An End of the World Savior versus Present Liberator
BY HERB MONTGOMERY
“The people were all so amazed that they asked each other, ‘What is this? A new teaching—and with authority! He even gives orders to impure spirits [read cosmic forces of evil] and they obey him.’ News about him spread quickly over the whole region of Galilee. (Mark 1:27-28)
This week we are looking at how some sectors of Christianity focus on the end of the world, to the exclusion of redeeming the present.
Historically, Christians have taken an interest in alleviating human suffering, and have been involved in human rights movements from abolition and temperance to disaster relief and, more recently, Black Lives Matter. Yet some sectors of Christianity are much more concerned with saving people from some end-time-calamity in their future life, than they are with people’s present life, and even those sectors that do alleviate present suffering typically focus on individual change rather than structural change.
The traditional Christian effort in regards to poverty is just one example. The effort usually takes the form of charity such as giving people food for today, yet not addressing the systemic causes that created their hunger to begin with. I’m not saying that charity is wrong. It’s vital. It simply is not enough. More recently, some Christians have begun offering financial education and seminars aimed at enabling and empowering the poor to succeed within the present economic system. But these seminars don’t ever look at the financial system itself and ask whether this system is, in fact, just.
Both the service and education approaches inadvertently place the blame for poverty on the victims themselves, i.e. “It’s your fault you’re poor.” Sometimes a person’s individual choices do cause them to suffer. And sometimes there is a much bigger picture that limits the choices that person can make. Either way, it is victim-blaming to focus on delivering folks from personal sin and leave untouched the sinful social structures that cause their suffering and oppress them. Sin moves both individually and socially, and grace also moves both individually and socially.
Far too many sectors of Christianity don’t even go this far, and focus solely on saving people from affliction at the end of time, without regard to what afflicts them in this right now, today. That is directly opposed to the approach of the gospels’ Jesus.
- We never see Jesus walking around trying to get people to say a sinner’s prayer so as to either go to heaven when they die or be raptured from global catastrophe in the end of time. (This is not to be confused with Jesus’ call to nonviolence endeavoring to offer Jerusalem a different fate than being destroyed by Rome.)
- We do see Jesus liberating those he came in contact with from those concrete things that oppressed them in present time.
- An End-of-the-World focus tends, too often, to allow for laziness in matter of social justice, now.
- An End-of-the-World focus tends, too often, to preserves the present position of those benefiting at the expense of others from the current status quo.
- An End-of-the-World focus tends, too often, to leave those presently poor, mourning, and hungry un-blessed by the gospel of Jesus. ( See Luke 6.20-26)
To see Jesus as Present Liberator, not merely End-of-the-World Savior, let’s look at Mark’s stories of the demoniacs. First, a few words about the apocalyptic worldview of the early Gospel authors.
Apocalyptic Worldview
Writers of the early gospel stories subscribed to an apocalyptic worldview, which means that they saw this world as the battleground for the cosmic forces of good and evil.
The apocalyptic world view possessed four tenets: dualism, pessimism, judgment and imminence.[1]
Dualism
Within the Apocalyptic world view the world is dualistic, meaning it has two parts: this world that we see and the cosmic world that we do not see. The cosmic world is composed of good cosmic powers and evil cosmic powers, each power works through earthly participants, and the cosmic forces of evil are the enemies of a good God. For first century apocalyptic Jews, these evil cosmic powers were sin, death, demons, and Beelzebub (or the satan). According to this view, the historical earthly participants with these cosmic powers were Babylon, the Persians, Greece, and Rome: all of these historical earthly powers were oppressors of the weak.
Within this worldview, the cosmic evil forces are presently in control of the earth (see 1 John 5:19) Accordingly, those who choose the side of good will suffer and those who choose the side of evil will prosper.
Pessimism
Those who subscribed to this worldview believed in the eventual overthrow of these evil forces, yet also believed there was nothing we can do in the meantime. There were variations on this belief, though. In the time of Jesus, the Pharisees believed they could hasten the eventual overthrow of evil through obedience to the purity laws of the Torah. Their pessimism produced the view that there are two ages: the present age where the forces of evil are in control, and the age to come when these powers would be defeated, Earth would be liberated, and those on the side of good would be vindicated. For now, according to this belief, all we should expect is that the world would get worse and worse until the very end when the suffering of the good would be traded for vindication.
Judgment and Vindication
The apocalyptic worldview also included the belief that the age to come will arrive with a cataclysmic breakthrough that would usher in utopia. That breakthrough was understood to be the inauguration of God’s Kingdom as spoken of by the prophets here on Earth. It would be accompanied by the bodily resurrection of those who had died previously, and then everyone, those living and those resurrected, would face either a punishment or a reward. (See Daniel 12.2)
Imminence of the End
Those who held to an apocalyptic worldview believed that the age to come, and all of the events associated with it, was just around the corner.
Positives and Negatives
This worldview had positives and negatives. The positives were that it took evil seriously. There are evils that are bigger than any of us individually. And it provided hope that there was a cosmic force for good that would eventually put things in this earth to right. The negative was that it tended to produce a moral complacency in the face of injustice, violence, and oppression here and now. In other words, there really is nothing we can do to change human suffering around us until the age to come, so the best we can do is try and survive.
The Canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John)
Today, our culture mostly subscribes to a naturalistic world view, which means that many people see this world as the result of observable, measurable forces that have repeatable impacts on the things and people in the world. This view is not dualistic, but assumes that everything that happens on this planet can be explained by natural causes and effects.
The early canonical gospel authors were not naturalists. They drew from the worldview of their time, the apocalyptic worldview. This is important to understand because it explains much of what we read in the gospel stories they wrote. They believed that in Jesus’ life and teachings, which climaxed in his execution and resurrection, the apocalyptic event they had been looking for in the future had finally arrived. It had happened! I do not believe that someone has to hold the apocalyptic world view to find benefit in the Jesus story, today. Someone can hold a naturalistic world view and still gain much from the ethical teachings of the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John that will help create a safer more compassionate world for us all.
Most Christians today subscribe purely to neither an apocalyptic nor a naturalist world view, but a hybrid of both which is influenced by the narratives of their religious tradition. On a spectrum of apocalypticism at one end and naturalism at the other, the more fundamentalist a Christian is, the more they will hover near the apocalyptic end of the spectrum; the more progressive a Christian is, the more they will hover near the naturalist end. Both will likely draw at least some elements from the other worldview as well. I’ll be contrasting the naturalistic world view with the apocalyptic world view in next week’s eSight.
What I would like to contrast this week is the apocalypticism of the early church with the apocalypticism of many fundamentalist Christians today. There is a stark difference between the two.
The Christian apocalyptic world view of today typically holds to some level of dualism (cosmic forces of good and evil working through earthly powers and systems.) It, too, looks toward a future judgment/vindication that is referred to by many who hold this world view as “the end of the world.” The view also holds that this “end” is imminent. It is just around the corner. We do not have much time left. Lastly, this view also tends toward a pessimistic passivity. Things are just going to get worse and worse. There’s nothing we can do until the end, and Jesus comes the second time to set things right. Things will not any get better till the end of the world arrives.
This contemporary form of the apocalyptic world view, though, is a subtle denial of Jesus.
The authors of the Jesus story did subscribe to an apocalyptic world view as well. Yet there was a difference. The difference between their apocalypticism and contemporary apocalypticism is that they believed that in Jesus, the apocalyptic event they had been looking for in the future had finally arrived. It had happened! They were no longer focused on some future event. The authors of the Jesus story in the New Testament were looking at the present through the lens of the life, teachings, execution, and resurrection of their Jesus.
Christians who hold a contemporary apocalyptic world view today are still looking toward the future event for world change. Many of those are remaining passive until those events take place. The writers of the Jesus story believed that in Jesus, the future apocalyptic event, in the form a mustard seed, had arrived and they were actively working to participate in Jesus’ liberation from suffering here and now!
They were no longer waiting on the future, the Kingdom had come!
They were no longer entrenched in passive pessimism, but active participation in Jesus’ work of liberation now! (see the book of Acts)
Holding to an apocalyptic world view, the gospel writers believed Jesus was their long awaited Messiah who had ushered in the Age to Come. (It had come in the form of leaven placed in dough.) Jesus was their liberator from all things that oppressed them, both cosmic evils and those force’s earthly collaborators, specifically Rome. These writers saw Jesus as their Liberator from all things that oppressed them then!
Mark’s stories of Jesus performing demoniac liberation are classic example of earthly acts of liberation from cosmic forces of evil. For those modern readers who subscribe to a more naturalistic world view, the demon stories of Mark (found in Mark 1:32, 34, 39; 3:15, 22; 5:18; 6:13; 7:26, 29-30; 9:38) are intellectually and philosophically troubling to say the least. But when we read them as part of an apocalyptic world view and their view of Jesus as arrival of the fulfillment of that worldview, we see the importance of the demoniac stories to the early Jesus followers. (As well as the stories of raising people from the dead, forgiving peoples sins, and healing those who were sick). Jesus, to them, was not a post mortem savior, nor a someone who told them to keep looking toward the future. Jesus was to them a present liberator from all things that concretely oppressed them now!
These followers saw Jesus as the Earth’s liberator from the cosmic forces of evil. As such, it was important that Jesus demonstrated power over theses cosmic demonic forces.
“The people were all so amazed that they asked each other, ‘What is this? A new teaching—and with authority! He even gives orders to impure spirits [i.e. cosmic forces of evil] and they obey him.’ News about him spread quickly over the whole region of Galilee.” (Mark 1:27-28)
Apocalyptic Liberation (the Kingdom) Has Come!
Whether someone subscribes to a more naturalistic worldview or a more apocalyptic world view, the Jesus story can still be relevant. Regardless of how one explains human suffering, whether it be through natural causes or cosmic evil forces, Jesus is the liberator from things that cause oppression, violence, and injustice now!
The gospel is not as much about an afterlife, as it is about freeing people from anything that oppresses them here and now. To follow Jesus means to participate in Jesus’ work of liberating people from things that concretely oppress them in this world.
Whether it be sexism, racism, colonialism, militarism, consumerism, authoritarianism, classism, capitalism, heterosexism, binarism, or whatever, the focal point of the Jesus of the Jesus stories is liberation from all things that concretely oppress people. He started his public ministry with this litany:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind [prison blindness],
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor [liberation from oppressors].” (Luke 4.18)
This is the liberation that Jesus referred to in his announcement of the coming near of the kingdom of God. The very material term “kingdom” is rooted in Jesus’ Judaism. Unlike the kyriarchical kingdoms of that age, however, Jesus’ kingdom would be based on sibling relationships and friendships. We see this demonstrated as Jesus, whom the disciples called “Lord,” stooped to wash the feet of those same disciples. A more contemporary term for Jesus’ new social order might be “kinship” rather than an imperial “kingdom” (see Matthew 23:8)
In short, the gospel is the good news of liberation now, not an announcement of good to come one day. The gospel is not a end-of-time fire insurance policy over which Christians must now argue over the amount of the premium to be paid. The gospel is the good news that the seeds of liberation from things that concretely oppress now are to be found in the teachings of this nonviolent, Jewish revolutionary—Jesus.
HeartGroup Application
As we gather together around Jesus’ shared table, the teachings of Jesus call us to live out the values of his gospel in our community, first within our HeartGroups and then within the larger communities outside of our HeartGroups.
A couple of weeks ago I asked you to list what those within your group needed to be liberated from and to practice ways you could come along side each group member in living out the values of the Jesus story.
1. This week, take inventory of how you are doing.
2. Acknowledge areas where you need to make some adjustments. List areas you could be doing more in, things that didn’t work, and things that you choose to do but did not yet follow through with.
3. Adjust you what you have been doing to better meet the needs of those in your HeartGroup. Don’t be afraid of adjusting again whenever you feel that what you used to do is no longer working.
Again, the teachings of Jesus contain the seeds of liberation, now, not later.
Like mustard seeds, they will grow if we choose to water them.
Wherever this finds you this week, keep coming to the shared table. Keep endeavoring to follow the teachings of Jesus. Keep living in love—until the only world that remains is a world where love reigns.
Many voices, one new world.
I love each you dearly.
I’ll see you next week when we take of look at the strengths and weaknesses of the naturalistic world view for a Jesus follower.
1. These four tenets are adapted from Bart Ehrman’s The Underlying Tenets of Apocalypticism in his book God’s Problem, pages 214-219 (Kindle Edition)
Is Transformative Justice Enough?
BY HERB MONTGOMERY
“Those who are well have no need of a physician.” (Mark 2.17)
This week, we continue exploring the passage that we looked at last week. Last week we said that the inclusive table of Jesus made room for “tax collectors” and “sinners,” and indicted the religious leaders who looked down on both. There is something else taking place in this passage as well.
Jesus perceived himself as a liberating physician who came not to condemn but to heal. His focus was transformation, not punishment. Tax collectors and sinners were being transformed (see Luke 19.1-9), and yet some of the people, for whatever reason, wanted to see these tax collectors and sinners suffer some chastisement for violating the Torah’s purity laws or for being unfaithful to the political interests of the Jewish people and collaborating with Rome.
I also want to be clear. The tax collectors and sinners were not changing in the ways the scribes and Pharisees wanted them to change, but they were changing. They were abandoning their participation in the systemic oppression of the poor and embracing Jesus’s teachings on the redistribution of their riches to those they had previously robbed.
There are two things to consider.
First: the tax collectors’ and sinners’ changes didn’t match the changes the scribes and Pharisees prescribed. Those who choose to follow the teachings of Jesus will be changed, but those changes may not look anything like the changes that religious onlookers expect.
This is not an “Anything goes if you turn to Jesus” approach. This is the reality that the changes that happen when we decide to follow the teachings of Jesus rarely reflect the values of religions that support and empower the status quo. The tax collectors and sinners who ate with Jesus were embracing Jesus’s bias toward the poor, but not necessarily the purity laws that the scribes and Pharisees passionately defended. And we have no indication that they were being indoctrinated into the mainstream definition of the Romans as the enemy.
Today the same is true. When someone turns to Jesus’s teachings, they may not change in all the ways others may think they need to. Change does occur. But the Jesus story offers transformation and a change in values as well. It is this values change that threatens the onlookers.
Just recently, I was accused of preaching a gospel that doesn’t produce change in the lives of those who embrace it: “Herb is preaching a gospel that tells people they can be saved in their sins.” Nothing could be further than the truth. What this claim misses is that radical change is in fact occurring, just not the changes some critics prescribe. Jesus’s gospel liberates us from both personal and systemic sin, and yet what you define as sin and what Jesus defined as sin may be radically different. We can miss ways people are changing right before our eyes because we don’t have Jesus’ tailor made plan of change for those people. Some status quo-supporting religions define as sin things that aren’t sin but are simply things that the status quo wants to suppress to maintain their societal position. The personal and systemic transformation that Jesus’s teachings call for is transformation that will ultimately turn the status quo on its head.
Second: Jesus is much more concerned with transformation than with chastisement.
The stories of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah told of the ancient judges who guided the Hebrews before the days of the kings. These Judges were the people’s liberators, not their punishers.
In the books of the Old Testament prophets, justice is primarily restorative and transformative. They do speak of charity, but charity only helps with the immediate needs of those at the bottom of our societies. When justice works personal and systemic transformation, it works at the root of the system itself, and it produces no more societal tops or bottoms. It produces equity.
It may always be important to pull people out of the water who are drowning. But at some point, as Martin Luther King, Jr., taught us, somebody has to ask the question, “Who keep throwing these people in the water?”
When people benefit from the status quo, their gospel tends to define justice as punishment or retribution. These definitions work to preserve the status quo and the benefits that some can draw from it.
By contrast, Jesus’s teachings focus on justice transforming the status quo rather than a justice defined punishing those who violate the rules that preserve the status quo. Both the Old Testament prophets and Jesus taught a justice that invites transformation and not mere penal chastisement.
Hear Jesus: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ BUT I say to you, Do not retaliate against an evildoer…You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, LOVE YOUR ENEMIES and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:38-39, 43-44, emphasis added.)
The cheek defiance and enemy love that Jesus taught affirmed those being violated, and it also sought creative ways to transform those violating them. (See the presentation entitled The Way of Enemy Love here.) Jesus’s enemy love was not in the least bit passive. It was nonviolent, and it lovingly confronted for the sake of transforming those at the helm of a harmful status quo.
The question I want to ask today is, “Is transformation enough?”
This question is for those who have already been hurt. Is it enough for those who have wronged you to be radically transformed, or do you need them to suffer something punitive as well? Can transformation take the place of retribution? Or is retribution necessary even when transformation has taken place? In my studies over the last five years, I’ve learned that there are two qualities of punishment (For more this see the presentation Do I Have To Believe in Hell? here.): One kind of punishment is transformative, and disciplines for the purpose of awakening and changing those who have hurt others. A second type of punishment is not concerned with transformation, but only seeks to satisfy the claim in the heart of the one who was hurt that says the guilty party needs to suffer.
If the Heart of the Universe is anything like the heart we see in the story and teachings of Jesus, it is primarily concerned with transformation, not penal, retributive punishment. And this insight should challenge all of us.
“An eye for an eye will leave everyone blind”.—frequently attributed to Mahatma Gandhi
HeartGroup Application
When I consider the intrinsic value of the shared table, the transformation of those who share the table is, for me, its greatest quality.
As I share here, another indispensable quality of the shared table is the room it makes for those around the table who are unlike us. As we listen to each voice around the table share their stories and experiences, we are challenged to see the world through a different lens than our own and we start out on the beautiful journey of integrating these diverse experiences into a meaningful and coherent whole. We’re each called to choose and work hard at creating a safer more compassionate world for us all.
This week:
- Sit down with your HeartGroup and list the similarities and the differences that exist among your group.
- Discuss together the differences you feel are missing within your group, what those differences would create if they were present, and active ways you could enlarge your group to include and embrace those differences.
- Select one of those ways to put into practice during the week.
Our differences have the potential to scare us, because when we come together, all of us walk away from the table different than when we arrived. But this is just the point of coming together—transformation. When we come to a table such as the one Jesus has set, if we will only listen to each other, every one of us gets up a different person.
It truly is a beautiful journey!
Many voices, one new world.
Till the only world that remains is a world where Love reigns.
I love each of you, and I’ll see you next week.
Jesus—Liberator of the Oppressed, Physician of the Sick
BY HERB MONTGOMERY
As Jesus was walking along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him. And as he sat at dinner in Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples—for there were many who followed him. When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to his disciples, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” When Jesus heard this, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” Mark 2:14-17
I want to begin this week by thanking you for your patience over the last couple weeks. We’ve been moving our oldest daughter into college. She is our first-born child, and we’ve felt a mixture of bittersweet emotions: business, grief, excitement, joy and sorrow. I was not prepared for what I’ve been feeling about her leaving home. Please pray for me and for us as family.
We started by reading from Mark’s gospel, chapter 2. Let’s take a look at Jesus and the dinner he attended at Levi’s house.
In Mark’s gospel, salvation is defined as Jesus’ liberation from all that oppresses. Mark’s Jesus is not preoccupied with getting people through life in moral condition so their post-mortem, disembodied soul is eligible for the pearly gates. Mark’s Jesus is busy liberating those he encounters from whatever oppresses them today, right now.
Mark’s gospel also draws from the apocalyptic, dualistic world view that connects everything here on earth with a fight between good cosmic forces and evil cosmic forces. In other words, if someone is being oppressed, their oppressors are the puppets of cosmic evil. Jesus envisioned himself as a conduit of cosmic good, here to liberate those oppressed on earth. This is why Mark jumps into supernatural acts of liberation this early in the Jesus story.
Mark shows us that Jesus possessed a preferential option for the poor. Jesus wasn’t working for the equal opportunity of all to compete in a system of winners and losers. He aimed instead at a radical restructuring of human communities where there are no more winners and losers. Jesus pointed us toward communities of mutual aid, where we each strove to take care of one another rather than competing against each other. In Mark 10, Jesus tells the man, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor.” He envisioned community not rooted in win/lose survival, but win/win cooperation.
In the second chapter of Mark, we see the wealthy tax collectors and “sinners” responding to Jesus’ call to wealth redistribution and the wealthy Pharisees not responding well. We begin here to see in Mark’s gospel a Jesus who prioritizes liberating the oppressed over religiously defined purity and fidelity to religious ritual.
In Luke’s gospel, Jesus makes his mission clear:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to those with prison-blindness,
to let the oppressed go free.”
Jesus, Luke 4:18
The Pharisees in Mark are upset that Jesus is eating with “tax-collectors and sinners.” Jewish tax-collectors were viewed as unfaithful to the national interests of their own people and collaborators with the oppressive political and economic power of Rome. A sinner in the gospels was someone perceived to be living contrary to the Pharisees’ and teachers’ interpretation of the Torah.
Notice that those who were thought to be guilty of nationally infidelity and/or religiously disobedient were responding to Jesus’ economic teachings, yet the Pharisees, who valued national faithfulness and strict obedience to the Torah’s ritual and purity laws, were not.
Mark offers another clue to understanding what’s happening in Mark 2. In the next two stories in his gospel, Mark focuses on the Pharisees and the rituals of fasting and the Sabbath. Asked about the Sabbath, Jesus responds, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food” (Mark 2:25). The Torah declared it was not lawful for anyone but the priests to eat the bread of the Presence. But when it came to feeding the hungry and strict adhering to the ritual laws, Jesus chose to labor for the oppressed and to prioritize feeding the hungry over the Torah rule. The people were a weightier matter than the law.
Jesus’ teaching matches something that Judaism refers to as pikuach nefesh, the principle that the preservation of human life overrides other religious considerations. The Pharisees in our story this week subscribed to a different way of interpreting the Torah; their principle was that ritual and purity laws may not be violated, even when a life is in danger. (You can see this principle at work in Mark 3 as well. Some members of every religion still argue for this approach to religious obedience today.)
Mark’s Jesus prioritizes the lives of those who are being economically oppressed.
Following Jesus is not about greater patriotism to nationalistic interests, nor is it primarily about religious observances. Following Jesus means defining salvation not as getting to heaven but as liberating humanity today from all things that oppress and using the principles Jesus taught himself.
Those who participate in this liberation work are, by definition, following Jesus in his work. Those who don’t may be very religious, yet are not following him in the way he walked while here on earth.
Our story ends with Jesus responding, “Those that are well don’t need a physician. I came to call not the righteous, but the sinners.”
I believe Jesus was using the religious leaders’ own paradigm here. They felt they were “righteous,” and called those Jesus embraced “sinners.” Yet Jesus took on the role of a liberating physician, and those labeled “sinners” and “sick” were responding to him. They were the ones seeing the sickness of the system they’d participated in. They were the ones choosing to move in a different direction. Jesus hadn’t come to affirm or reward those who were “righteous.” He had come to heal the sick, to liberate the oppressed.
Jesus suggests to the religious leaders that even if they were more politically “righteous” than the tax collectors and more ritually “righteous” than those they referred to as “sinners,” they were just as much economic “sinners” as the wealthy tax-collectors, and just as much in need of liberation as the people they condemned. As long as they refused to consider this reality, they could have no part in and no understanding of Jesus’ work for the poor and oppressed.
This week, don’t ask yourself how successful you are in the merely religious aspects of your life. Ask yourself what you and those around you need to be liberated from so you can be fully human. Ask what you are doing in your own sphere to live out Jesus’ liberation.
Just recently, someone responded to one of my critiques of social political and economic abuses. “What are you, Herb,” they asked me. “A minister or a politician?” My response is that I’m neither. I am simply a human being endeavoring to obediently follow Jesus. And it is that obedience that dictates that I must concern myself with more than the afterlife. I must also concern myself with whatever people need liberation from today in order to be what the great Heart at the center of the universe brought them into existence to be.
To the degree that we’re living out Jesus’ ministry of liberation from all things that oppress, to that same degree we’re working alongside Jesus. Unless we live out the wisdom of the Jesus story, we may still possess some assurance that helps us sleep at night, but we’re not following Jesus’ way.
If our Jesus today is not first and foremost a liberator of the oppressed as he declared in Luke 4:18, then we must at least ask whether our Jesus is the same one the gospels describe.
HeartGroup Application
The Jesus story calls us to fundamentally rethink theology from the standpoint of the poor and oppressed, to envision a God who is on the side of the poor and the oppressed of our world. The Jesus story calls us away from being preoccupied with getting people through life in good religious or moral condition so that when they die they can be admitted into heaven. Hope of a post-mortem Heaven, dear as it may be, cannot be our cause for excluding or ignoring the basic conditions anyone lives in today. The Jesus story calls us to ask, “What do we need to be fully liberated from in order to be fully human?”—and that liberation is physical, economic, political, religious, and social.
What do we and those around us need to be fully liberated from?
This week:
- Sit down with your HeartGroup and take inventory: what in your everyday lives do each of you need to be liberated from? List the issues, experiences, or needs.
- Brainstorm ways the group can come together along side of those needs, and live out the liberation values of the Jesus story. Write them down.
- Pick three things you have written down in number 2, and coordinate the carrying out of the actions previously discussed.
Charity addresses our immediate needs, but justice gets at the root of what is causing the oppression. Again, the Jesus story defines salvation as liberation from all things that oppress. Within the teachings of Jesus are the seeds of how we can embody Jesus’ work of healing in this world (see John 3:17). His teachings are where a Jesus follower begins to discover how we live out this gospel in our community and incarnate the values of this story which we hold dear.
Till the only world that remains, is a world where love reigns.
Here’s to Jesus’ safer, more compassionate home for us all. I wish each of you much love, peace and liberation this week.
I love each one of you and I’ll see you next week.
Jesus, the Meek, and the Golden Rule
Jesus’ non-exclusive, non-homogenous, non-kyriachical, shared table.
BY HERB MONTGOMERY
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. (Matthew 5:5)
As we look at the “blessings” of Matthew 5 this week, know that they do not say that any state is an intrinsic blessing. Rather they each say, that if you have any of the experiences Jesus describes—poverty, mourning, or persecution you will be particularly blessed by the changes Jesus came to make.
The first blessing, “Blessed are the poor,” is a great example. It’s not a blessing to be poor. No one strives and works hard so that one day they can be poor. But Jesus was saying that if the present arrangement of this world has left you poor, you are blessed because the changes I’ve come to make are in your favor. This is also true in the statement we’re looking at this week, “Blessed are the meek.”
Merriam-Webster defines “meek” as having or showing a quiet and gentle nature, not wanting to fight or argue with other people. It can also be defined as easily imposed on or submissive. There is no intrinsic blessing in being meek in the present world structure. In fact, meekness is a disadvantage in a world where everyone’s looking out for number one, trying to get ahead, looking out for themselves. The world is presently arranged in such a way that it does not reward the meek, it steam rolls over them.
I experienced multiple examples of the truth of this in my travels this summer.
The first was driving in Los Angeles. Driving in L.A. is very different from driving in Lewisburg, WV. In Lewisburg, we look out for everyone on the road. Even cautious drivers are let in and taken care of. Suffice it to say, it is not this way in L.A. If you drive with any degree of meekness, that’s the degree to which you’re going to get run over!
On one of our flights, a large, muscular young man threw a fit in order to intimidate a flight attendant into giving him the seat he wanted. And it worked! As he passed by my seat, I noticed the tattoo on his arm in large lettering: “I trust no one.”
In this world, a world based on competition rather than cooperation, it’s not the meek who are blessed but those who know how to play the game with the greatest skill. Even in something as simple as getting on the airplane, we don’t look after the meek. Each passenger already has their seat assignment, and we will all be taking off and arriving together at the same time. Yet some people need to be the first on the plane to the degree that they will roll over others to do so.
Jesus isn’t telling the people in his day to be meek. He is telling those listening that the world he was creating would bless even the meek, by contrast to the present world that doesn’t.
Can you imagine a world, where everyone—everyone—treats another simply the way they would like to be treated? Matthew’s Jesus points to that world using the language of his own Jewish tradition:
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. (Matthew 7.12)
Jesus is sharing a universal truth here. This is how it sounds in the language of other cultures:
“Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.” –Confucius (Ancient China)
“That which you hate to be done to you, do not do to another.”—Egyptian, Late Period Papyrus (Ancient Egypt)
“Do not do to others that which angers you when they do it to you.” –DIsocrates (Ancient Greece)
“Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.” —Udanavarga (Ancient Buddhism)
“Do to no one what you yourself dislike.”—Tobit 4:16 (Ancient Judaism, at least 200 years before Jesus)
“Recognize that your neighbor feels as you do, and keep in mind your own dislikes.”—Sirach 31:15 (Ancient Judaism)
“That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”—Talmud, Shabbat 31a (Judaism)
“One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one’s own self. This, in brief, is the rule of dharma. Other behavior is due to selfish desires.”—Brihaspati, Mahabharata (Anusasana Parva, Section CXIII, Verse 8) (Ancient Hinduism)
This universal truth that Jesus teaches in Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels contains the building blocks of a whole new world. And if we follow it to its furthest conclusion, we find it’s a world that takes care even of the meek. Follow closely.
Jesus modeled this new world for us in his practice of a shared table. Let’s look:
“Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” (Luke 15.1)
When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” (Matthew 9.11)
The Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to his disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” (Luke 5.30)
For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ (Luke 7.33-34)
Please remember that Jesus was not a Christian. Jesus was a Jew. In first-century Judaism, unlike in our time and culture, the label “sinner” was not a universal term. It referred only to those within the covenant community who were thought to be living out of harmony with the Torah.
Jesus chose a table that included those who, at best, were politically and religiously marginalized, and, at worst, were excluded by their culture’s status quo. Jesus modeled a table, that to a certain degree, was non-homogenous (think of Simon the zealot and Matthew the tax collector).
In other places in the canonical gospels, Jesus is clear that his table must also be non-kyriarchical.
I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends. (John 15.15)
But he said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you.” (Luke 22.25-26)
But Jesus called them to him and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. t will not be so among you.” (Matthew 20.25-26)
So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you.” (Mark 10.42-43)
After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you?” (John 13.12)
He modeled an inclusive, non-homogenous, non-kyriarchical shared table. And he invited us to sit with him there.
I believe Jesus understood that exclusivity creates a world where certain voices and perspectives are not heard, a world that does not fully take into account how others would desire to be treated or how we would wish to be treated if we were in their position.
I believe Jesus understood that homogeneity creates a world that’s unsafe for anyone who is different or unlike those seated at the table. To the degree that someone is not at the table, to that same degree those present will create an unsafe world. Ultimately, homogeneity leads to exclusion and exclusion leads to extinction.
Jesus understood that hierarchies where one human exercises authority over another human deny the image of God within both, and create a subjugation that leads to oppression.
I see this truth modeled in the Eucharist. We honor the memory of all who have been excluded, subjugated, and exterminated in the past. These were the ones Jesus also stood in solidarity with, and that solidarity cost him his life at the hands of the status quo. We choose, in the name of Jesus and in the face of this world’s present structures, to shape communities in the form a shared meal, a share table.
Regardless of gender, race, orientation, sex, education, and economic achievement, everyone must be invited to the non-kyriarchical, non-homogenous table. And if we would only choose to learn to follow Jesus and sit around this table with others, especially those who are not like ourselves, we could embrace a world devoid of oppression, subjugation and destructive violence.
I have not always understood this myself, but I am continuously learning. Today I see that if we would choose to live in the manner of a shared table, this would create a world respectfully and compassionately shared by and with us all, even the meek.
In that world, even the meek are blessed, for they, too, will inherit the earth.
Many voices.
One shared table.
One new world.
HeartGroup Application
1. What are some ways your HeartGroup can lean more deeply into practicing the universal truth of treating others the way you’d like to be treated?
List, together, at least ten.
2. Discuss what it is going to take to begin putting this into practice.
3. What challenges does your HeartGroup face now that this principle would significantly help?
List them.
It’s my hope that your heart will, with mine, continue to be liberated, healed and renewed, till the only world that remains is a world where Love reigns.
I love each of you.
I’ll see you next week.
Women and the Cheek Defiance of Jesus
Self-Affirming, Nonviolent Resistance and the Cheek Defiance of Jesus for Women.
BY HERB MONTGOMERY
If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. —Matthew 5:39
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been confronted by yet another reminder of Christianity’s failure to participate in Jesus’ mission of liberation. Christians cannot participate in the liberation work of our Christ while we continue to empower oppression.
What brought this reality most painfully to my attention recently was the failure of my faith tradition to recognize and reject the evils of sexism and veiled misogyny.
The most appropriate place I know to turn this week is Jesus. For Jesus and the stories about Jesus have much to say to women being subjugated by men.
In his own culture, Jesus taught Jewish women how to respond to the evils of sexism around them. Jesus saw these women being made to believe they were “less than,” and taught them responses including seizing the moral initiative, asserting and affirming their human dignity, refusing to submit and accept an inferior position, and exposing the injustice of systems who perpetuate such evils. Because of how much we’ve domesticated the teachings of Jesus, we rarely see the full scope of his message.
In order to help you see it now, I want to recommend the extraordinary work of Walter Wink in Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way. It relates to women in a very specific way.
In this volume, Wink pulls back the veil of centuries of misunderstanding about nonviolence and highlights the cultural context of Jesus’ teachings. Wink shows that Jesus taught his followers to assume moral authority and choose to take on the consequences of resistance—assume moral authority and choose .
In Matthew 5, Jesus taught:
“If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.” (Matthew 5:39)
As we have seen before, this phrase is often construed to mean that the slapped party submits to the person who strikes them. Nothing could be further from the original intent of the passage. The Jesus in Matthew abhors both passivity and violence as responses to evil. And so he offers instead a third alternative to the oppressed of his day (cf. Luke 4.18).
“In that society the left hand was used only for unclean tasks. Even to gesture with the left hand at Qumran carried the penalty of exclusion and ten days’ penance (The Dead Sea Scrolls, I QS 7).” (Wink, ibid.)
The scenario Jesus is describing in Matthew 5 is not a fistfight. It is a slap meant as an insult, and the intention is not to injure, but to humiliate: it was a back-handed slap given with the right hand and landing on the recipient’s right cheek. As Wink explains, men used this kind of slap against women to remind them to get back in their place. He goes on to say:
“One normally did not strike a peer thus, and if one did, the fine was exorbitant (4 zuz was the fine for a blow to a peer with a fist, 400 zuz for backhanding him; but to an underling, no penalty whatsoever (Mishnah, Mishnah, Baba Qamma 8:1-6).” (Wink, ibid.)
In that time, a backhanded slap was the normal way of admonishing inferiors, and women were considered admonish-able and women were considered underlings. Husbands would backhand wives who got out of line.” So Jesus is describing unequal relations within that society. He’s also describing interactions, such as public stoning, where retaliation would be suicidal. The obvious option for many women in Jesus’ day to this relational culture was “cowering submission.”
Wink continues:
“Why then does [Jesus] counsel these already humiliated people to turn the other cheek? Because this action robs the oppressor of the power to humiliate. The person who turns the other cheek is saying, in effect, ‘Try again. Your first blow failed to achieve its intended effect. I deny you the power to humiliate me. I am a human being just like you. Your status does not alter that fact. You cannot demean me.’” (Wink, ibid.)
Remember: to strike someone with a closed fist on the left cheek was how men in that era struck their peers. A man striking a woman on the left cheek would be forced to recognize the woman as his peer, equal, and equivalent.
I encourage you this week to actually pick up a copy of Wink’s excellent volume and read it for yourself. When you understand the context in which Jesus told his followers to engage in what I call “cheek defiance,” it becomes clear that he was empowering them to
- Seize the moral initiative
- Find a creative alternative to violence
- Assert [their] own humanity and dignity as a person
- Meet force with ridicule or humor
- Break the cycle of humiliation
- Refuse to submit or to accept the inferior position
- Expose the injustice of the system
- Take control of the power dynamic
- Shame the oppressor into repentance
- Stand [their] ground
- Make the Powers make decisions for which they are not prepared
- Recognize [their] own power
- Force the oppressor to see [them] in a new light
- Deprive the oppressor of a situation where a show of force is effective (Wink, pp. 186-187)
This option would also require women to make serious choices and do so freely for themselves. Each of us must decide whether we are:
- Willing to suffer rather than to retaliate
- Willing to undergo the penalty for breaking unjust laws [or policies]; and
- Die to fear of the old order and its rules.
- Seek the oppressors’ transformation
Wink closes with this profound statement.
“Nonviolence is not the final objective. Nonviolence is a lifestyle. The final objective is humanity. It is life.”
As a friend of mine recently wrote, “Healing the world is hard work.” If you think it’s going to be easy then just reread how in Matthew 10 Jesus prepares his twelve to be misunderstood, feared, accused, and ultimately extirpated by the present status quo.
After teaching cheek defiance in Matthew 5, Jesus addresses two more scenarios: the poor interacting with the rich (public nudity) and Jewish relations with Roman soldiers (civil disobedience). But the very first example Jesus gave is one where women could be empowered to affirm their worth and dignity, to affirm themselves and stand up to patriarchy and its abuses.
In Jesus’ new world, there are no more hierarchies. We are all siblings, offspring of the same Heart at the center of the Universe. We are going to have to learn how to sit together around the same shared table, as equals, once again. But first we must make a choice. Do we really want a world that is a shared table, or will we keep striving to subordinate others or submit to others’ dominance.
Understand this: When we value peace more than we value other people, the result is oppression. Peace (or unity) is not the fruit of submission. It is the presence of equity.
Jesus’ ultimate goal was “peace on earth,” yet he also spoke of being willing to stand up to the uplifted “sword” of our oppressors in creative ways that exposed the domination systems and awakened even those who empowered and drove those systems to also choose an alternative way. Yes, some of us may end up on a cross for shutting down the temples of our day as a result of following Jesus, but we are people of the resurrection and not only of the cross. The hope of the empty tomb is that subordination will yield to equity, condemnation will give way to compassion, fear to hope, and hate to love. But this change will never happen by itself. Each one of us, both men and women, must choose this new world.
I want to be clear. As a man, I am not telling women how they should respond to sexism or patriarchy in the world or in the church. Women within Christianity must be free to self-determine how they respond. I’m concerned by what I’ve witnessed: men telling women to simply “submit.” And I’m offering the alternative I believe Christ offered: the way of self-affirming, empowered, nonviolent resistance.
I’ll close this week with the words of Mahatma Gandhi:
“Nonviolence is not to be used ever as a shield of the coward. It is the weapon of the brave.”
HeartGroup Application
This week, discuss with your HeartGroup ways you can apply Jesus’ methods of nonviolent resistance to participate in Christ’s work of liberation from oppression. (cf. Luke 4.18)
- Take time with your HeartGroup to name the forms of oppression each of you see around you.
- Make time to sit and think of what Jesus’ nonviolent resistance might look like if practiced in each of those oppressive contexts today.
- Make a decision: Will you only sit and talk about oppression and resistance, or will you choose to embrace the options you’ll have just come up with?
If you are struggling with this week’s reading, reread Matthew 10. This is the chapter I turn to when I’m afraid, and I recommend it to you in hopes that it will empower you as well.
I recently received an email from a medical doctor friend of mine who works around the globe to make a difference in the lives of the less privileged. He said to me:
“There are always dark nights of the soul and Gethsemanes. But stand strong. From what I’ve experienced in the last 11 years, monetary resources are no problem for God. It’s human resources that are hard to come by. The harvest is ripe but the workers are few. The financial support will come, just keep going. The message you are bringing of non-violence, of the real Jesus, of love for the [marginalized] (the “least of these”), is prophetic and needed in our time. But most prophets in the Bible got pretty rough treatment most of the time…and of course, like I just mentioned, Jesus had a pretty hard time of it too…
“Everyone is always so worried about whether things are safe or not. Newsflash: following Jesus is not safe! What you’re doing is not “safe.” It’s dangerous. But that is also a part of following the Lamb… You may question: was it worth it to stand up for the few and lose the many who could’ve heard the message? But you have to put your money where your mouth is, Herb. And in the end, you’ll have no regrets. Keep going. Don’t quit.”
As we each choose to participate in the hard work of aligning our stories with the Jesus story itself, may the prayer of our hearts be, “I want Jesus to walk with me.” He promised he would be with us till the end of the present age and until the dawning of the new world. As some Adventist women are saying this week, “You can’t hold back the dawn.”
Till the only world that remains is a world free from oppression, a world where only love reigns.
I love each of you dearly. I’ll see you next week.
Blessed Are Those Who Are Poor . . .
BY HERB MONTGOMERY
Looking at his disciples, he said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. (Luke 6:20)
It’s good to be back home! I truly loved my time in Brazil. It is a very beautiful place, and the hearts of its people are the most beautiful.
I encountered two polar contrasts during my trip: the severe poverty of so many, and the equally shocking, extreme, generous nature of their sharing with one another. I saw that sharing even among the poorest.
As many are aware, when colonialism “ended” in many of the developing countries, another form of oppression took its place: economic oppression. The Empires that had settled in many of these areas passed on their debts to these fledgling countries as they gained their independence. Starting off deeply indebted to those who had previously ruled them, these nations gained independence, but not freedom. Many of these countries then turned to the World Bank, the IMF, and other power brokers of the new global economy for help. The international banks, the IMF, took the form of loans with terms and conditions that would leave more than half of each country’s resources going to debt repayment rather than internal development.
Brazil, for example, owes $1,420,331,037,715 to so called “first world countries” today. Every year, Brazil’s debt incurs $138,250,530,000 in interest. That’s $4384 per second. This debt amounts to 56.08% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), which is the monetary value of all the finished goods and services Brazil produces in its borders in a year.
So most of Brazil’s income repays debt that it wasn’t even responsible for incurring in the first place, and doesn’t maintain the infrastructure for taking care of its 202,768,562 citizens.
Imagine what your world would look like if your municipalities were, overnight, depleted of their resources to pay for water, sewer, trash pickup, road maintenance, emergency personnel, and law enforcement.
Manaus, the place I visited first, has virtually no middle class now. The very few wealthy and affluent live alongside masses upon masses of the severely poor.
I noticed this on Friday when I arrived. But that was just the start of my adventure.
Shortly after I arrived in Brazil, I was informed that my meetings in Manaus and Novo Airão had both been cancelled at the last minute. I learned that one of the “saints,” after seeing that I would be speaking in their church, googled my name and found out I was a friend to the LGBTIQ community. Discovering my love—and I quote—“for the gays,” rumors also began to circulate that I drank, smoked, ate pork, did drugs, had multiple wives, and did not believe in the Holy Spirit. (You can’t make this stuff up.) Those of you who’re not familiar with the teetotaling, kosher nature the Adventist church, please know that just saying that someone drinks, smokes, and eats pork is enough to marginalize an Adventist. Every other rumor was gratuitous. My meetings had been scheduled to begin that first weekend, but they would at best be delayed, and at worst be permanently cancelled.
So I woke up early the next morning and attended the church where I’d been scheduled to speak. Sunday, I spent becoming familiar with the city, and then Monday afternoon, I had an appointment with the Conference President.
The president and I were not the only ones present at this meeting. Accompanying me was my host and an interpreter. It turned into a short meeting, and the president did not discuss why our meetings had been delayed. We did discuss a church policy concerning guest speakers from other countries, and so I had the opportunity to remind everyone present that I was only in the country by their prior invitation. The meetings had been approved a year previously, and we had cooperated with every stipulation they had made in that time.
After the meeting—Im still not sure what made the difference—the administration approved our meetings for the second time. They would now begin on Wednesday evening. Faced with four lost days, I started editing my presentations. I’d already edited them severely for translation, and now I had to cut the series in half. As a result of the delays, however, the Manaus series was poorly attended until the last presentation, when the house was packed.
I chose Luke 4:18-19 as my focus for the week. In these texts, we discover Jesus, the liberator of the oppressed, embracer of the outcast, and proponent of a shared table. Those who did attend repeatedly told us how thankful they were for the meetings, and they shared the different paradigm shifts they had each experienced through encountering Jesus’ teaching in a refreshing new light.
The next series was about 120 miles northwest of Manaus, in Novo Airão. Buy bus that is about a four hours distance. This area was much more economically stressed than Manaus.
For this group, my choice to present Jesus as a first century poor Jewish teacher (Luke 2.24 cf. Leviticus 12.8) who came with good news for his fellow poor resonated deeply. We focused on Jesus’ words in the Synagogue in Luke 4 (emphasis added):
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for those with prison-blindness,
to set the oppressed free.”
Never have I encountered first-hand just how important it is to couch Jesus’ ministry in the context of his liberation of the poor. The Novo Airão group showed me how much.
As we reflected on Luke 4, we explored four themes together.
1. How Jesus taught the poor to survive. Jesus gave the poor a way to transcend “worry” and “fear” by combining what they did have and choosing to embrace, share with, and take care of one another. (See Luke 12:13-34; Matthew 5:25-34)
2. How Jesus empowered the poor and oppressed to move beyond survival. Jesus taught the poor how to affirm themselves by nonviolently confronting oppressors and by staying rooted in enemy-love and enemy-transformation. John Dear, who has done a tremendous amount of work in nonviolence over the years, states: “Nonviolence is active love that seeks justice and peace for the whole human race, beginning with the poor and oppressed. It is the all-encompassing love that embraces every human being on the planet, refuses to kill anyone, and works for social justice for everyone.” (See Luke 4:16-29; Matthew 5:38-42)
3. How Jesus rejected hierarchical structures in the community of his followers. Jesus promoted equity, justice, and compassion for all. This insight resonated with the audience the most as many felt as if they were living lives at the bottom of political, economic, and religious structures. (See Matthew 20:25-28; Matthew 23:8-12)
4. How Jesus replaced systems of oppression and exclusion with a shared table. As each one of us, along with our differences, encounter one another at Jesus’ shared table, we become enabled to integrate all the many diverse experiences of life into a meaningful and coherent whole, producing a safer and more compassionate world for us all. (Luke 6:20-26; Luke 15:1, 25-32)
We ended this series with the ending of Jesus narrative. Jesus was crucified by the powers and systems that his teachings threatened, and God said “NO” to that execution in the resurrection on Sunday morning. Jürgen Moltmann defines the resurrection as a Divine protest to the domination systems of our world. The early church also perceived the resurrection as a decisive clue that a new world, like a mustard seed placed in the ground and like leaven in dough, had begun with Jesus. (See Acts 13:32-33) In overwhelming clarity, we encountered, together, a Jesus who proclaimed that the Heart of the Universe was standing with those who, as a result of the way the present world is set up, are hurting, suffering, going hungry, falling asleep many nights in tears, oppressed, marginalized and subordinated. These are the majority of those who live in Novo Airão. And those who were present found renewed hope as decisions were made to embrace and to follow this Jesus.
On the last night of this second series, one of the more affluent members who attended shared with me this message in broken english:
“I had never looked at things this way before. Thank you so much for coming. I feel as if I cannot continue on the same way I had. If I am to embrace Jesus’ shared table, things in my life where I’m participating in ‘pyramids of oppression’ and ‘circles of exclusion’ must change.”
Over all, I view my trip to Brazil as a tremendous success for Jesus’ new world. The response of the people to the stories and teachings of Jesus was breathtaking, especially in Novo Airão, and I believe the Novo Airão church took significant strides toward Jesus’ new world of compassion and safety for everyone.
To those of you who were praying for this series here at home, thank you. Over the next two weeks the Novo Airão church will be conducting a local school building project: please keep praying for them.
And to each of you who has supported Renewed Heart Ministries, I can’t thank you enough. You made it possible for me to go to Brazil and share with the people I met.
I take Jesus’ words to his disciples, “Freely you have received, freely give” very seriously. Renewed Heart Ministries is a not-for-profit ministry, and we never charge seminar fees for local work. We also make all of our resources available on the web so the people who need to hear this message can access it freely.
This means we are directly dependent on our monthly supporters as well as those who make one-time contributions: you help us to keep lifting up Jesus and his teachings in a hurting world. Jesus’ teachings have placed us on a path that leads to life rather than death, compassion rather than condemnation, and love rather than hate. Like Jesus, we believe our call is not “to condemn the world.” Instead we do this work that the world, through Jesus and his teachings, “might be healed” (John 3:17).
I witnessed the healing nature of Jesus’ teachings firsthand during my visit to Brazil. Jesus’ words to the poor and oppressed, his uplifting of women in a patriarchal society, his embrace of the outcast and excluded, and even his self-affirming nonviolence resonated so deeply with those who participated in these two series of meetings that I, too, walked away having to agree with the Samaritans of Jesus’ day: “This man [Jesus] really is the Savior of the world.” (John 4:42)
Thank you for helping me to see and share that Savior. Till the only world that remains is world where love reigns, let’s keep lifting Jesus up.
And to each of you who support the ministry of RHM as we reach our around the globe, thank you.
I love each of you dearly. I’ll see you next week.
A Liberation For Those Who Mourn
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” (Matthew 5:4)
(Top to bottom; left to right.): Ethel Lance, 70; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Cynthia Hurd, 54; Depayne Middleton Doctor, 49; The Rev. Clement Pinckney, 41; Susie Jackson, 87; Myra Thompson, 59; The Rev. Dr. Daniel Simons Sr., 74; The Rev. Sharon Coleman-Singleton, 45.
I’m in Brazil this week sharing two separate series of presentations. The first series was in Manaus and the next will be hosted in Novo Airão.
My heart was torn in two directions as I started to write this article. Since my arrival in Brazil, I’ve wanted to share with you the gross economic disparity I see between so-called “first world” countries and “third world” countries. I’ve noticed how developed countries have harnessed developing countries and I’d like to talk more about that.
But my heart also breaks for what has taken place back at home in the US, with the violent, anti-Black, mass murder in Charleston resulting from white, xenophobic hatred.
As a white male in American society, whose voice is often heard and listened to, I’ve wrestled with whether my comments on Charleston will benefit or harm those who we should be making room to listen to in this moment.
I hope that w hat I am about to share will contribute to a safer and more compassionate world for all. This is what’s on my heart.
What I’m sharing are my feelings—how I feel and not just what I think. I believe and teach enemy-transforming, restorative forgiveness, which is vastly different than simply letting someone off the hook. Yet there is a sick feeling in my gut when people of color are murdered by White people and I hear White people affirming the victims for forgiving their murderers and not killing White people in return. When I share this feeling, some of my White friends retort, “But I thought you believed in nonviolence, Herb?”
Yes, I do believe in nonviolence. And I don’t think that what I believe is the most important question we could ask at times like this.
So I want to qualify what I’m about to say. This piece is primarily for those White people who want to understand how I apply my teachings about Christological nonviolence. I am in no way critiquing members of the Black community about whether they should be nonviolent or what form their nonviolence should take. African-Americans are entirely free to self-determine their responses, and it is not for me, or any other than that community, to decide for them.
If you’ve followed my work over the last few years, you’ll know that I have said a number of times that Christological nonviolence is not passive in the face of evil; instead, it is disruptive and that’s the very reason it can be effective. If nonviolence is passive and does not subvert or transform white racial violence, it simply empowers that violence. Whatever form nonviolence takes, it must carry with it a distinctive and profound “no” to the violence it’s responding to.
I’m on the wrong side of the tracks to be thankful that another racist white murderer is being publicly forgiven by relatives of the people he killed. If these family members would like to do that, that is their prerogative. But I do not feel comfortable being thankful for it. The business of racism, the business of oppression, the business of violent, anti Black, xenophobic hatred must not continue as usual, and for me to ask victims of racial violence to be peaceful according to my standards when I belong to the group that still controls the status quo would be a subtle form of violence in the name of nonviolence: nonviolence in name only.
Think back to our study of the Jesus story itself. Only a poor Jewish outcast could tell poor Jewish followers to nonviolently confront their oppressors. For a Roman citizen to tell a Jew to be nonviolent just after a violent Roman massacre of Jews would’ve been a special, blinkered breed of violence. Those in white society are in no position morally to approve or reject the choices made by those in communities of color, whether those choices be forgiveness or revolt, nonviolence or violence. As someone who belongs to the group still in control of our societies, I have no ground to judge those whose humanity the status quo is denying. As the nonviolent Jesus taught, it’s not for me to focus on the dust that may or may not be in someone else’s eyes. I need to “first take the beam out of [my] own eye.” These are the kinds of feelings I am navigating today.
When we consider the historical context of the Jesus story, we see the wealthy classes economically abusing the poor. Herod’s plan was to deliver Israel through economic wealth at the expense of the poor; Pilate oversaw Roman political oppression of the Jewish people; and the High Priest Caiaphas monetarily benefited from both of these abusive structures. He added “God’s” blessing to the abuse and allowed the Temple to be co-opted in the stronger’s domination of the weaker. Jesus threatens this trifecta and is executed on a Roman cross.
James Cone’s monumental book, A Black Theology of Liberation, affirms how Jürgen Moltmann describes the resurrection. Cone writes, “Moltmann is correct when he speaks of the resurrection as the ‘symbol of protest.’”
The resurrection is God’s “NO” to the systems of oppression that lynched Jesus. Yes, Jesus forgave. And the resurrection is God’s further response—a decided NO to the violence Jesus was victim to on the cross. The status quo executed Jesus because he stood in solidarity with the oppressed and those who had been “Othered.” In the resurrection, God stood in solidarity with Jesus in this and stood against the violence meted out through the cross. Everything accomplished in the cross was undone and reversed in the resurrection.
Whenever the status quo desires people of color to remain passive in the wake of horrific white violence, Martin Luther King, Jr. is always drug out of the grave and co-opted. If only the system knew how subversive and critical of the system King really was, I do not think they would tout him so readily. Listen to King speaking at the funeral service of three of the four children killed as a result of racist violence in a church in 1963. Speaking of three of these children, Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, and Cynthia Diane Wesley, King said:
“They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly . . .”.(emphasis added.)
So what about what Jesus taught in Matthew 5? What he taught and demonstrated in his life is not a nonviolence of self-denial that he imposed on the victims of his day. It was oppressors who he called to deny their lust to victimize others. Jesus’ nonviolence for the victims is not self-denying, it is self-affirming. Their “selves” were already being denied by their oppressors. Rather than harnessing the oppressed with an enemy embrace, or demanding they reconcile with their “enemy” before their “enemy” becomes a friend, Jesus’ nonviolence empowers those being dehumanized with a way to affirm their humanity through nonviolent, enemy confrontation. Reconciliation may happen down the road, yet it is a reconciliation that follows enemy transformation.
As I have said in previous weeks, the Jewish people faced disproportionate violence from Rome. If they reacted to Rome with violence, Rome would raze Jerusalem to the ground, much as white Charleston residents burned down Emmanuel AME church in the 1800s after Denmark Vesey’s attempted slave revolt. Jesus empowered the oppressed to choose a nonviolence that they could apply even if they were grossly outnumbered. Its primary goal was not reconciliation but the transformation of the enemy. Again, any reconciliation would only come after their enemies were transformed. Ultimately, Jesus’ nonviolence has the goal of liberation for everyone. King called this the “double victory” of liberating both the oppressed and the oppressors. But we must note that liberation for the oppressors is radically different from the liberation of the oppressed. The oppressors choose to perpetuate dehumanization, whereas the oppressed have dehumanization chosen for them. Both need to be set free from injustice, but liberation means very different things to each side.
Lastly, Jesus’ nonviolence is not concerned whether we make waves or “remain peaceful.” It is not about maintaining the society of the oppressors. Jesus’ nonviolence is grounded in solidarity with the oppressed and a solid rejection of the oppression of the oppressor. Jesus’ nonviolence offers the oppressed a self-affirming, enemy-confronting, non-peaceful nonviolence. Scholars such as Walter Wink, Marcus Borg, and others have shown that, culturally understood, the three examples of nonviolent protest Jesus gives in Matthew chapter 5 are nothing less than “cheek” defiance, public nakedness, and a refusal to follow the oppressors’ rule. (See Jesus and Nonviolence by Walter Wink, chapter 2; as well as the presentation The Way of Enemy Love). Jesus’ nonviolent protest in the Temple flipped tables and scattered livestock. It most certainly disrupted “business,” and it might have even involved some damage to the property of those who were facilitating oppression in the temple. Jesus’ nonviolence was not passive. Jesus’ nonviolence shut down the business of oppression in the Temple. Jesus’ nonviolence is rooted in love, even enemy love, yet it is enemy love with the goal of liberation, and it will neither settle for nor stop at anything less.
This week, I don’t have much more than this to share: this is what’s on my heart. My heart hurts for the nine families whose loved ones were taken from them much too soon. I don’t have a neat little HeartGroup Application, I don’t have a quippy ending, and I’m asking the followers of Renewed Heart Ministries to simply do this:
Engage and listen to those whose existence in our societies is elementally different from your own, because they don’t share the privileges that most of us are oblivious to. This is not the time for censure or smug approval. It is the time to listen to those whom we have failed to hear.
This week more than ever,
Till the only world that remains is a world where love reigns. One shared table, many voices, one new world.
I love each of you and I’ll see you next week.
Jesus’ Words to the Disinherited: Salt, Light, Justice, and Anger
BY HERB MONTGOMERY
“You are the light of the world.” — Jesus (Matthew 5.14)
Last week we talked about the difference it makes when we place the Sermon on the Mount in the context of Jesus belonging to and speaking among the community of the oppressed.
I’ve taken this week’s title from Howard Thurman’s book Jesus and the Disinherited. If you have not read Thurman’s work, you really do owe it to yourself to do so. It’s a short read, and packed with insight.
There are four passages from the Sermon on the Mount that I’d like you to consider this week. Notice how each changes when we name their audience as the disinherited.
The Salt of the Earth
You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. (Matthew 5.13)
New studies show how first century farmers used salt as fertilizer added to manure to enrich their soil. With this metaphor, Jesus encourages his audience to more fully engage this world, “the earth,” not to escape it. The metaphor is about re-enriching the nutrient-depleted soil of this earth. Jesus directs the oppressed to place their focus on “this world,” not the next. He directs his audience away from escape and he empowers them to make a difference in the world they live in.
Imagine it this way. Compassion and safety for everyone are just two of the plants that grow out of the soil of a healthy society. When certain voices are marginalized or pushed to the fringes, their absence depletes the social soil. Jesus is here telling the marginalized and oppressed that they are the salt of the earth. Their inclusion can give back to the soil of a society the nutrients of a wider consciousness and perspective that enables compassion and safety for all to grow again. Including marginalized voices enables one to integrate the many diverse experiences of life into a meaningful and coherent whole: inclusion uproots weeds of fear and insecurity, and provides rich soil for a society to produce compassion in the place of those weeds.
Our societies today are depleted of compassion and safety for those who share this globe with us but whom our systems also force to live on the fringes. Jesus actually believes they are the “salt,” or the fertilizer, and their voices will give back to the soil the nutrients that need adding back to the societies of our world. Remember, Jesus is looking at the disinherited when he says, “You are the salt of the earth.”
As we have said so often, Jesus’ shared table must not be homogenous. It is at a heterogenous table that we share our unique and different life experiences, form a more beautiful and coherent world view, and make this world a safer more compassionate place for us all. Through this teaching, Jesus is saying that it is the subordinated, the oppressed, and marginalized who restore the nutrients of society’s depleted soil. It is the disinherited who are the “salt of the earth.”
The Light of the World
You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine. (Matthew 5:14-15)
When we understand Jesus’ audience to be the disinherited Jews, those who are pressed down, and those who are silenced even among the ones forced to live on Jewish society’s fringes, it becomes empowering to hear Jesus affirm that they are the light of the world. Jesus is investing those around him with value and telling them not to hide their light. They are to “let their light shine!”
Some of you who are reading this have been told that your voice is not welcome. You have been made to feel you are “other.” To you, first and foremost, Jesus would say, “You are the light this darkened society needs.” Remember, darkness is only the absence of light. When we exclude and marginalize voices, their very absence creates darkness in society. And as Dr. King so famously said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.” Jesus is telling you that the inclusion of your voice brings “the light.” Your story is worthy of being shared at Jesus’ table. It is to you that he says, “Let your light shine!”
There is also another truth to what Jesus is saying here. Too often, Christians have taken for granted that they are the light of the world when they have been the ones in society calling for the exclusion of those unlike themselves. Whether it be with Jews and Muslims during the crusades, the silencing of women’s voices by patriarchal Christians, Black voices by White Christians, the voices of the poor by rich Christians, or the voices and stories of those who belong to the LGBTQ community by christians in general.) Yes, there are exceptions, but as a rule, Christians have made some of the loudest calls for certain voices, certain stories, to be pushed to the margins. Certain people are not ordained worthy of being heard.
Again, when anyone’s voice, anyone’s story is shut out from Jesus’ shared table, the absence of that voice creates darkness. It is the excluded and marginalized in every situation who are Jesus’ “light” that must be brought back to dispel the darkness that their absence created. When Christians exclude and marginalize, they cease to be “light,” and instead become the creators of darkness itself. “If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6.23) It would be well for those who have historically claimed to be the “light of the world” to listen to Jesus’ words here.
Surpassing Retributive Justice
Unless your justice surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5.20)
The community that Jesus is speaking to here is one whose theism, morality and ethics had been shaped through the interpretations of the Law and the Prophets approved and taught by the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. These groups were the religious educators of the Jewish working class. To get through to the people, Jesus must first disturb their confidence in these teachers, and in this saying, Jesus points out the inadequacy of the approved teachings.
The Pharisees believed in a Messiah who would usher in world peace, and many believed this peace would come through a sword retributively raised against Israel’s enemies and energized and supernaturally empowered by the strictest Torah observance.
The justice that Jesus is placing before them in Matthew is of an entirely different nature: it is a restorative, transformative, liberating justice that includes one’s enemies. Jesus is clear in verse 17, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. “Fullfil” here in this verse is pleroo, which means to complete or to perfect. In the very next verse Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” The word here for “accomplished” is ginomai which also means “to perfect or complete.” By implication, that which precedes this perfecting is imperfect or incomplete. What Jesus addresses in verse 20 is the retributive, punitive justice that is often found among those who have been oppressed and marginalized. Retributive justice is one of the elements that Jesus is referring to as incomplete, partial, underdeveloped and imperfect. Yes, within the Law and the Prophets one may find a justice defined as an eye for an eye. But one will also find a more complete, restorative, transformative Justice, too. Jesus is calling his audience away from an imperfect retributive justice to a more complete and holistic restorative kind. Jesus’ quality of justice was to “surpass” the eye-for-an-eye justice longed for by his contemporaries. So is the justice of his followers.
Liberation from Internalized Anger
You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. (Matthew 5:21-22)
This passage, our last for today, is where we see Jesus beginning to describe how his teachings would surpass the teachings his community was used to hearing. As we discovered last week, Jesus invites us to stop viewing well-being as solely external and recognize its internal nature as well. In this passage, Jesus is naming the hatred that those who have been wronged so often feel toward those who have wronged them. He teaches that the external liberation the disinherited so deeply long for is founded on prior internal liberation. An example of this is found in his teachings on nonviolence. These teachings were not simply techniques for more effective protest: they were that and they were also much more than that. Jesus’ ethic of nonviolence was rooted in an internalized love for enemies and forgiveness that enabled the Jesus follower to think and feel radically differently toward their enemies, to transcend revenge and instead work for their enemies’ transformation. Ponder what Jesus is saying in Matthew 15:
“Jesus called the crowd to him and said, ‘Listen and understand. What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.’ Then the disciples came to him and asked, ‘Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?’ He replied, ‘Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots. Leave them; they are blind guides. If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.’ Peter said, ‘Explain the parable to us.’ ‘Are you still so dull?’ Jesus asked them. ‘Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.’ (Matthew 15:10-20, emphasis added)
If Jesus’ disinherited peers were to experience liberation from their enemies, it would be because they were internally liberated from ‘anger’ against one’s enemies. Anger, wrongly placed, too often turns efforts that could have been restorative from transformation to retribution and mere punitive revenge. As King also said, “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
This teaching highlights two ditches, two places we could stumble. One ditch is the idea that the disinherited need to focus only on external liberation with no thought for their internal relation to their oppressors. The second is the belief that all one needs is internal liberation, and that when this is in place it no longer matters whether a person is externally liberated. This second ditch has been dug over and over throughout history in the path of the oppressed: it pacifies the oppressed and leaves the status quo unchallenged and undisturbed. I see this too often, even today.
But make no mistake: Jesus’ new social order, Jesus’ new world, what he called “the Kingdom,” is a world where all oppression, injustice, and violence is put right, internally and externally. The new world subverts the status quo here, now. The whole system is to be dismantled. Jesus’ revolution doesn’t end with internalized liberation from hatred, fear, and anger toward one’s enemies. That is only where Jesus’ revolution begins.
HeartGroup Application
Reread Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and reflect on the significance of Jesus’ audience being his own community, a disinherited people. May this small interpretative key turn on some more lights for you as it does for me.
- Choose a section of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount this week and contemplate its meaning within the context of his audience being his fellow oppressed. How does this audience inform your understanding of his words?
- Journal what you discover.
- Share your insights with your HeartGroup, your Shared Table, this week.
In the introduction to Jesus and the Disinherited, Vincent Harding eloquently states that Jesus’ teachings are replete with significance for any group being subordinated in modern domination systems: “Latinos, Native Americans, Southeast Asians, many women, and gay and lesbian people are only the most obvious additions” and the Black people Thurman originally wrote to. Today, so many make up the community of the disinherited, oppressed, marginalized, or as Thurman would put it, those whose backs are against the wall.” Jesus’ teachings directly empower these community members to live with dignity and creativity as they move toward liberation.
Whatever your place in this world, whether you belong to the community of the poor, the Native Americans, African-Americans, cisgender women, women of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, YOU have the power to enrich the nutrient-depleted soil of our society, YOU are the light of this world, and it is your voice that must be heard at Jesus’ table as we journey together toward a meaningful, more coherent whole, and a safer, more compassionate world for all.
Jesus’ new world is coming. In fact, in those whose hearts the Kingdom’s mustard seed has already sprouted, Jesus’ new world has already begun.
Wherever this finds you this week, keep living in love, enriching the soil of the earth around you, and shining bright like cities on hills, till the only world that remains is a world where Love reigns.
I love each of you.
And I’ll see you next week.
Letting Go of Three Types of Fear
BY HERB MONTGOMERY
“Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.” (Luke 12:32)
I have recently gone through a paradigm shift in the way I look at Jesus and I believe this shift is significant. In short, Jesus and his message were not outside the economically disadvantaged and subordinated in his society. Jesus’ teachings emerged from within this community. Jesus was not speaking to people whose daily experience he did not share first-hand. Jesus was speaking to and with his own peers. In Howard Thurman’s privately published volume of poems, The Greatest of These, he wrote:
“His days were nurtured in great hostilities
Focused upon his kind, the sons of Israel.
There was no moment in all his years
When he was free.”
Jesus was a poor Jew. He was oppressed on two counts: being from the community of “the poor” and being part of the politically subordinated Jewish people ruled by the Romans, he understood first-hand the implications of his teachings. Although he was a Jewish male within a Jewish patriarchal society, he choose to stand in solidarity with Jewish women (see Matthew 9.22; John 8.10; Luke 15.8; Luke 10.42; Mark 10.11; Mark 15.40), and he also also voluntarily chose a life of solidarity with people who were socially marginalized, including the eunuchs of Matthew 19:12, saying there was room in his new world for them, even though many in his day considered them “unclean.” (Deuteronomy 23.1; Acts 8.36-39; cf. Isaiah 56.3)
It is as one of the “least of these” that Jesus spoke to his peers about the topic we’re looking at this week: the continual war carried out on the nerves of the oppressed people that causes them to live in a perpetual state of fear.
There are three types of fear that we will consider this week:
- the fear of going without
- the fear of violence
- and the fear of isolation, helplessness, and insignificance.
Fear of Going Without
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. (Matthew 6:25-34)
I want to point out here that Jesus was not teaching the economically oppressed to sit back and do nothing. Notice the phrase, “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness.” Jesus was speaking to a people who had precious little: security was one of their chief concerns. Jesus is here inspiring them to risks even their own temporary security to make active advancements toward the new world (“the kingdom”). He was casting a vision in their imagination of a just world (“his righteousness”), and assuring them that if they would pursue a world that is just, safe, and compassionate for all, then in the end result, they would see a world where everyone’s needs would be met.
This passage directly refers to the mentality so many downtrodden people have: “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” Those in control use present security, even when it is a facade, to dissuade people from questioning or threatening the status quo.
Fear of Violence
“So do not be afraid of them, for there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs. Do not be afraid of those who destroy your external well being but cannot touch your inner well being. Rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy your entire well being, both your outer as well as your inner wellbeing in Gehenna [(Annihilation of 70 C.E. by following militaristic messiahs)] Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” Matthew 10:26-30 (Personal translation.)
Here, Jesus is speaking with those whose internalized fear of their oppressors (the Romans) had driven them to also internalize hatred of the Romans and the wealthy Jewish aristocrats who had “sold out” to complicity with the Empire. The Zealots would have only been at one end of the spectrum of those Jesus is speaking to. All across the spectrum of those disgruntled with the system, there were those who believed they could overthrow Rome by taking up the “sword” like Judah Maccabee during the Maccabean revolt. In Matthew 5.38-41, Jesus offers this audience another way. Jesus foresaw that if his people chose the way of violence toward their violent oppressors, that choice would only end in Rome’s annihilation of the Jewish people. This is exactly what transpired in the Jewish-Roman War of 66-69 C.E. that climaxed in Jerusalem’s destruction in 70 C.E. Jesus offered his peers a force more powerful than violence, a force rooted not in hatred of one’s enemies and a desire to defeat them but in love and a desire to transform them. Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence were not passive. They did involve noncooperation in some scenarios and they also included nonviolent direct action, risk, and creative imagination. Both noncooperation and direct action have their appropriate use in nonviolently “seeking” Jesus’ new world (“the kingdom”) and its justice (“righteousness”) for all.
But where all of this must begin is deliverance from fear of those in control of the present “dirty, rotten, system” (Dorothy Day). Jesus is offering a way for us to transcend fear of what others can do to our external realities and be internally immunized against the fear that so often leads to a loss of integrity and an embrace of hatred. This is what Jesus means by destroying one’s body and their “soul” as well. Fear, falsehood, and hate have the power to kill you, internally as well as externally. They produce what I would call a living and enduring hell.
Take a moment and reread the above passage in Matthew 10 with this in mind. We’ll consider Jesus’ words through the works of Thurman in just a moment.
Fear of Isolation, Helplessness, and Insignificance
“Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.” (Luke 12:32)
The adjective here for “little” is mikros. It refers not just to size but also to one’s dignity. By comparing the oppressed to a flock, Jesus is purposely drawing attention to the way that, like sheep, they have been objectified and dehumanized, and are simply part of someone’s else’s net worth. And by referring to them as little flock, he addresses the dignity they lack even among others who are objectified and dehumanized. Little flocks were worth far less than large flocks. Jesus was speaking to the least among the disadvantaged, the lowest among the community of the low.
And Jesus says, “It is to YOU, the little flock among the flocks, that the Heart of the Universe is pleased to give this new world.”
These words of assurance are especially for those who are multiply oppressed in the community of the oppressed. (Modern examples of this would be women of color among White feminists, or transgender people in the LGBT community.)
There is something deeply humiliating and foundationally damaging to the self-respect and personal dignity of those who cannot appeal to anyone for protection from their oppressors.
I want to share three passages from Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited that are relevant: I cannot say it better than Thurman did! I’ll simply share his insight here and have only edited Thurman’s words to make them more gender inclusive.
“There are few things more devastating than to have it burned into you that you do not count and that no provisions are made for the literal protection of your person . . . A person’s conviction that they are God’s child automatically tends to shift the basis of their relationship with all their fellows. They recognize at once that to fear another person, whatever may be that person’s power over them, is a basic denial of the integrity of their very life. It lifts that mere person to a place of pre-eminence that belongs to God and to God alone. Those who fear are literally delivered to destruction.
“To the child of God, a scale of values becomes available by which people are measured and their true significance determined. Even the threat of violence, with the possibility of death that it carries, is recognized for what it is— merely the threat of violence with a death potential. Such a person recognizes that death cannot possibly be the worst thing in the world. There are some things that are worse than death. To deny one’s own integrity of personality in the presence of the human challenge is one of those things . . .
“The core of the analysis of Jesus is that every person is a child of God, the God of life that sustains all of nature and guarantees all the intricacies of the life process itself. Jesus suggests that it is quite unreasonable to assume that God, whose creative activity is expressed even in such details as the hairs of a person’s head, would exclude from God’s concern the life, the vital spirit, of the persons themselves. This idea—that God is mindful of the individual—is of tremendous import in dealing with fear as a disease. In this world the socially disadvantaged person is constantly given a negative answer to the most important personal questions upon which mental health depends: ‘Who am I? What am I?’ The first question has to do with a basic self-estimate, a profound sense of belonging, of counting. If a person feels that he does not belong in the way in which it is perfectly normal for other people to belong, then they develop a deep sense of insecurity. When this happens to a person, it provides the basic material for what the psychologist calls an inferiority complex. It is for a person to have no sense of personal inferiority as such, but at the same time to be dogged by a sense of social inferiority. The awareness of being a child of God tends to stabilize the ego and results in new courage, fearlessness, and power. I have seen it happen again and again.” (Adapted from Howard Thurman’s, Jesus and the Disinherited)
Dr. King spoke on fear and faith this way:
“Now it isn’t easy to stand up for truth and for justice. Sometimes it means being frustrated. When you tell the truth and take a stand, sometimes it means that you will walk the streets with a burdened heart. Sometimes it means losing a job…means being abused and scorned. It may mean having a seven, eight-year-old child asking a daddy, ‘Why do you have to go to jail so much?’ And I’ve long since learned that to be a follower to the Jesus Christ means taking up the cross. And my bible tells me that Good Friday comes before Easter. Before the crown we wear, there is the cross that we must bear. Let us bear it—bear it for truth, bear it for justice, and bear it for peace. Let us go out this morning with that determination.
“And I have not lost faith. I’m not in despair, because I know that there is a moral order. I haven’t lost faith, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. I can still sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ because Carlyle was right: ‘No lie can live forever.’ We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant was right: ‘Truth pressed to earth will rise again.’ We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell was right: ‘Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.’ Yet, that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the bible is right: ‘You shall reap what you sow.’
“With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when the lion and the lamb will lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid because the words of the Lord have spoken it. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all over the world we will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last!’ With this faith, we’ll sing it as we’re getting ready to sing it now. Men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. And nations will not rise up against nations, neither shall they study war anymore. And I don’t know about you, I ain’t gonna study war no more.” (Sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967)
Jesus’ new world of compassion and justice for all is possible. We must, just like Jesus, not lose faith in humanity. Jesus spoke as one who himself belonged to the community of the oppressed, and his way to this new world begins with the call to abandon fear.
All that might follow begins with this. For as perfect love drives out fear, fear also drives out perfect love. And it is love for all, and only love, that compels us to sit at Jesus’ shared table and opens the way to that world where the Heart of the Universe has become the Heart of us all.
HeartGroup Application
- This week, go back and spend some time each day contemplating Jesus’ words in Matthew 6.25-34; Matthew 10.26-30; Luke 12.32.
- Journal your thoughts, your questions, your insights, and your breakthroughs as you engage with these passages every day this week.
- Share your journal insights with your HeartGroup, your shared table, for discussion and feedback.
Here’s to a safer, more compassionate world for us all: many voices, one shared table, one new world. Wherever this finds you this week, keep letting go of fear, living in love, and listening with compassion, till the only world that remains is a world where love reigns.
I love each of you.
I’ll see you next week.
No Such Thing As “Dogs and Pigs” . . . Only “Children.”
How “Listening” is the Cure for our Blindspots
BY HERB MONTGOMERY
“Lord,” she replied, “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” (Mark 7:28)
This week, I want to place some puzzle pieces on the table for you that may not seem to fit together at first. Once we get them all on the table, though, I hope that we’ll see something fresh and relevant in Jesus’ interaction with the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7:24-30. Let’s begin by defining three terms.
The first term is intersectionality. Intersectionality is the study of intersections between forms or systems of oppression, domination, and discrimination. It describes oppression as an interlocking matrix. The model, first developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, helps us to examine how biological, social, and cultural categories such as gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, religion, caste, species and other axes of identity interact on multiple and often simultaneous levels and so contribute to systematic injustice and social inequality.
The second term is kyriarchy. Kyriarchy is a social system or set of connecting social systems built around domination, oppression, and submission. Kyriarchy encompasses sexism, racism, homophobia, economic injustice, colonialism, ethnocentrism, militarism, and other dominating hierarchies that encourage people to internalize and institutionalize the subordination of one person or group to another.
The third term is colonialism, the establishment, exploitation, acquisition, maintenance, and expansion of colonies in one territory by a political power from another territory. Colonialism depends on a set of unequal relationships between the colonial power and the colony and between colonists and the territory’s indigenous population.
Let’s use intersectionality, kyriarchy, and colonialism to look at the relationship between Rome and Jerusalem during the life of the itinerant preacher Jesus of Nazareth. Ponder the status of Jerusalem in the world during that time. Consider the Hebrew people and their own history. Jesus emerged from a people who had participated in forms of kyriarchy and colonialism but, under Rome, was now disinherited.
Jesus presents some images in his teachings that are directly related to this oppressive context.
Dogs and Pigs
“Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces. (Matthew 7:6)
Dogs and pigs are both scavengers, and the Hebrews considered them to be unclean. You may have heard that Jews called any non-Jew “dog.” But this is not correct. According to the IVP Background Commentary of the New Testament, Jewish people reserved the slurs of “dogs” and “pigs” only for those gentile foreigners who oppressed the Jewish people, such as the Romans. Today, some use the term “pig” to refer to police constables who have become oppressive.
Jesus’ teaching in this passage critiques how Rome was being permitted to co-opt the sacred and valuable Jewish Temple for Imperial purposes. That’s the most direct interpretation of the passage. Yet I also believe there is something deeper here as well.
Throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has been speaking of inward realities—objectifying women in one’s heart, hatred toward one’s enemies—and not merely outward ones. So I have a hunch that in this passage, Jesus is speaking about the ways that oppressed and disinherited people can allow the sacred and valuable space within them to be co-opted and used for hatred toward their oppressors. Howard Thurman writes about this in his book Jesus and the Disinherited.
Tyre and Sidon
As well as teaching about dogs and pigs, Jesus also taught about Tyre and Sidon. (See Luke 4:25-26; Luke 10.13-14; Matthew 11.21-22) In our story this week, Jesus had retreated to the region of Tyre and Sidon, ancient Phoenician cities, for a respite. Yet what many miss is that while Jesus is there, he is met by a woman described as Syro-phoenician. “The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia.” (Mark 7.26) It is the “Syro” part that the gospel authors desire to turn our attention. This woman, being from Syria, was of Seleucid decent. (Syria was the short-hand name used by Rome to refer to the Seleucid Empire.) Why does this matter? These were the ancient oppressors of the Jewish people before Rome! Under the influence of Antiochus Epiphanies, the Seleucids had sought to exterminate the Jewish people. And although the Seleucids and the Hebrews now shared the same fate under Rome, there was a time when the Seleucids conquered and occupied the Hebrew nation. Jesus’ exchange with this woman, a descendant of those how had sought to wipe out the Hebrew people under Antiochus, takes place in a time when this was not yet distant history for the Jewish people.
Syrophoenician Woman
Before I talk about the Syrophoenician woman, I want to turn to Howard Thurman’s insightful comments on Jesus’ exchange with her.
“Opposition to the interpretation which Jesus was giving to the gospel of God had increased, and Jesus and his disciples withdrew from active work into temporary semi-retirement around Tyre and Sidon. The woman broke into his retreat with an urgent request in behalf of her child . . . ‘What mockery is there here? Am I not humiliated enough in being misunderstood by my own kind? And here this woman dares to demand that which, in the very nature of the case, she cannot claim as her due.’” (Thurman, Howard; Jesus and the Disinherited [pp. 90-91] Kindle ed.)
The issue here is not that this woman was a Gentile. Though the most prominent Phoenician woman in the Old Testament was Jezebel, Elijah also helped a Phoenician woman (1 Kings 17:17) So her non-Jewishness is not the point. In addition to being Phoenician, the woman was also of Syrian descent: she was Syro-phoenician. As Mark writes, “The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter” (Mark 7:26). Syria was the term Rome used to refer to the historical Seleucid Empire.
The issue in this story is that Jesus understood that his announcement of “the favor of God” was to apply to Gentiles too (see Luke 4:25-29; Matthew 8:5-13). But this Gentile begging him for a blessing was of Seleucid descent. This would be the equivalent of descendants of a Holocaust survivor being asked to share survivor reparations with a descendent of the Nazis who had fallen on hard times. It would be comparable to a White American asking to receive reparations intended for the Native American community here in the United States. It would be as if, two hundred years from now, a same-sex married couple were asked to help the descendent of a fundamentalist-evangelical business-owner from Indiana.
The encounter between Jesus and this women is set up to prick our sense of justice. Jesus came to liberate the oppressed. But now one of the oppressors was asking him to liberate her daughter too! Jesus question is valid:
“Is it right to give the children’s (the Hebrew people) bread to the dogs (the Seleucids)?”
According to the Torah, there were foods that were not to be eaten by the Hebrews but that could be thrown out as dog food (see Exodus 22:31). Jesus is here asking: is it just to give that which was intended to liberate my people to a person belonging to those who violently oppressed us in the past?
There are two ways I have heard this explained. One explanation is that Jesus is merely play-acting to teach the on-looking disciples an important lesson in generosity. The other explanation, which I think is more plausible, is that Jesus is growing in his own understanding and experience of intersectionality.
Yes, this woman belonged to a people who had endeavored to wipe his people off the face of the earth. But she was also a woman. Where is her husband? Why is her husband or father not making this request as the father does in Mark 5.22? In a patriarchal world, what does it mean for this woman to be speaking for herself and her daughter as if she were a single mother?
Whatever her circumstances, Jesus asks, is it right to help her? Is this how the liberation and reparations for Israel are to be used: not only to benefit those who have been oppressed but also to benefit the suffering oppressors too?
This is where intersectionality comes in. A person can be both oppressor and oppressed simultaneously. After all, the Hebrews were not innocent. Just as the Seleucids had once sought to exterminate the Hebrews from existence, the Hebrews had once engaged in the genocide and colonization of the Canaanites. The Hebrews participated in the cultural patriarchy that those in Hellenistic Tyre and Sydon lived by as well. And although the Jews in Jesus’ time suffered economic poverty under Rome’s high taxes, the Hebrew had also oppressed the poor with their own kings (Amos 2:6; 5:7, 11, 24). Yes, this Seleucid woman belonged to a people who had historically oppressed the Hebrews, but that day, she, too, needed liberation. Was there enough mercy in Jesus’ merciful theism for her as well?
In this story, the compassion of Jesus wins out. It’s worth asking ourselves just how Jesus made even a small space in that room to listen.
“Lord,” she replied, “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” (Mark 7:28)
There is theoretical knowledge and then there is experiential knowledge. Jesus understood a love of enemies in theory and gained a deeper understanding of it that day through experience.
I’m thankful for a Jesus who took time to listen. I’m also thankful for a woman who didn’t give up, but persisted in helping Jesus and his disciples see her need and their blind spots. Had Jesus sent her away, a great injustice would have been committed. But he listened. And he entered into a fuller experience of his own ethic that day instead. Henry David Thoreau wrote, ”Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”
I cannot fault Jesus for asking the question he asked. Jesus, after all, emerged from the community of the disinherited poor. Jesus faced the same dilemma we face:.how does one embrace enemy love without betraying one’s own people?. How does one stay faithful to both justice for the oppressed and the transformation of the oppressors?
Jesus and his disciples, I believe, left the region of Tyre and Sidon that day with a fuller experience of the truth that there is really no such thing as “dogs” or “pigs.” There are only “children.” We are all siblings of the same Divine Parents. We all walk this earth side-by-side, and we all wear on our faces the very image of God.
HeartGroup Application
1. Here are just a few of the categories of intersectional privilege and disadvantage in our society here in the West:
White Wealthy Certified Educated Male Straight Cisgender
Non-White Poor Uncertified Education Female Non-straight Transgender
These categories combine to create intersectional experiences of domination and oppression.
Consider how each of the following experiences simultaneously includes some level of privilege in our society and some level of disadvantage. Name where they are privileged first. Then look for where they are disadvantaged.
a. A White lower-class, cisgender, straight, blue-collar male
b. An African-American male president of the United States
c. A White cisgender gay female living in inner-city America
d. A bisexual cisgender woman of color living in rural poverty
e. A single White father of three living in suburban America
f. A middle-class White fundamentalist-evangelical, transgender female
d. Wealthy highly educated White, cisgender straight female
2. We need each other. What does it mean for us to trade our dominations systems for Jesus’ heterogeneous shared table? How can we learn to listen to those who are not like us? How can we learn to incorporate each person’s varied life experience into a beautiful and coherent whole that leads to a safer and more compassionate world for all? How can we allow others to show us where our own blind spots are and also share our stories that can help others see their blind spots?
3. Discuss your thoughts with your upcoming HeartGroup this week.
I’ll close this week with Howard Thurman’s Three Hounds of Hell that dog the soul of the disinherited—fear, hypocrisy, and hatred. The ethical teachings found in the values of the Jesus story as it has come down to us today, I believe, offer the disinherited in any area of society a way to escape those three hounds nipping at our heels. This week, if nothing more, may we all learn to sit around Jesus shared table and simply listen.
Wherever this finds you, keep living in love, and listening with compassion, till the only world that remains is a world where Love reigns.
I love each one of you,
I’ll see you next week.
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