off,” Zechariah vows (v. 10, CEB). The cycle of retribution and violence is broken, not continued. This promise is embodied in the defeat of sin and death at the end of this week, as well. The cycle is broken. Violence is not repeated.
The breaking of this cycle of violence and retribution is central to a Christian theology of abolition. Police and especially prisons exist as perpetuators of these cycles of violence and retribution. We will never move beyond the social ills that our criminal justice system claims to address while we continue to perpetuate the violence at the center of crime. You cannot imprison a crime, but you can commit more injustice under the guise of doing so.
This Palm Sunday, let’s acknowledge these cycles of harm, violence, and retribution. These are the things Jesus came to break. These are the cycles Zechariah said God wants broken. Let’s shatter them that we might live in the world God wants where the bows and chariots have no use to us.
Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his) is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina.
Just imagine. Imagine that new creation, that resurrection is actually possible. Imagine, even, that not only is resurrection possible, but God has already begun bringing about the restoration of the world, all of creation, and our invitation is to participate in this Missio Dei.
Of course, this renewal can be hard to picture when we’re surrounded by systems of death and imprisonment. Perhaps as abolitionists, you and members of your faith community have been struggling against the ongoing expansion of policing and incarceration, and there are times when you feel discouraged. Oppressive forces have a way of making themselves seem inevitable; meanwhile, the damage they inflict causes so much pain and harm in our communities. We lament the death that surrounds us, as we should, and yet we do not grieve alone.
When Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha dies, his sisters and his community mourn the loss of someone they loved so dearly. When Jesus and his disciples eventually join them, Martha says to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (v. 21). She is hurt, and understandably so; when we suffer the grief of death, we want to cry out to God, “where were you?” And yet Jesus has drawn near. He loved Lazarus and his sisters (v. 5), and he mourned with Mary and Martha, weeping over the death of his friend and their brother (vv.33-35). We are reminded that God is with us in our despair, and grieves alongside us. But despair is not the final word, and neither is death.
Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life” (v. 25). Resurrection is present now in Jesus. Restoration and renewal are here now. New creation is beginning now. Jesus calls out to Lazarus to come out from the tomb, and the man who was dead and still bears the cloth strips of one who was buried now walks. Jesus says, “Unbind him, and let him go” (v. 44). This is his word for us too. Our calling is the same: to work alongside Jesus as he unbinds the bound.
We are right to mourn the death that surrounds us, and to lament the injustice caused by systems of incarceration. God mourns with us. However, we continue to hope because God promises resurrection – this is the good news that the preacher must proclaim. And we are empowered to participate in God’s work of renewing the world. We continue to do the work, alongside Jesus, of unbinding the bound. This is our invitation, our calling.
In his book, The Spirituals and the Blues, James Cone quotes these lyrics from a Black Spiritual1:
Children, we shall be free When the Lord shall appear. Give ease to the sick, give sight to the blind, Enable the cripple to walk; He’ll raise the dead from under the earth, And give them permission to talk.
Just imagine.
Jed Tate is a United Methodist pastor in North Carolina.
8 for once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Walk as children of light, 9 for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. 10 Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. 11 Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness; rather, expose them. 12 For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly, 13 but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, 14 for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”
Ephesians 5:8-14
A key part of the abolition movement is educating ourselves and others about the great injustices of the US criminal-legal system. There would be no need to abolish systems that work for everyone or that serve all of society well. That’s why we must “expose” the “unfruitful works of darkness” in the criminal-legal system (Ephesians 5:11).
The pervasive cultural narrative is that police, courts, and prisons are simply aimed at achieving “law and order.” In this narrative, police successfully investigate every significant crime, arrest the right person every time, and convict them swiftly — typically before the end of a 60-minute TV episode. The convicted criminal then receives the “just” punishment of incarceration to “pay their debt to society.”
The problem with this narrative is that it isn’t true. The reality is far messier (at its best) and far more sinister (at its worst). Even the individuals in these systems who bring the best of intentions fail to get it right because the sinful systems are stacked against the accused. The truth is that, according to FBI data, police only make arrests on a fraction of all reported crimes, and less than half of reported violent crimes. Police and courts are demonstrably biased against Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people and against poor people. Convictions are sometimes rushed through using sloppy evidence and insufficient defense. And prisoners themselves experience horrible conditions in most carceral facilities, including economic exploitation, malnutrition, abuse from guards and other prisoners, torture such as solitary confinement, and even the death penalty. Ephesians tells us that “the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true,” and very little about the criminal-legal system fits that description (5:9).
Instead, the evils of the criminal-legal system are whitewashed with propaganda from the media, politicians of all stripes, and even religious leaders. But our calling is not to remain in the darkness; it is to step into the light of Christ, the light of the Holy Spirit. Again Ephesians says, “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness; rather, expose them” (5:11). As Christian abolitionists, it is our responsibility to expose what is evil in our midst. It’s our responsibility to share the stories of people who have been chewed up and spit out by prisons, police, and courts. It’s our responsibility to commit ourselves to “speaking the truth in love,” when it comes to abolishing these unjust systems (Ephesians 4:15).
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.
Christians have spilled untold gallons of ink on the concepts of justification and reconciliation in Romans and elsewhere in the New Testament, but rarely do they consider the implications of God’s mechanisms of justice for their own “justice systems.” You could go to any number of theologians for the former, so let’s focus on the latter. In the United States, our “justice system” has its basis in retributive justice, the kind where punishment is the response to wrongdoing. That is not the pattern described in the New Testament.
Instead of exacting punishment to get justice, which our current “justice system” attempts to do, God’s mechanism for justice in the New Testament is justification followed by reconciliation. The goal is not simply to punish anyone, but to reconcile enemies. The whole point of justification and reconciliation is the elimination of enmity for the sake of our collective salvation and liberation.
How does that compare to our “justice system?” Our system doesn’t eliminate enmity; rather, it exacerbates it:
The removal of someone from society via incarceration as a punishment results in disruption to family and community systems, many of which may have depended on the incarcerated individual.
The individual incarcerated suffers from increased economic instability, inequality, and distress, particularly in regard to legal discrimination toward the incarcerated in housing and employment.
Whether it is between incarcerated people or between staff and those incarcerated, prisons are sites of further brutalization and violence—they do not stop violence. No one is reconciled, just punished and victimized.
Consider, too, that “levels of imprisonment increased fivefold since 1973, crime rates have not dropped proportionately during this period.”* The massive prison industrial complex we’ve built has not achieved significant crime reduction or gains in public safety. Our system simply reproduces violence and increases enmity between persons. If the goal of God’s justice is to eliminate enmity and provide reconciliation, as Paul suggests in Romans 5, why do Christians so readily concede to a “justice system” that does the opposite?
When preaching about these theological concepts, keep in mind their implications for social organization. While Paul is not laying out a model for civil society explicitly, you can’t believe one thing when it comes to your own reconciliation to God and something completely different and disconnected for our reconciliation to each other.
How do you feel about the book of Romans? Whether you were raised in dominant American Christianity or just absorbed it through osmosis, it is very hard to open Paul’s letter to the church in Rome and not hear it in the voice of modern evangelicalism, contrasting “faith” and “works” and proclaiming a Jesus who “frees us from ‘the law.’” The supersessionist replacement theology of Paul the American Christian would be confusing to Paul the 1st-Century Jew, and to his Gentile and Jewish audience.
Thankfully, in recent decades there has been an abundance of scholarship asking, in essence, “What if Paul wasn’t a self-hating Jew?” At the risk of summarizing an entire academic library in a few sentences, this new perspective argues that for Paul, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus acts to welcome Gentiles into God’s family without replacing or reducing the Chosen-ness of the Jewish people. And this happens, crucially, not because of our own “righteousness” in faith (as the NRSV translates this passage), but because of God’s righteous commitment to us. Our faith doesn’t “save” us Gentiles, God’s love has already redeemed us. God leaves no one behind.
We can continue to debate this, but for me this reading helps us see and understand Paul the incarcerated organizer. Here, God does not ordain punishment—human or divine—for our unbelief or our bad works. If all people are now inheritors of God’s Chosen-ness, we all “inherit the world” through the righteousness of God’s belief in us. Whether or not we keep the faith or behave well, God has faith in us. God is rooting for all of us, collectively as a species. As Jewish poet Aurora Levins Morales writes,
This time we’re tied at the ankles.
We cannot cross until we carry each other,
all of us refugees, all of us prophets.
No more taking turns on history’s wheel,
trying to collect old debts no-one can pay.
The sea will not open that way.
This time that country
is what we promise each other,
our rage pressed cheek to cheek
until tears flood the space between,
until there are no enemies left,
because this time no one will be left to drown
and all of us must be chosen.
This time it’s all of us or none.
Rev. Jay Bergen is a pastor at Germantown Mennonite Church in Philadelphia, and a volunteer organizer with the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI), a campaign fighting to end life sentences and heal communities across Pennsylvania.
As we enter Lent, Psalm 32 offers a beautiful picture of confession and forgiveness. Besides the classically-theological elements of this psalm, such as its emphasis on God’s mercy, the psalm shows us a way into the pathways of accountability as a positive practice that is helpful for building alternatives to carceral ways of thinking, being, and responding to harm.
After the psalmist tells the truth about their sin to God, God responds not only with deliverance (v. 7) but also with instruction and counsel (v. 8). God’s response is not to forgive, but to guide the sinner into paths of accountability. Following God’s counsel is (theologically) a form of repentance; it is also an empowerment for an accountable way of living in community.
It feels important to always emphasize that accountability is an ongoing practice, and one which is fundamentally about how we live in ways responsible to one another, and to God. Even the more direct work of taking accountability for harm we do is grounded in the ongoing practices of accountability to each other, as Mia Mingus describes. As she poignantly asks, “What if accountability wasn’t scary?”
I think Psalm 32 offers, in theological language, a picture of accountability that isn’t scary. It shows one way of practicing accountability in “joy” and “steadfast love” (v. 10–11).
A further resource for thinking about accountability specifically in response to harm is Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s book On Repentance and Repair, and this guide for Christians studying that book during Lent is a helpful resource. Each of these tools exist to help us conceive of accountability as a liberating, joyful way of moving forward when we have done harm. They let us feel, along with the author of Psalm 32, the joyous, powerful response of God to each of our tiny, halting attempts to turn from harm and make things right.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.
What the author of Matthew is trying to do in his gospel is actually quite simple. He is interested in establishing Jesus’ authority for a largely Jewish audience. This particular section does this by showing how Jesus is the fulfillment of the work of Moses and Elijah: the law and the prophets. Jesus’ trip up the mountain with Peter, James, and John mirrors Moses’ trip up Mt. Sinai with Israelite leaders. Moses spends 40 days on the mountain shrouded by a cloud that looks like devouring fire. This was the glory of the Lord, and within that cloud God teaches Moses how they are to live together and worship God in covenantal relationship. When Moses returns his face is shining, reflecting the presence of God. Like Moses, Jesus shines on the mountain-top. Like Moses, a bright, glowing cloud overtakes them. In case readers have gotten the message yet, a voice from the cloud says ““This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”
There is more that readers have gleaned from this text though. Several commentators emphasize the theophany aspect of the transfiguration and suggest that this points to Jesus’ divine status. Multiple commenters in Feasting on the Word focus on Jesus’ divinity and Hauerwas notes that Moses simply reflects God’s glory after being in the cloud for 40 days, but Jesus’ whole body shines from within. Yet other commenters, like Douglas Hare in the Interpretation commentary, argue that this is certainly not an expression of Jesus’ divinity. Hare states that Jesus “is presented not as a non-human, but as a transformed human who will be the pioneer and perfecter of those who will share his heavenly experience.”1
These are actually not contradictory ideas. The union of divinity and humanity in Jesus should not distance him from us in any way. It is precisely the union of the divine and human in Christ that assures us that we will experience a similar divinized humanity. When we are divinized in Christ, our humanity isn’t annihilated, instead we become more fully human and more deeply humane. For example, for one of the early Cappadocian fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, our divinization in Christ is how the Imago Dei is realized in humanity; what was intended in our creation. This led Gregory to condemn slavery. Any violent division among humans is opposed to the Imago Dei that is at the heart of our collective humanity.2 Our god-like-ness is reflected in how humane we are. It is realized in our ability to love each other well. It is realized in our ability to delight in and advocate for one another’s well-being.
Objections to Jesus’ divine-human status are often related to how inconceivable this notion is. It is not uncommon in the Bible for people to respond to the divine with fear. The divine is so foreign, powerful, beautiful… so beyond us, that it feels threatening. Likewise, we often respond to the foreign other in fear. Our fear perverts our expression of divine attributes. We pervert beauty by hoarding it and pervert power by oppressing others. This is not what divine power and beauty are like. Christ touches us and reminds us “do not be afraid.” The beauty and power of the divine is for us. It is in the divine that we become fully ourselves, in harmonious relation with one another.
While the author of Matthew wasn’t commenting on Trinitarian doctrine, Jesus is mediating the divine in a unique way in this text. God is doing something new in Jesus. Jesus doesn’t tell us what God said, God tells us to listen to what Jesus says. Jesus doesn’t give us the word of God, he is the word of God. Yet, Jesus doesn’t want his authority established on a beatific vision. Peter, James, and John may be given some private encouragement as they enter into Jesus’ last days, but it isn’t until he becomes an executed criminal and is raised from the dead that Jesus wants people to hear about this moment of glorification. Ultimately his authority lies in his overcoming of condemnation and punishment, death and hell.
The cosmic, beautiful, divine Christ is often contrasted with the earthly suffering Jesus, but in the transfiguration the divine and human are drawn together. The man who glows with a beautiful light and is called the beloved son of God is also the Son of Man who is hung on a cross and whose flesh is eternally scarred. Courts, prisons, and execution chambers are ugly places, but this is where God goes and when God tells us to “listen to him!” God is commanding us to listen to and obey a man who suffered in these ugly places. Though our world hoards beauty and power at the expense of the weak, God’s power is not something to be afraid of, and God’s glory will descend into the ugliest places, to raise people up into their own beauty and power with transfigured scars that speak to their authority. This eschatological vision is both an encouragement for those imprisoned right now and a condemnation of the systems that imprison them today.
1 Hare, Douglas R. A.. Matthew (Interpretation, a Bible commentary for teaching and preaching). (1993) Louisville, Ky: John Knox Press, 199.
2 See Hart, D. Bentley. “The ‘Whole Humanity’: Gregory of Nyssa’s Critique of Slavery in Light of His Eschatology.” Scottish Journal of Theology 54, no. 1 (2001): 51–69. doi:10.1017/S0036930600051188.
Sarah Lynne Gershon (she/her) is an MDiv/MTS student, DOC pastor, and lives at the Bloomington Catholic Worker.
This passage from Deuteronomy which promises “life and death, blessings and curses” is often a challenging one from a restorative-justice or abolitionist perspective. The stark contrast made here in Deuteronomy and the promise of reward and punishment for human action drive the Deuteronomic History of Israel, the telling of Israel’s history which unfolds over the books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings which sees Israel prosper when they are faithful and be punished when they do wrong. Such a simplistic narrative of reward and punishment is at first glance opposed to the more transformative understandings of accountability which derive from transformative justice practices.
I think this is a misunderstanding of the Deuteronomic History, which in fact offers a more nuanced and dialectical attempt to point towards the difficult-to-express reality of accountability without punishment. I’ve written more about that, in connection with the prophet Jeremiah, in this post.
But I also think there is value in facing the stark choice between life and death in this passage as an existential reality, reading it on its own terms and not just in light of how later authors use it to interpret Israel’s history. Because abolition, fundamentally, requires us to make a stark choice between life and death.
Prisons and policing are “death-making institutions,” as Mariame Kaba says. Ruth Wilson Gilore defines racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” in Golden Gulag. To uphold these systems is to support death-dealing. In place of them, abolitionists demand solutions aimed at life: caregiving, community. As Kaba and Andrea Ritchie put it, abolitionists demand “safety,” which depends on strengthening all the things in communities that can help promote well-being, rather than “security” provided by the exclusion and violence enforced by carceral systems.
The difference between safety and security is perhaps why the solutions abolition provides to violence don’t always compute within a carceral framework. Safety requires holistic approaches. It requires strengthening communities and practicing safety and accountability in small and partial ways, as Mia Mingus suggests, not simply looking for solutions that immediately remove or make invisible harm when crises occur. Supporters of police and prisons sometimes seem to think abolitionist responses are unserious because the response to violence is the ongoing production of care and safety, rather than insisting on violence in return for violence. But this turn to such deep, lasting work that can prevent violence in communities and defend against it is precisely the work of “choosing life,” the work of building beautiful things, which is — as we see in Deuteronomy — opposed to death-dealing systems, which are idolatry.
Ultimately, Deuteronomy poses an existential challenge we cannot avoid. To choose safety instead of security, to choose life over death, requires complete and unreserved commitment on our part.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.
