Refusing to Passively Endure Injustice

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Herb Montgomery, September 13, 2024

If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:

Our reading this week is from the gospel of Mark:

Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, “Who do people say I am?”

They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”

“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”

Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.”

Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him.

He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.” (Mark 8:27-38)

I love it when the gospel lectionary readings are from one of the synoptic gospels. This passage in Mark gives us a lot to consider because this passage has been used for harm. As Jesus followers today, we can choose to let go of harmful interpretations to make room for more life-giving ones. 

First, the claim that Jesus was the Messiah has long been used to harm our Jewish friends, family and neighbors. Before Christians used the title of Messiah against the Jewish community, who the Messiah was was an intra-tradition argument. What I mean is that Jewish voices within the Jewish community initially made the claim of Messiahship was in dialogue and sometimes debate with other Jewish voices. The earliest Jewish Jesus followers, even before the narrative events of his death and resurrection, had recognized something in Jesus’ teachings that gave them hope in Jewish renewal and restoration. That hope was originally a liberation hope within a larger oppressed community that was anything but monolithic. For them, Jesus’ teachings pointed to the same liberation they hoped for. 

The community for whom the gospel of Mark was written recognized Jesus as Messiah and our reading this week was intended to affirm this recognition. There is something political for the early church deeper in this reading too. Naming Peter as the one who declares Jesus’ messiahship in this gospel narrative also affirms the community’s recognition of Peter’s authority among the other apostles in the early Jesus movement. Jesus as Messiah was not just an question for the Markan community. All of the communities after Jesus hotly debated which voices were to be recognized as authoritative. So this week’s passage is actually much more about Peter than it is about Jesus: it is only secondarily about Jesus’ messiahship, a tenet that this community already accepted. We should read this passage primarily as establishing Peter’s authority as one who recognized and affirmed the community’s belief in Jesus’ messiahship.  

Whatever we make of the claim of Jesus’ messiahship today, we must be intentional about holding our interpretation in a life-giving way for all. Messiahship originally meant liberation and restoration. Today we must similarly hold our interpretation in a way that does no harm. Within Christianity today, we must be especially careful in regard to the history of harm we are responsible for by the careless ways we have used the term “Messiah” when we speak of Jesus. 

Let’s now talk about Jesus’ call to take up the cross. Many Christians have held the cross in a way that promotes the myth of redemptive suffering. Too often, bearing one’s cross refers to the kind of suffering that every person suffers whether they are standing up for justice or not. Let’s be honest: life includes a lot of suffering. It’s how we interpret and respond to that suffering that matters. But the cross was only about a specific kind of suffering, not all suffering in general. The cross was a political consequence and had a political context. The cross was suffering perpetrated by those in positions of power and privilege on people who were calling for change within an unjust system. Latin American liberation theologian Jon Sobrino warns us of romanticizing the cross and removing it from its original political context, and thus romanticizing suffering that has nothing to do with working for justice. 

“There has been. a tendency to isolate the cross from the historical course that led Jesus to it by virtue of his conflicts with those who held political religious power. In this way the cross has been turned into nothing more than a paradigm of the suffering to which all human beings are subject insofar as they are limited beings. This has given rise to a mystique of suffering rather than to a mystique of following Jesus, whose historical career led to the historical cross.” (Jon Sobrino, quoted in Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker’s For God So Loved the World?, p. 16)

Suffering doesn’t give life. Mujerista theologians (Hispanic woman’s liberation theologians) remind us that life is found in our struggle against suffering (see Isasi-Diaz, Ada Maria. Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century, p. 21). 

Jesus didn’t choose to suffer. He chose to live a life in opposition to injustice and oppression. Jesus didn’t choose to die. He chose to refuse to let go of his hold on the fight for justice when threatened with a Roman cross if he continued. For Jesus, the cross was a Roman-imposed response to Jesus’ refusal to change his course. The cross today is not suffering in general but the threat by those who benefit from an unjust status quo that we will suffer if we speak out. I don’t interpret Jesus in this week’s reading as promoting suffering. Rather he is calling for those being threatened for speaking out against injustice to keep speaking out, to not be silent, to keep up the fight and join him in the fight even in the face of real threats.

Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker, feminist theologians, rightly interpret the cross when they write:

“To be a Christian means keeping faith with those who have heard and lived God’s call for justice, radical love, and liberation; who have challenged unjust systems both political and ecclesiastical; and who in that struggle have refused to be victims and have refused to cower under the threat of violence, suffering, and death. Fullness of life is attained in moments of decision for such faithfulness and integrity. When the threat of death is refused and the choice is made for justice, radical love, and liberation, the power of death is overthrown. Resurrection is radical courage. Resurrection means that death is overcome in those precise instances when human beings choose life, refusing the threat of death. Jesus climbed out of the grave in the Garden of Gethsemane when he refused to abandon his commitment to the truth even though his enemies threatened him with death. On Good Friday, the Resurrected One was Crucified.” (God So Loved the World?, Brown and Parker, p. 22)

Too often Christians in power have used “bearing one’s cross” to teach that to follow Jesus means to passively and patiently endure whatever abuse, injustice, or oppression one is experiencing with the hope that in the afterlife your suffering will be rewarded. Nothing could be further from the way Jesus describes taking up one’s cross in our reading this week. The cross is not passively enduring injustice. The cross is the threat abusers and oppressors make against us for our refusal to passively endure injustice. The cross is the threat intended to make us passive. 

When Jesus tells his followers to take up their cross, he’s telling them to keep refusing to be passive, even if you’re threatened with a cross for doing so. And even in doing so, we must remember that the cross is not intrinsic to standing up for what is right. A cross only enters our story if our abuser or oppressor chooses to respond to our calls for change with threats rather than change. Jesus’ call is a call to courageously refuse to let go of your hope for justice, for change, for liberation, and freedom to thrive. Don’t passively endure suffering. Don’t give in when those who have privileges to lose seek to persuade us to patiently “endure pain, humiliation, and violation of our sacred rights to self-determination, wholeness, and freedom” rather than speaking out (God So Loved the World?, Brown and Parker, p. 2)

How are you speaking out for change right now? How are you working for a brighter today and tomorrow? In whatever ways we are working for justice, even if those benefitting from injustice threaten us, the Jesus of our passage this week calls us to keep at it.

Discussion Group Questions

1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.

2. Share an experience of where you refused to be silent about injustice? Discuss with your group.

3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone? 

Thanks for checking in with us, today.

I want to say a special thank you to all of our supporters out there. And if you would like to join them in supporting Renewed Heart Ministries’ work you can do so by going to renewedheartministries.com and clicking donate. 

My latest book Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political and Economic Teachings of the Gospels is available now on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and also on Audible in audio book format.

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You can watch our YouTube show each week called “Just Talking”. Each week, Todd Leonard and I take a moment to talk about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and social justice. Our hope is that our talking will be just talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week you’ll be inspired to also do more than just talking. If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out, you might like it. You can find JustTalking each week on YouTube at youtube.com/@herbandtoddjusttalking. Please Like, Subscribe, hit the Notification button, and leave us a comment.

And if you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.

Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.

I love each of you dearly,

I’ll see you next week.

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New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!

Season 2, Episode 19: Mark 8.27-38. Lectionary B, Proper 19

Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend in the context of love, inclusion, and social justice. Our hope is that our talking will be “just” talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week we’ll be inspired to do more than just talking.

If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out at:

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New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast

A podcast where we talk about the intersection of faith and social justice and what a first century, prophet of the poor from Galilee might have to offer us today in our work of love, compassion and justice. 

This week:

Season 1 Episode 22: Refusing to Passively Endure Injustice

Mark 8:27-38

“Too often Christians in power have used “bearing one’s cross” to teach that to follow Jesus means to passively and patiently endure whatever abuse, injustice, or oppression one is experiencing with the hope that in the afterlife your suffering will be rewarded. Nothing could be further from the way Jesus describes taking up one’s cross in our reading this week. The cross is not passively enduring injustice. The cross is the threat abusers and oppressors make against us for our refusal to passively endure injustice. The cross is the threat intended to make us passive. When Jesus tells his followers to take up their cross, he’s telling them to keep refusing to be passive, even if you’re threatened with a cross for doing so. Jesus’ call is a call to courageously refuse to let go of your hope for justice, for change, for liberation, and freedom to thrive. Don’t passively endure suffering. Don’t give in when those who have privileges to lose seek to persuade us to patiently ‘endure pain, humiliation, and violation of our sacred rights to self-determination, wholeness, and freedom’ rather than speaking out”

Available on all major podcast carriers and at:

https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/refusing-to-passively-endure-injustice

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Now Available on Audible!

 

Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.

by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon

Available now on Audible!

After two successful decades of preaching a gospel of love within the Christian faith tradition Herb felt like something was missing. He went back to the gospels and began reading them through the interpretive lenses of various marginalized communities and what he found radically changed his life forever. The teachings of the Jesus in the gospel stories express a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of those in marginalized communities. This book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, and presents a compelling argument for a more socially compassionate and just expression of Christianity. Herb’s findings in his latest book are shared in the hopes that it will dramatically impact how you practice your Christianity, too.

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