Carrying on the Work of Love and Justice
We want to take this moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to all of our supporters for your support of Renewed Heart Ministry’s work of love, justice, and compassion. At a time when ministries like ours are being asked to achieve more with fewer resources, your support is so deeply appreciated, and we want to simply say thank you. Whether in our larger society or within our local faith communities, Renewed Heart Ministries remains committed to advocating for change, working towards a world that is inclusive, just, and safe for everyone, and being a source of love. From all of us here at Renewed Heart Ministries, thank you for your generous support. We deeply appreciate you.
If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”
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Carrying on the Work of Love and Justice
Herb Montgomery | May 30, 2025
If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:
Our reading this weekend is from Luke’s version of the ascension:
He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.”
Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. He told them, “This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”
When he had led them out to the vicinity of Bethany, he lifted up his hands and blessed them. While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven. Then they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy. And they stayed continually at the temple, praising God. (Luke 24:44-53)
Our reading this week is from Luke. It would be amiss to speak of the ascension in Luke without mentioning how the other gospels approach the end of Jesus’ story. Originally, Mark’s gospel had no ascension. It ends with the women at the tomb:
Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. (Mark 16:8)
In Matthew, the ascension takes place in Galilee not Jerusalem:
Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.” (Matthew 28:7)
Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.” (Matthew 28:10)
Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:16-20)
The gospel of John includes multiple stories about Jesus appearing after the resurrection but has no ascension story.
Luke’s gospel does have an ascension. Unlike Matthew’s version, Luke’s ascension story doesn’t take place in Galilee, but in Jerusalem. All of the disciples then stay in Jerusalem, not Galilee, until Pentecost, when they receive the Holy Spirit. Matthew’s version of the Jesus story, remember, was written for the community of Jesus followers in the region of Galilee, so its ending there makes sense. Luke and Acts were instead written for the community of Jesus followers in Judea. That community was centered in Jerusalem and expanded out into more cosmopolitan regions of the Roman Empire. Its alternative ending makes sense, too, given the community it was written for. Both communities had a story that encouraged them to keep following Jesus in ways relevant to their location. For Luke’s readers, it was important to ground the Jesus story in the tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures.
If the key story details of Jesus’ suffering, resurrection, repentance, forgiveness in this week’s reading sound familiar, creedal even, it’s because this was one of the passages that influenced what ultimately became the Apostles’ creed. Today these words show us today what the goals of that first century Lukan Jesus community were. The phrase “repentance for the forgiveness of sins” begins in Luke with John the Baptist:
He [John] went into all the country around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. (Luke 3:3)
And it’s that message that Jesus and then the apostles under the gift of the Holy Spirit were to take to the ends of the world:
“You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8)
The Lukan Jesus community saw their community becoming more metropolitan, and they believed that their community should expand beyond their roots in Jewish culture and scripture to bring Jesus’ teachings to the entire world.
Again, the repentance for the forgiveness of sins that they taught had a quality that began with John the Baptist in Luke 3. John’s repentance was not for personal, private, individual sins. John called his listeners to a repentance for community sins, social and political choices, that were not only making the most marginalized vulnerable to harm, but also being the conduits of that harm as well. The elite, the powerful, propertied, and privileged, had become complicit with the Roman empire’s exploitation and extraction of the masses in Galilee, Samaria, and Judea. John then came, echoing the Hebrew prophets, calling for national repentance for national sins in the hopes that the people would experience national forgiveness. Remember, this forgiveness was to start in Jerusalem and go to the end of the world.
In the Hebrew scriptures, forgiveness did not mean being allowed to go to heaven when one dies. It meant liberation from oppression here on earth, violence being replaced with safety and peace, and injustice giving way to compassion and equity. It meant social healing, not private, personal, individual benefit that was separate from everyone else.
Consider how forgiveness is treated in the books of Chronicles:
“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways [repent], then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”
That forgiveness isn’t connected to a post mortem destination later, but to healing of their land in this life, and it was not simply for Judea, Samaria, and Galilee, but also for the entire world.
A more vernacular way of describing the “healing of the land” today would be to speak of societal healing. This healing was to live on in the lives of the Jesus followers who would now carry on the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone. Three components of that work are worth singling out today.
The first is Jesus’ emphasis on community. In the Jewish language of the 1st Century, the gospels refer to community as “the kingdom.” While the label of “kingdom” is problematic for us today, for Jesus in the gospels, it meant a community where the reign of love and compassion dictated our societal decisions. It was a society where love and compassion governed the distribution of resources with the hope of being distributively just. (See the stories at the beginning of the book of Acts.)
The second is that the heart of this community was the value of those presently being socially marginalized and excluded. Liberation theologians refer to this as a “preferential option for the poor.” The ethic of prioritizing those being marginalized begins with the poor and today should also include those excluded because of race, gender, orientation, culture, education, and more. Any time someone is being marginalized, scapegoated, or pushed to the undersides and edges of our collective life together, Jesus’ teachings call us to prioritize that group to restore equity. In the gospels, Jesus’ God loves all people equally. That love should lead us to have a unique concern for the distinct needs of all who are marginalized.
And third, Jesus’ teachings were much more than a list of things to believe. Jesus taught his followers how to live. His teachings weren’t ways to gain the favor of a divine being or gain entrance into paradise. They were ways to live in response to the immense suffering of those around them. Consider these words from Jesus-following communities carrying on his teachings:
“What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” (James 2:14-17).
“If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?” (1 John 3:17)
Notice these actions were not centered around a debate of personal piety. They were in response the material needs of those around them.
This gives Jesus followers today much to ponder. Are we seeking to make our world a better place for all or are the lives of those who are different from us less safe and just because of our actions? If we don’t start here, anything more is pointless.
Discussion Group Questions
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s podcast episode with your discussion group.
2. What does repentance for societal sins and forgiveness for societal sins look like to you this week? Share and 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.
As always, you can find Renewed Heart Ministries each week on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s Threads. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts.
Thank you for listening to The Social Jesus Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast please take a moment to like and subscribe and if the podcast platform you’re using offers this option, please leave us a positive review. This helps others find our podcast as well.
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.
New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!
Lectionary Readings in the context of Love, Inclusion, & Social Justice
Season 3, Episode 13: Luke 24.44-53. Lectionary C, Easter 7 (Ascension of the Lord)
Each week, we’ll discuss the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend in the context of love, inclusion, and justice. We hope that our talking will be “just” talking (as in justice) and that we’ll be inspired to do more than “just talking” during our brief conversations each week.
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.
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 2 Episode 22: Carrying on the Work of Love and Justice
Luke 24:44-53
“Repentance for the forgiveness of sins that they taught had a quality that began with John the Baptist in Luke 3. John’s repentance was not for personal, private, individual sins. John called his listeners to a repentance for community sins, social and political choices, that were not only making the most marginalized vulnerable to harm, but also being the conduits of that harm as well. The elite, the powerful, propertied, and privileged, had become complicit with the Roman empire’s exploitation and extraction of the masses in Galilee, Samaria, and Judea. John then came, echoing the Hebrew prophets, calling for national repentance for national sins in the hopes that the people would experience national forgiveness. In the Hebrew scriptures, forgiveness did not mean being allowed to go to heaven when one dies. It meant liberation from oppression here on earth, violence being replaced with safety and peace, and injustice giving way to compassion and equity. It meant social healing, not private, personal, individual benefit that was separate from everyone else. That forgiveness isn’t connected to a post mortem destination later, but to healing of their land in this life. A more vernacular way of describing the “healing of the land” today would be to speak of societal healing for societal sins being committed right now.”
Available on all major podcast carriers and at:
https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/carrying-on-the-work-of-love-and-justice
Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.
by Herb Montgomery
Available now on Amazon!
In Finding Jesus, author Herb Montgomery delves into the profound and often overlooked political dimensions of the gospels. Through meticulous analysis of biblical texts, historical context, and social discourse, this thought-provoking book unveils the gospels’ socio-political, economic teachings as rooted in a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of the marginalized. The book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, presenting a compelling argument for a more socially engaged and transformative Christianity.
Finding Jesus is not just a scholarly exploration; it is a call to action. It challenges readers to reevaluate their understanding of Christianity’s role in public life and to consider how the radical teachings of the gospels can inspire a renewed commitment to justice, equality, and compassion. This book is a must-read for those seeking a deeper understanding of the social implications of Christian faith and a blueprint for building a more just and inclusive society.
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The Jesus Story and Living with Disabilities
We want to take this moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to all of our supporters for your support of Renewed Heart Ministry’s work of love, justice, and compassion. At a time when ministries like ours are being asked to achieve more with fewer resources, your support is so deeply appreciated, and we want to simply say thank you. Whether in our larger society or within our local faith communities, Renewed Heart Ministries remains committed to advocating for change, working towards a world that is inclusive, just, and safe for everyone, and being a source of love. From all of us here at Renewed Heart Ministries, thank you for your generous support. We deeply appreciate you.
If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”
Image created by Canva
The Jesus Story and Living with Disabilities
Herb Montgomery | May 23, 2025
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 John:
“Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”
“Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”
Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.
The day on which this took place was a Sabbath,” (John 5:1-9)
In her book The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability, Nancy Eiseland writes, “Living with a disability is difficult. Acknowledging this difficulty is not a defeat, I have learned, but a hard-won accomplishment in learning to live a life that is not disabled. The difficulty for people with disabilities has two parts really—living our ordinary, but difficult lives, and changing structures, beliefs, and attitudes that prevent us from living ordinarily” (Italics/emphasis added, p. 13). This week, I want to push back against two things that make “living ordinarily” difficult for folks with disabilities: the way the Jesus story was originally written and specific Christian attitudes and beliefs.
First, I understand that whomever the gospel authors were, they were writing the versions of the Jesus story in our sacred canon today within the context and setting of their own time and culture. I get that. Nonetheless, how the Jesus story is often told when it comes to folks with disabilities is still damaging. We can tell the Jesus story in a more life-giving way for this community, and we must. It’s not optional. Everyone will eventually experience disability. It makes sense to address and ease this experience that is or will be so common, and does impact everyone in some way whether as care receiver or caregiver.
Let me give you just one example of the four gospels’s language. When Matthew’s gospel refers to religious leaders that were complicit in political and economic harm against the vulnerable people in Jesus’ society, it portrays Jesus telling the people, “Leave them; they are blind guides. If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit” (Matthew 15:14).
In passages like this, the gospels use blindness, deafness, the inability to speak, and the inability to walk as metaphors for something sinful or erroneous while characterizing mobility, vision, and hearing ability as righteous, whole, just, or holy. This language characterizes folks who live their daily lives with any of these disabilities as somehow of less worth or value. And it is akin to how Blackness is often equated with evil or sin (i.e. “the black sheep of the family) while whiteness and light is equated with righteousness or holiness. These racial implications have been promoted by those who subscribe to White supremacy for centuries. But it’s not especially righteous to have no disabilities. Being disabled is not a metaphor for being evil, sinful, or broken.
In this week’s passage, John’s gospel uses the man who couldn’t walk to set up a conflict between Jesus and the powerful in his society over Jesus healing the man on the Sabbath and Jesus’ relation to the Divine. I wish the gospel writers had given this man a name in a way that would have affirmed his humanity and worth, but he is instead presented as a nameless narrative object that only serves as a plot point in the larger story. This pattern also repeats in the gospels. The synoptic example is in Mark 2:1-12, and both Mark and John include a variation of Jesus’ instruction: “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home” (Mark 2:11, cf. John 5:8). In Mark, the story of Jesus healing a man who could not walk is at the center of a discussion on forgiveness. Here in John, it is used to discuss Sabbath observance and Jesus’ divinity: “For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (John 5:18).
Over and over, disabilities are a theme in the gospels. The gospel authors characterize Jesus as reversing disabilities and using disabilities as a metaphor for things we need liberation from. And the gospel authors use Jesus’ interaction with people with disabilities to provide a context for other theological debate of that time.
Although I wish the gospel authors had handled disabilities with greater care, the evidence Jesus repeatedly gives for the authenticity of his teachings is his interactions with people living in poverty and people living with disabilities.
For example, when John the Baptist’s disciples question whether Jesus was really the one they had been looking for, Jesus replies, “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor” (Matthew 11:5, cf. Luke 7:22). In Luke’s gospel, Jesus’ gospel is defined in itself as good news the poor, liberation for the oppressed, and the restoration of sight for the blind (see Luke 4:18). This challenges me another level.
I grew up in Christianity, and heard the gospel more times than I can count. But it wasn’t until much later, as an adult, that I ever heard the gospel as good news for the poor or good news to people living with disabilities. The good news was presented to me as universal, for all, poor and rich alike, because it had precious little to do with the material, economic, or political world around us. The gospel I grew up hearing about had zero specific application to the poor or those with disabilities, because it was solely about giving everyone forgiveness of sins and the assurance of heaven. That forgiveness and assurance never needs to mention poverty or disabilities, and in fact, the gospel I grew up with never did.
Where does this leave us today who want to return to a more consistent definition of what it means to follow the Jesus in the story?
Let’s briefly consider the gospel stories’ approach to the two groups Jesus’ gospel is good news for. First, people living in poverty. Jesus understood that poverty is created by systems that the powerful and propertied create. His efforts in regards to poverty were systemic and communal, not private and individual. He called for the reinstatement of the Torah’s jubilee where debts would cancelled and lands returned to families who originally owned them. His call to deeper Torah fidelity in relation to economic justice was a call to radically redistribute wealth. And along the path toward that redistribution, he called those who had more then they needed to share their resources with those whose needs were not being met. It was a combination of systemic change and mutual aid on the way to change.
For people with disabilities, his approach was similar. While there are stories of Jesus healing individuals and liberating them from their private and societal struggles to live life to the fullest, he also called for change in how his society thought about and treated people living with disabilities.
He challenged societal exclusion and pushed toward accessibility:
“But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind.” (Luke 14:13)
He challenged how the exclusionary practice of those in power and how they related to those who had been excluded because of their disabilities:
“See that you don’t tell this to anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for your cleansing, as a testimony to them.” (Mark 1:44)
And he challenged the theology behind how his society thought about and treated people with disabilities:
As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus. (John 9:1-3)
Healing or removing a disability as Jesus did for so many in these stories is not an option for many if not most of us today. But we can take a cue from the narratives and challenge theologies that shape the exclusion and mistreatment of those with disabilities. We can also push for accessibility and inclusion for fellow members of this diverse human family who live with disabilities, whether in our faith communities or in society.
The Jesus story is complicated when it comes to our theology, practice, understanding, and relationship to our own disabilities and/or the disabilities of others. The Jesus story isn’t perfect on this topic, but there is still good we can glean from it to inform our justice work with and for people with disabilities today. No one throws away an apple because it has a core. You just eat the good flesh and discard the rest. There is good, too, in the Jesus story here: good that still calls us to create a safer, more accessible, more just, more compassionate world that is home for everyone, regardless of our differences.
Discussion Group Questions
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s podcast episode with your discussion group.
2. In what ways do you feel the Jesus story could be told in more in more life giving ways for folks living with disabilities? Share and 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.
As always, you can find Renewed Heart Ministries each week on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s Threads. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts.
Thank you for listening to The Social Jesus Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast please take a moment to like and subscribe and if the podcast platform you’re using offers this option, please leave us a positive review. This helps others find our podcast as well.
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.
New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!
Lectionary Readings in the context of Love, Inclusion, & Social Justice
Season 3, Episode 12: John 5.1-9. Lectionary C, Easter 6
Each week, we’ll discuss the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend in the context of love, inclusion, and justice. We hope that our talking will be “just” talking (as in justice) and that we’ll be inspired to do more than “just talking” during our brief conversations each week.
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.
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 2 Episode 21: The Jesus Story and Living with Disabilities
John 5:1-9
“Healing or removing a disability as Jesus did for so many in these stories is not an option for many if not most of us today. But we can take a cue from the narratives and challenge theologies that shape the exclusion and mistreatment of those with disabilities. We can also push for accessibility and inclusion for fellow members of this diverse human family who live with disabilities, whether in our faith communities or in society. The Jesus story is complicated when it comes to our theology, practice, understanding, and relationship to our own disabilities and/or the disabilities of others. The Jesus story isn’t perfect on this topic, but there is still good we can glean from it to inform our justice work with and for people with disabilities today. No one throws away an apple because it has a core. You just eat the good flesh and discard the rest. There is good, too, in the Jesus story here: good that still calls us to create a safer, more accessible, more just, more compassionate world that is home for everyone, regardless of our differences.”
Available on all major podcast carriers and at:
Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.
by Herb Montgomery
Available now on Amazon!
In Finding Jesus, author Herb Montgomery delves into the profound and often overlooked political dimensions of the gospels. Through meticulous analysis of biblical texts, historical context, and social discourse, this thought-provoking book unveils the gospels’ socio-political, economic teachings as rooted in a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of the marginalized. The book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, presenting a compelling argument for a more socially engaged and transformative Christianity.
Finding Jesus is not just a scholarly exploration; it is a call to action. It challenges readers to reevaluate their understanding of Christianity’s role in public life and to consider how the radical teachings of the gospels can inspire a renewed commitment to justice, equality, and compassion. This book is a must-read for those seeking a deeper understanding of the social implications of Christian faith and a blueprint for building a more just and inclusive society.
Are you getting all of RHM’s Free Resources?
Free Sign Up Here
Loving One Another and Distributive Justice
We want to take this moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to all of our supporters for your support of Renewed Heart Ministry’s work of love, justice, and compassion. At a time when ministries like ours are being asked to achieve more with fewer resources, your support is so deeply appreciated, and we want to simply say thank you. Whether in our larger society or within our local faith communities, Renewed Heart Ministries remains committed to advocating for change, working towards a world that is inclusive, just, and safe for everyone, and being a source of love. From all of us here at Renewed Heart Ministries, thank you for your generous support. We deeply appreciate you.
If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”
Image created by Canva
Loving One Another and Distributive Justice
Herb Montgomery | May 16, 2025
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 John:
When he was gone, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man is glorified and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will glorify the Son in himself, and will glorify him at once.
“My children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come.
A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
(John 13:31-35)
Loving one another was a central value in the Johannine community. We see evidence of this in all their writings in our sacred canon. One example is in 1 John 4:8:
“The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.”
In the short film Journey to Liberation: The Legacy of Womanist Theology, which I watched last year, Dr. Emile M. Townes states, “When you start with an understanding that God loves everyone, justice isn’t very far behind.” This statement resonated so deeply for me that it brought tears to my eyes.
Before I became an ally to trans people, and before falling out with many of our early followers, I had spent years speaking, writing, and teaching on the universal love of God for everyone (see Finding the Father.) Yet one response I repeatedly heard during our transition as a ministry was that people couldn’t understand what made us shift from God’s love to God’s justice. I spent countless hours trying to help folks understand that love means justice. They aren’t separate! Justice is the fruit of love, and you can’t genuinely have one without the other. As Cornel West famously stated, “Justice is what love looks like in public.”
What do I mean by the term justice?
Justice is distributive. Speaking of how the Hebrew scriptures define justice, John Dominic Crossan writes, “The primary meaning of ‘justice’ is not retributive, but distributive. To be just means to distribute everything fairly” (John Dominic Crossan, The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord’s Prayer, p. 2).
If we believe in universal love in our time, why wouldn’t that belief lead us toward compassion, action, and ensuring a distributive justice for all?
Distributive justice in the early Jesus communities was the outgrowth of Jesus’ teaching of a God that loves all universally:
“Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds!” (Luke 12:24)
“Consider how the wild flowers grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, 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, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith!” (Luke 12:27-28)
“[God] causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” (Matthew 5:45)
Jesus’ God universally loved even the ravens and lilies, therefore Jesus envisions God as also concerned with distributive justice for us. For Jesus, God’s love was at the root of God’s radical vision for a world in which all had enough.
A God who indiscriminately loves is also a God who indiscriminately and justly sends rain and sunshine on the objects of that love. Jesus is standing firmly in his own Jewish tradition when he connects love and distributive justice. Consider these passages from the Hebrew prophets where love and distributive justice are intrinsically connected:
“In love a throne will be established;
in faithfulness a man will sit on it—
one from the house of David—
one who in judging seeks justice
and speeds the cause of righteousness.” (Isaiah 16:5, emphasis added.)
“But you must return to your God;
maintain love and justice,
and wait for your God always.” (Hosea 12:6, emphasis added.)
Calling for distributive justice was a way in which the Hebrew prophets spoke truth to power:
“For I, the LORD, love justice;
I hate robbery and wrongdoing.
In my faithfulness I will reward my people
and make an everlasting covenant with them.” (Isaiah 61:8)
“Hate evil, love good;
maintain justice in the courts.
Perhaps the LORD God Almighty will have mercy
on the remnant of Joseph.” (Amos 5:15)
“Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.” (Isaiah 1:17)
As we mentioned last week, it is this preoccupation with distributive justice that defines whether someone in the Hebrew culture “knew God.”
“He defended the cause of the poor and needy,
and so all went well.
Is that not what it means to know me?”
declares the LORD (Jeremiah 22:16)
Jeremiah states that someone’s understanding of the Divine should inevitably work its way out in whether they defend the oppressed and vulnerable rather than drive oppression, marginalization, and/or exploitation. According to Jeremiah, to know the Hebrew God accurately is to defend the vulnerable. Gustavo Gutiérrez confirms this interpretation:
“For the prophets this demand was inseparable from the denunciation of social injustice and from the vigorous assertion that God is known only by doing justice. (A Theology of Liberation: 15th Anniversary Edition, p. 134)
Gutiérrez also writes, “To know God is to work for justice. There is no other path to reach God.” (Ibid., p. 156)
The Hebrew sacred text is repeatedly concerned with a societal, distributive justice (see Exodus 21:2; Exodus 22:21-23; Exodus 22:25; Exodus 23:9; Exodus 23:11, Exodus 23:12; Leviticus 19:9-10; Leviticus 19:34; Leviticus 23:22; Leviticus 25:2-7; Leviticus 25:10; Leviticus 25:23; Leviticus 25:35-37; Leviticus 26:13; Leviticus 26:34-35; Deuteronomy 5:14; Deuteronomy 5:15; Deuteronomy 10:19; Deuteronomy 14:28-29; Deuteronomy 15:1-18; Deuteronomy 24:19-21; Deuteronomy 26:12; 2 Kings 23:35; Nehemiah 5:1-5; Job 24.2-12, 14; Isaiah 3:14; Isaiah 5:23; Isaiah 10:1-2; Jeremiah 5:27; Jeremiah 5:28; Jeremiah 6:12; Jeremiah 22:13-17; Ezekiel 22:29; Hosea 12:6-8; Amos 2.6-7; Amos 4:1; Amos 5:7; Amos 5:11-12; Amos 8:5-6; Micah 2:1-3; Micah 3:1-2; Micah 3:9-11; Micah 6:10-11; Micah 6.12; and Habakkuk 2:5-6).
This tradition continues in the more Jewish portions of the New Testament texts (see Luke 6:24-25; Luke 12:13-21; Luke 16:19-31; Luke 18:18-26; and James 2:5-9).
It makes perfect sense, then, that a Jewish prophet of the poor from Galilee who in the 1st Century traversed the region teaching about a God who loved ravens, lilies and all people too would live, teach, minister, protest, and be crucified in profound solidarity with those suffering injustice in his society.
If we define politics as the distribution of resources and power, the gospel has real political implications that we must not hide or hide from. The portions of the New Testament believed to have been written by the Johannine community are the portions of the New Testament most preoccupied with defining God as “Love.” They don’t miss the connection between love and justice either:
“How can the love of God be in anyone who has material goods and sees a sibling in need and yet refuses help? . . . Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” (1 John 3:17-18)
I want to close this week with one more statement by Gustavo Gutiérrez that it would be well for us to spend this coming week contemplating:
“This does not detract from the Gospel news; rather it enriches the political sphere. Moreover, the life and death of Jesus are no less evangelical because of their political connotations. His testimony and his message acquire this political dimension precisely because of the radicalness of their salvific character: to preach the universal love of the Father is inevitably to go against all injustice, privilege, oppression, or narrow nationalism. (A Theology of Liberation: 15th Anniversary Edition, p. 135).
Those who believe they understand God’s love should be the loudest in the room opposing the injustices of classism, racism, misogyny, patriarchy, bigotry to and erasure of our LGBTQ siblings, and more. To believe in universal love is to work for a distributive, societal justice for those who are the objects of that universal love. As James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time, ”If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”
Discussion Group Questions
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s podcast episode with your discussion group.
2. How are love and justice instrinsically connected for you? Share and 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.
As always, you can find Renewed Heart Ministries each week on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s Threads. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts.
Thank you for listening to The Social Jesus Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast please take a moment to like and subscribe and if the podcast platform you’re using offers this option, please leave us a positive review. This helps others find our podcast as well.
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.
New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!
Lectionary Readings in the context of Love, Inclusion, & Social Justice
New Episodes each week!
Each week, we’ll discuss the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend in the context of love, inclusion, and justice. We hope that our talking will be “just” talking (as in justice) and that we’ll be inspired to do more than “just talking” during our brief conversations each week.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/@herbandtoddjusttalking/videos
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 2 Episode 20: Loving One Another and Distributive Justice
John 13:31-35
“Before I became an ally to trans people, and before falling out with many of our early followers, I had spent years speaking, writing, and teaching on the universal love of God for everyone. Yet one response I repeatedly heard during our transition as a ministry was that people couldn’t understand what made us shift from God’s love to God’s justice. I spent countless hours trying to help folks understand that love means justice. They aren’t separate! Justice is the fruit of love, and you can’t genuinely have one without the other. As Cornel West famously stated, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” Those who believe they understand God’s love should be the loudest in the room opposing the injustices of classism, racism, misogyny, patriarchy, bigotry to and erasure of our LGBTQ siblings, and more. To believe in universal love is to work for a distributive, societal justice for those who are the objects of that universal love.”
Available on all major podcast carriers and at:
https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/loving-one-another-and-distributive-justice
Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.
by Herb Montgomery
Available now on Amazon!
In Finding Jesus, author Herb Montgomery delves into the profound and often overlooked political dimensions of the gospels. Through meticulous analysis of biblical texts, historical context, and social discourse, this thought-provoking book unveils the gospels’ socio-political, economic teachings as rooted in a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of the marginalized. The book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, presenting a compelling argument for a more socially engaged and transformative Christianity.
Finding Jesus is not just a scholarly exploration; it is a call to action. It challenges readers to reevaluate their understanding of Christianity’s role in public life and to consider how the radical teachings of the gospels can inspire a renewed commitment to justice, equality, and compassion. This book is a must-read for those seeking a deeper understanding of the social implications of Christian faith and a blueprint for building a more just and inclusive society.
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Sent to be Socially Life-Giving
Thank You!
To All of Our Supporters, We want to express our heartfelt gratitude for your invaluable role in the Renewed Heart Ministry community and for your dedication to our mission of fostering love, justice, compassion, and healing. Your support is the bedrock of our efforts to promote love and justice. It empowers us to offer connection and inspiration to individuals as we collaboratively strive for justice in today’s world. At a time when ministries like ours are being asked to achieve more with fewer resources, your support is incredibly important, and we want to simply say thank you. Whether in our larger society or within our local faith communities, Renewed Heart Ministries remains committed to advocating for change, working towards a world that is inclusive, just, and safe for everyone. Your support is integral to our work. From all of us at Renewed Heart Ministries, thank you for your generous support. We deeply appreciate each and every one of our supporters. And if you’d like to join them in supporting our work, we need your support now more than ever.
Please consider making a donation today at renewedheartministries.com and clicking on
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Herb Montgomery | May 10, 2024
If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:
Our lectionary reading this seventh weekend of Easter is again from the gospel of John:
I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world. They were yours; you gave them to me and they have obeyed your word. Now they know that everything you have given me comes from you. For I gave them the words you gave me and they accepted them. They knew with certainty that I came from you, and they believed that you sent me. I pray for them. I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours. All I have is yours, and all you have is mine. And glory has come to me through them. I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe by that name you gave me. None has been lost except the one doomed to destruction so that Scripture would be fulfilled. I am coming to you now, but I say these things while I am still in the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them. I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified. (John 17:6-19)
John 17 is referred to as Jesus’ “farewell” prayer in the Johannine community’s gospel. In the Christian faith tradition, this chapter in John has some history. This chapter, more than any other, influenced the church’s orthodox position on Jesus’ divinity in the 4th and 5th centuries.
This chapter also gives us a window into how the Johannine community defined Jesus and his life work. At this time, the Johannine community was a generation removed from the historical Jesus. Those who wrote this version of the Jesus story were second-generation Jesus/John followers. They believed the first generation’s reports about Jesus and they took up the torch to promote this version of Jesus and his life work (see John 17:20-23) This gospel will take its place alongside the synoptic gospels as early as the end of the second century (Irenaeus groups together the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, that we are most familiar today in his Against Heresies).
Yet Jesus and his life work are subtly different in the Johannine community’s version of the Jesus story. In Mark, Matthew, and Luke, Jesus’ life work is liberating those on the edges and undersides of his society, healing those who are oppressed by sickness and disease, and calling those responsible for the economic exploitation of the poor to abandon their complicity and participation in the status quo and join his movement to make the world a compassionate, safe, and just home for everyone. This is a movement that the synoptic Jesus in those gospels refers to as “the kingdom.”
In the gospel of John “the kingdom” is wholly absent. John’s gospel pays lip service to the synoptics’ “kingdom” twice. But in both cases, it spiritualizes the kingdom as transcending Jesus followers’ concrete and material experiences or describes it as concerned primarily with matters of “another place.” John’s kingdom has nothing to do with threatening the privileged and exploitive power structures of this world or injustice.
“Jesus answered, ‘Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.’” (John 3:5, emphasis mine.)
Jesus said [to Pilate], “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.” (John 18:36, emphasis mine.)
In John, Jesus’ purpose is to open death, transform it into a portal, and show us how we can follow him through death and resurrection into the higher, post mortem bliss of being rejoined and reunited with “the Father.” We see John’s gospels influence today in expressions of Christianity that are focused on getting to heaven in an afterlife while being oblivious to or unobservant of suffering and harm people around them experience on earth in the here and now. This focus looks nothing like the Jesus of the synoptic gospels.
There are a couple things in our reading this week that I think the Johannine gospel gets right. First is the concern for unity. I don’t mean unity at any price, though. At the time of this gospel’s writing, the early church was in jeopardy of splintering apart with conflicts over power and control and different definitions of what it meant to follow Jesus. Various Jesus communities, some more egalitarian and others more patriarchal were in conflict. Communities that recognized the apostleship of Peter, Mary, Thomas, John, and the other apostles found themselves having to justify their validity in a larger community where some defined themselves as the only true Jesus-following group and sought to delegitimize the others. It is in this context that we read Jesus’ farewell prayer that his followers “may be one” as he and the Father were one. The Johannine community was calling for a richly diverse but still unified Jesus community as opposed to one defined by oneness as “sameness.” It’s ironic given that Christianity today is an internally diverse and divided religion. But diversity doesn’t have to mean division. And unity doesn’t have to mean homogeneity.
We can learn a lot from the Johannine community here. Today some in our larger society are holding on to a past era in American history where power and privilege were based on the sameness of being white, male, straight, and cisgender. Those holding on to this way of shaping the world are deeply opposed to the life-giving, diverse, multicultural, multiracial, egalitarian, radical form of democracy where power is genuinely shared and everyone has what they need to feel safe and to thrive regardless of race, gender, orientation, and gender identity. Many Christians are among those who are obstructing this more diverse way of shaping our world. Yet when we apply the principle held by the Johannine community to our world today, we remember that our diversity is something beautifully rich, something to be celebrated and embraced. John’s gospel reminds us that although we may be different, we belong to each other. What affects one affects us all. And we either thrive together or decline and wither together. Humanity is far from homogeneous, but we are all still part of each other. Like it or not, our shared humanity connects us all.
Another life-giving value we can glean from this week’s reading as Jesus followers is found in the next-to-last sentence of this week’s passage, “As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.” The gospel has already used a phrase like this: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” Are we to be sent into the world in the same way?
I’m reminded of both the writing of Delores Williams and the gospel of Luke here. Notice how Williams defines what it meant for Jesus to save the world: not from a post mortem hell, but from a hell many are enduring right now:
“Redemption had to do with God, through the ministerial vision, giving humankind the ethical thought and practice upon which to build positive, productive quality of life. Hence, the kingdom of God theme in the ministerial vision of Jesus does not point to death; it is not something one has to die to reach. Rather, the kingdom of God is a metaphor of hope God gives those attempting to right the relations between self and self, between self and others, between self and God as prescribed in the sermon on the mount, in the golden rule and in the commandment to show love above all else. (Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, pp. 146-147)
The gospel of Luke also defines Jesus’ saving work this same way, as concerned with the very real concrete and material realities that those around him were suffering at that time:
“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 the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)
As we look around us at our larger world today, what does it mean for us to be sent the same way Jesus was? To be sent in the same life-giving, healing way we see demonstrated in Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John? To be sent as a source of love, compassion, justice, and safety for all, but especially for those presently striving to endure systemic harm?
Discussion Group Questions
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s eSight/Podcast episode with your discussion group.
2. What does being sent as Jesus was sent mean for you in the context of societal justice engagement? Share and 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.
As always, you can find Renewed Heart Ministries each week on X (or Twitter), Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s Threads. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts.
If you would like to listen to these articles each week in podcast form, you can find The Social Jesus podcast on all major podcast carriers. If you enjoy listening to The Social Jesus Podcast please take a moment to like and subscribe and if your podcast platform offers this option, consider taking some time to leave us a positive review. This helps others find our podcast as well.
You can watch our new YouTube show 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 societal 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.
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 5: Sent to be Socially Life-Giving
John 17:6-19
“Although we may be different, we belong to each other. What affects one affects us all. We either thrive together or decline and wither together. Humanity is far from homogeneous, but we are all still part of each other. Like it or not, our shared humanity connects us all.”
Available on all major podcast carriers.
https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/sent-to-be-socially-life-giving
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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Love and Social Justice
Thank You!
To All of Our Supporters, We want to express our heartfelt gratitude for your invaluable role in the Renewed Heart Ministry community and for your dedication to our mission of fostering love, justice, compassion, and healing. Your support is the bedrock of our efforts to promote love and justice. It empowers us to offer connection and inspiration to individuals as we collaboratively strive for justice in today’s world. At a time when ministries like ours are being asked to achieve more with fewer resources, your support is incredibly important, and we want to simply say thank you. Whether in our larger society or within our local faith communities, Renewed Heart Ministries remains committed to advocating for change, working towards a world that is inclusive, just, and safe for everyone. Your support is integral to our work. From all of us at Renewed Heart Ministries, thank you for your generous support. We deeply appreciate each and every one of our supporters. And if you’d like to join them in supporting our work, we need your support now more than ever.
Please consider making a donation today at renewedheartministries.com and clicking on
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Love and Social Justice
Herb Montgomery; May 3, 2024
If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:
This weekend our gospel reading is again from the gospel of John:
“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other. (John 15:9-17)
As much as I compare and contrast John with the other synoptic gospels, there’s one difference in John that I appreciate. The Johannine gospel, more than any of the other gospels, emphasizes and centers on love. But how we understand what this looks like makes a huge difference. John emphasizes our learning to love one another. As I’ve said before, it’s easy to preach a gospel about Jesus that only speaks about how God loves us. It’s much more difficult to preach the gospel th at the Jesus in the stories preached, the gospel that teaches us how to love each other.
There is a way to take this theme of love into a way of life that looks nothing like Jesus. In that kind of life, the focus on love, God’s love, is inward focused, with goals that are inward experiences of spiritual ecstasy or bliss. God’s love is an escape from our present world, either to drown out what is happening to us or in a way that leaves us oblivious to and unconcerned about what is going on for others around us.
It is vital, whatever we say about love, the Jesus of the gospels, and the Divine, that these beliefs about love transform us into more loving human beings. We can teach, preach, and believe in love, and still not let those beliefs become anything more than mental assent to ideas. We must choose to apply our beliefs about love not just to how we imagine God relates to us, but also to how we relate to one another! In fact, it is by applying our beliefs that we test our ideas of what love is and discover which of our ideas about love are life-giving and which are instead harmful.
John’s gospel, which emerged out of the Johannine community, emphasizes loving one another more than the other gospels, even more than the gospels that emerged out of the Markan, Matthean, or Lukan communities. We know that at that time there was division and strife in the Jesus community as some groups in the early church competed for power while other groups claimed their own validity and contesting others’. John’s gospel approaches these conflicts by casting a big tent, especially in its final chapters. By naming Peter, Mary Magdalene, Thomas, as well as John in these post-resurrection stories, each community that honored each of these apostles was legitimized, making room for them at the Jesus movement’s table, so to speak.
The community that would later gain the most power and orthodoxy was the group that recognized the apostleship of Peter. At the time John was written, though, the Johannine community was writing to a Jesus movement they hoped was big enough to also include those who recognized the apostleship of Mary Magdalene, Thomas, and John. The Johannine community’s gospel was calling this wider Jesus movement that practiced love for their neighbors and enemies (the synoptics) to also extend that love to “one another,” to their fellow Jesus followers in other groups. Even though some Jesus followers interpreted some of their community’s cherished sayings of Jesus and stories about him differently, they could all agree on the importance of Jesus and his teachings showing us how to go about shaping our world into a loving, just, and safe home for everyone.
I often critique the gospel of John because of the differences between it and the other gospels. I feel these differences have at times led to harmful practices by Christians today who honor John above the synoptics. But with this week’s reading, I could not be more supportive of the Johannine community’s gospel. In this specific area, I feel they got it spot on. We agree on too much to foster divisions over the few things we see and interpret differently. The Christian religion today is very divided. And if we are ever going to become relevant to a world continually at war, we are first going have to learn how to be less combative within our own faith communities.
What might we also learn from the Johannine community’s call to, above all else, remember to love one another?
In our justice work today, love must be the foundation of justice. When I say “love,” I don’t mean sentimental feelings or emotional availability. Take enemy love for example. Enemy love doesn’t mean you actually feel something positive or warm for your enemies. You may genuinely and justifiably not like them. It does mean you refuse to remove them from the human race. It means you still recognize their humanity. We may be obstructing their intention to do harm, or standing up to them and telling them “no,” or calling for them to be held accountable for the choices they have made, but we still acknowledge that we are connected to them through our shared humanity. We hold space for them to choose to make better decisions. And, until they get there, we still hold out the option that they can experience change.
As we work toward making our world a safe and just home for everyone, love of neighbor calls us to love those neighbors who may be different from us, too. This is a central theme Jesus taught when he defined “neighbor” in his own social and political context as a Samaritan.
As a Christian, you can’t love your neighbor and not care about the things they suffer from because of the way our society is shaped. You can’t love them and vote for policies or politicians who seek to do them harm. During this election season here in the U.S., pay close attention to which vulnerable groups are being scapegoated or who we are being encouraged to feel fear toward as one political party seeks to one-up or out-do the other. I’m thinking of my dear trans friends and my children’s trans school friends, who are all much more at risk of hurting themselves than hurting anyone else around them. I’m thinking of political commercial after commercial on my local television stations where each politician is trying prove they are more anti-trans than the other guy. As they reach toward being elected to office do they realize how precious these kids are that they are throwing under the bus to achieve their political goals?
Years ago, I was involved in our town expanding our non-discrimination laws to include housing, employment and public services for our LGBTQ neighbors. I remember speaking with a city council woman after one of the public hearings and will never forget her words: “Do you want your child to have a place to live? Do you want your child to have employment? Do you want your child excluded from eating at a local restaurant? Well every LGBTQ person you meet is somebody’s child.” I was already an ally when she said this to me, but as, tears filled my eyes, every fiber of my being said “Amen.” She is now our mayor.
Our reading this week reminds us of the central command of Jesus’ teachings, that we love each other as Jesus loved us. And in the end, by this everyone will know that we are Jesus’ disciples, “if you love one another.” (John 13:35)
Discussion Group Questions
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s eSight/Podcast episode with your discussion group.
2. How does understanding social justice as a practice of Jesus’ loving one another inform your own justice engagement. Share and 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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If you would like to listen to these articles each week in podcast form, you can find The Social Jesus podcast on all major podcast carriers. If you enjoy listening to The Social Jesus Podcast please take a moment to like and subscribe and if your podcast platform offers this option, consider taking some time to leave us a positive review. This helps others find our podcast as well.
You can watch our new YouTube show 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 societal 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.
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 4: Loving One Another and Social Justice
John 15:9-17
“Whatever we say about love, the Jesus of the gospels, and the Divine, these beliefs about love must transform us into more loving human beings. We can teach, preach, and believe in love, and still not let those beliefs become anything more than mental assent to ideas. We must choose to apply our beliefs about love not just to how we imagine God relates to us, but also to how we relate to one another! And we can’t love one another and not care about the things each of us suffers as a result of the way our society is shaped.”
https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/loving-one-another-and-social-justice
New Episode of JustTalking!
Season 2, Episode 11: John 15.9-17. Lectionary B, Easter 6
Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and societal 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 the latest show on YouTube at:
Please Like, Subscribe, hit the Notification button, and leave us a comment
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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Challenging Exclusion
Herb Montgomery | June 21, 2019
It’s not enough to simply offer a gospel that only offers divine forgiveness of sins. A gospel that is faithful to the Jesus story must include people forgiving people. It must include a redistribution of power and resources so that everyone has what they need not simply to survive but also to thrive. It must include reparations alongside reconciliation. It must include access and inclusion where the vulnerable have been excluded. A gospel that is faithful to the Jesus story must include material, holistic liberation.
“Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus by digging through it and then lowered the mat the man was lying on.” (Mark 2:4)
In the worldview of the gospel authors and their intended audience, healing was normal. Whereas most healing stories in that era tended to bolster the way society was organized, the healing stories in the gospels challenged, subverted, and even threatened the status quo.
One such resistance/healing story is found very early in the gospel of Mark:
“A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home. They gathered in such large numbers that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them. Some men came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus by digging through it and then lowered the mat the man was lying on. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’ Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, ‘Why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?’ Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, ‘Why are you thinking these things? Which is easier: to say to this paralyzed man, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, take your mat and walk’? But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.’ So he said to the man, ‘I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.’ He got up, took his mat and walked out in full view of them all. This amazed everyone and they praised God, saying, ‘We have never seen anything like this!’” (Mark 2:1-12)
Message of Inclusion
The first thing we bump into in this story is a lack of room. The crowd could have made room for the paralyzed man to get through. They could have practiced a preferential option for the one with the disability. Yet they didn’t. They were each focused on making sure there was a place for themselves, even if it came at the expense of someone else.
I used to fly a lot. Those two options—a preferential option for others or making a place for oneself—always played out during the boarding practice. Before airlines started overselling flights, there was enough room for everyone. The plane was going to leave at the same time for everyone and seats were even already assigned. Yet you could see passengers who only thought of themselves from a concourse away.
Saving ourselves at others’ expense has a long evolutionary history for humans. Yet I contend that our salvation as a race lies not in what works for some at the expense of others but in what makes our world safe, just, and compassionate for all. We will survive together or we will perish together. What once worked for the survival of some, will not ensure the survival of us all in the context of global climate break down.
I also want to address the gospel author’s use of a person with a disability. In the culture of the gospel writers, there were religious teachings that explained disabilities as the result of sin, either one’s own or one’s parents (see John 9:1-2). This teaching added a basis for further exclusion in a world that already left those with disabilities on the margins. But in Mark’s story, Jesus rejects that teaching and declares that this paralytic has been forgiven. Jesus does not offer the man a plan or program: do this and your sins will be forgiven. Jesus declares that this man already was forgiven.
His teaching challenged those who believed that those with disabilities were being punished for some sin. It challenged them to view this man as their equal regardless of his ability. Jesus here juxtaposes disability and the culture’s definition of right standing, and calls people to rethink.
Similarly, one could challenge non-affirming Christians’ definition of what’s normative in relation to the LGBTQ community. Last week, Renewed Heart Ministries posted a meme for Pride Month juxtaposing LGBTQ identity and LGBTQ people’s being in the image of God. This deeply challenges Christian cis-heterosexism.
Again, though, Jesus does not offer the man a plan or program to follow. Jesus declared that this man already was forgiven, and so challenges many Christian stories that teach a God who must be moved by some action on our part first.
Holistic Liberation
Just like in any work of affirmation or liberation, there will always be pushback by those who feel threatened by such inclusivity and equity. The objection in Mark’s story is “only God can forgive sins.” Jesus doesn’t respond by stating that he is divine. The gospel writers instead identify Jesus with a “a human being” or the “son of man.” This language is from the Maccabean era Jewish resistance literature.
“In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man.” (Daniel 7.13, NIV, emphasis added.)
“As I continued to watch this night vision of mine, I suddenly saw one like a human being . . .” (Daniel 7.13, CEB, emphasis added.)
The “human being” in Daniel 7 was a symbol of liberation from oppressive empires and putting the world to right.
Forgiveness in Mark’s story is also a human act. It’s not something left only to a god or cosmic being that leaves us off the hook. Forgiveness as something we should practice as humans was part of Jesus’s message. Yet I don’t believe Jesus taught reconciliation without reparation and liberation. Jesus message of forgiveness was primarily aimed at wealthy, elite creditors and called them to “forgive” the debts of their poor debtors. Jesus’ message of forgiveness included a deep economic implication. It was a call for debt forgiveness, the Jewish Jubilee. (See A Prayer for Debts Cancelled)
Jesus’ gospel included material liberation. And not only was the man with the disability told he had already been forgiven, but the story also includes him being liberated from his inability to walk. Honestly, I don’t like this story as I read it from our vantage point today. It can be too easily coopted to make people with disabilities feel less than those without. I’m thankful that the story author challenged the crowd’s bias against this man before he removes the group’s actual reason for marginalizing him. Otherwise the marginalized would be simply kept marginalized.
If the gospel writer had written the story differently, the solution to marginalized women would be to make women men.
The solution to marginalized Black, brown and other people of color would be to make them White.
The solution to marginalized LGBTQ people would be make them straight and/or cisgender. (Conversion therapy is harmful and is outlawed in 18 states, Maine and Colorado being the latest to ban such practices.)
Rather than using various disabilities as metaphors for social evils (as the gospels do), we can do better and name specific social evils instead.
Being gay is not a social evil.
Being a woman is not a social evil.
Being non-white is not a social evil.
Being a migrant is not a social evil.
Being disabled is not a social evil.
How the social system treats these folks is a social evil.
Poverty is a social evil.
Keeping people uneducated is a social evil.
Keeping people indebted is a social evil.
Keeping people without adequate access to health care is a social evil.
And that is what I believe Mark’s story is trying to teach. In holistic liberation, everyone receives what they need. When we apply this to people with disabilities, we arrive at the lesson of removing the barriers that keep people with disabilities excluded. We are to remove the barriers that keep people with disabilities from accessing what they need to thrive.
Actual social evils are what we as followers of Jesus must work against today. This story doesn’t stop at forgiveness. We can’t afford to either. It’s not enough to simply offer a gospel that only offers divine forgiveness of sins. A gospel that is faithful to the Jesus story must include people forgiving people. It must include a redistribution of power and resources so that everyone has what they need not simply to survive but also to thrive. It must include reparations alongside reconciliation. It must include access and inclusion where the vulnerable have been excluded. A gospel that is faithful to the Jesus story must include material, holistic liberation.
This story calls us to work toward an inclusive, just, safe society for everyone.
“Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus by digging through it and then lowered the mat the man was lying on.” (Mark 2:4)
HeartGroup Application
- What are some of the ways you either experience or witness others experiencing discrimination and exclusion, either in your faith community or our larger society today?
- Make a list of practices your HeartGroup can engage that express inclusion, justice, and create a safe space for those mentioned in number 1.
- Pick something from the list and put it into action this week.
Thanks for checking in with us. I’m so glad you’re here.
Wherever you are today, keep living in love. Choose compassion, justice and action. Till the only world that remains is a world where love and justice reigns.
I love each of you, dearly.
I’ll see you next week.
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The Subversive Narratives of Advent (Part 1 of 3)
BY HERB MONTGOMERY
“I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all people.” (Luke 2.10)
Advent season has begun!
Over the next two weeks I want to look at the birth narratives of Jesus from first century Christian, Jewish, and Roman perspectives. Much has been lost, co-opted, and eclipsed by the Imperial Christianity that began in the fourth century when Christianity became the official religion of the Empire. So in the next two weekly e-Sights, we’ll be looking first at Matthew’s birth narrative and then at Luke’s. Both Matthew and Luke have story elements in common. They also differ greatly on other narrative details. We will be reading each story in the contexts they were each written in. Seen that original context, these narratives are intensely subversive of the military, political, and economic ways of empire as well as imperial theologies, not just in Rome but across time, including our own era.
A useful tool that I want to recommend this holiday season is Marcus Borg’s and Dominic Crossan’s timely volume, The First Christmas. They’ve done invaluable work in compiling information about the historical/cultural setting in which these birth-narratives were originally told. That information helps us rediscover the stories’ meaning not simply to the first century followers of Jesus but also to us today as well. If I were teaching a class on the Christmas narratives this holiday season, not only would each student have a copy of Matthew’s and Luke’s narratives, they’d also have this 244-page volume as an accompanying text book. It is a fantastic overview.
A Preliminary Word about Both Narratives
Something to note before we begin: These narratives are primarily concerned with this world, not with heaven. They are focused on this life. Too often, the birth-narratives of Jesus are read through the lens of salvation defined as entrance into a post-mortem heaven. But that is not how the original Jewish Jesus community would have heard these stories. They were concerned with the whole of life, not merely with an afterlife. A spiritual or afterlife application of these narratives became the dominant interpretation through the cultural influence of the expanding Roman Empire and European colonialism. We’ve talked about the way that reading the gospel narratives with an otherworldly focus has had intensely destructive fruit. Before imperial Christianity, these narratives were understood to be about the transformation of this world. They were not solely theological; they were theological and political! They announced the Divine dream for this world and announced that the fulfillment of that dream had begun in Jesus. They were not about the destruction of this world but about the restoration of it. This restoration, seen in the narratives as they were originally understood, was symbolized by visions of the end of war, violence, injustice, and oppression.
The Importance of Context
A point that I have been harping on for months now (and was happy to see addressed by Borg and Crossan) is the importance of acknowledging the historical context in which the Jesus narratives were created. Two examples that I use regularly to help people see the historical context of the Jesus story are Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I was overwhelmingly pleased to see Marcus and Dom use these examples as well:
“What would you think of a book that started with the opener, “I am going to discuss Mahatma Gandhi as a Hindu saint, but I’ll skip all that distracting stuff about British imperial India”? Or another with, “I am going to describe Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as a Christian saint, but I’ll get right to his biography and skip all that stuff about racism in America as background baggage”? You would know immediately that something is seriously wrong with those authors’ presentations.”—The First Christmas (p. 55)
I couldn’t agree more!
If we’re going to be able to wrest these two narratives from the militaristic, political, economic, and theological eclipse of empire and restore them to their original, deeply imperially subversive character, we must discover their Jewish, Christian, and Roman context.
Once we see the historical context of these stories, we cannot unsee it. Once we know it, we cannot unknow it. And once we experience this context, it will forever change how we read the birth-narratives of Jesus.
Next week, we’ll look again at Matthew’s narrative. The following week, just before Christmas, we will be turning our attention to Luke’s. My hope is that through this short series that you will read the birth-narratives in Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels anew, that your heart will be renewed, and that you will be inspired, as a Jesus follower, to more deeply embody the this-world-transforming values taught within these narratives.
Though the early Jesus birth-narratives were originally intended to subvert the Roman Empire, I believe they also hold significance for us today who live in or in the shadow of the American Empire. In our era, these narratives are being eclipsed by the consumerism of our Empire’s economic machine. The early followers’ voices are lost even to Christians who are most familiar with these Christmas stories. Systemic racism continues to thrive, xenophobia toward Syrian refugees and Muslim Americans flourishes, and U.S. militaristic methods of achieving peace are continually touted by those who carry the name of this babe from Bethlehem.
If we are to rediscover the original subversive power of the birth-narratives of Jesus and rightly apply the stories to our lives today, we must begin with reading these narratives in the matrix of Imperial Rome and its grinding clash with the hopes of first-century Judaism.
“Who is the ‘King of the Jews’? That was Herod the Great’s title, but Matthew’s story tells us Herod was more like Pharaoh, the lord of Egypt, the lord of bondage and oppression, violence and brutality. And his son was no better. Rather, Jesus is the true King of the Jews. And the rulers of his world sought to destroy him.
Who is the Son of God, Lord, savior of the world, and the one who brings peace on earth? Within Roman imperial theology, the emperor, Caesar, was all of these. No, Luke’s story says, that status and those titles belong to Jesus. He—not the emperor—is the embodiment of God’s will for the earth.
Who is the light of the world? The emperor, son of Apollo, the god of light and reason and imperial order? Or is Jesus, who was executed by empire, the light in the darkness, the true light to whom the wise of this world are drawn?
Where do we find the fulfillment of God’s dream for Israel and humanity? In the way things are now? Or only beyond death? Or in a very different world this side of death?”
—The First Christmas, p. 37.
The Gospel of Rome promised peace through victory achieved by violence. The conquered interpret this kind of peace in a vastly different way than the conquerors do. The Gospel of the Early Jesus Community envisioned a peace through restored justice for all, through a distinctly nonviolent transformation.
Over the next two weeks, I’m looking forward to sharing these two birth-narratives with you and focusing on how the first century Jesus community heard and read them in the context of their era.
What we are about to discover may mean you’ll never read these stories in quite the same way again.
HeartGroup Application
- Take time this week to read Matthew 1-2 as well as Luke 1-2. Familiarize yourself with each story. Try to keep them separate, for now, in your reading.
- List what each story has in common. Then where each narrative differs from the other.
- In preparation for next week, create an outline of Matthew’s birth-narrative as this is the one we will be looking at first. You can do this on your own or as a group in your HeartGroup.
I’m looking forward to next week already! Until then, keep living in the way of love, till the only world that remains is a world where only love reigns.
I love each of you dearly.
I’m overjoyed that you’re joining us for this small series this year.
Happy Holidays, and I’ll see you next week.
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)
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