Ethical Teachings Versus Supernatural Claims
BY HERB MONTGOMERY
“Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do as I teach? As for everyone who comes to me and hears my words and puts them into practice, I will show you what they are like. They are like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid the foundation on rock. When a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it, because it was well built.” (Luke 6:46-49)
I’m just returning from Phoenix, Arizona, where I conducted a five-day religious re-education series for adults on the revolutionary teachings of Jesus.
A sampling of the teachings we looked at were:
- Self-affirming, enemy-transforming nonviolence for the oppressed (Matthew 5.39-40)
- A preferential option for the poor (Matthew 5.42; Luke 4.18-19; 6.30; 11.41)
- Enemy love (Matthew 5.44; Luke 6.27-28)
- Forgiveness (Mark 11.25; Matthew 6.14-15; Luke 6.37)
- Restorative/transformative justice (Matthew 23.23; Luke 11.42; 18.7)
- Redistribution of wealth (Mark 10.21; Matthew 6.19-34; Luke 12.33-34)
- The Golden Rule (Matthew 7.12)
- The modeling of a heterogenous shared table (Mark 2.16; Luke 14.12-14)
(You can listen to this series here.)
What I’ve noticed more and more over the last couple years as I’ve spoken about the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, and Luke is that the teachings he taught are somehow new thoughts and ideas for many of the Christians I meet. At least where I’ve traveled, Western, American, mostly white* Christians are unfamiliar with Jesus’s actual teachings, and at the same time have very strong ideas about what it means for them to be “Christian.”
This phenomenon has a long history in the United States, at least as far back as the 1700s. A significant voice for 18th Century American patriotism was Thomas Paine’s. Paine was one of the founding fathers of the American revolution and also among the first to speak out against slavery and in favor of abolition. But what landed Paine in the most trouble was his book, The Age of Reason. In this book, Paine critiques institutional religion as an oppressive force and also questions the supernatural claims contemporary Christianity made about Jesus.
These supernatural claims have historically included:
- The divinity of Jesus
- The virgin birth
- The miracles of Jesus
- The substitutionary death of Jesus to satisfy the wrath of God
- The resurrection
What struck me as odd as I wrote the above list is that many of my readers have been conditioned to place greater importance on mentally assenting to this list than on endeavoring to follow the first list of teachings I shared. We have learned to call the second list “faith” and the first list “behaviorism.” The Jesus of the gospels taught that first list himself. And mentally assenting to any item on the second list doesn’t necessarily change the world around us for the better whereas endeavoring to practice even one item on the list of Jesus’s teachings transforms each practitioner into an agent of healing in this world.
Historically, Freethinkers and secularists like Thomas Paine have agreed with and sought to apply the teachings, values, and ethics found in the Jesus story. They’ve seen in those teachings deep intrinsic worth, especially the Golden Rule, which could change our societies if we practiced it.
My concern this week is this: more and more, I see the harm we’re doing as Christians in the world today rather than being the sources of healing our Jesus story calls us to be.
If I had to choose between 1) someone who was highly certain about the supernatural claims of traditional Christianity yet was unfamiliar with or simply disregarded the actually ethical teachings of the Jesus story and 2) someone who questioned or even doubted those supernatural claims yet were dedicated to learning more deeply how to apply and follow Jesus’s ethical teachings, I would choose the latter and consider them to be a Jesus follower. Again, it is the first list that the Jesus of the gospels taught himself.
We have enough highly certain humans already, in our Christian religion and beyond, and in so many ways the dogmatically certain who will not do as Jesus taught continue to make the world an unsafe and less compassionate place for many. This group is not in a moral position to critique the morality of those they are harming, though they often do. People who may doubt the church’s explanations and yet do as Jesus taught can at least assist with the moral development of humanity as they sit around the table, equals with us, sharing and listening to the stories of those whose life experience differs vastly from their own.
I expect to get a few emails this week from those who feel I have underestimated the traditional supernatural claims of Christianity. What I’m hoping for, nevertheless, is that a few of us will begin to ask why we feel more passionate about defending those claims while we experience comparatively little concern that so many Christians disregard the practical ethics that Jesus taught during his lifetime. To be fair, many Christians, today, ARE waking up to the imbalance we are looking at, this week. I’m pushing for more than acknowledgment, more than reformation, what is needed is a revolution. Christianity is in desperate need of a revolutionary fusion that puts us back in touch with its original Revolutionary—Jesus.
HeartGroup Application
- This week, pick one of the values, ethics, or topics from our first list above and do some research on it. As you study it, contemplate the ways in which you could experiment with the teaching in your own life.
- Write down what you discover.
- Share and discuss your findings within your HeartGroup.
I’ll close this week with a book recommendation. If you would like to understand the long history mentioned in this week’s eSight, you can find a great overview in Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (Holt Paperbacks; January 7, 2005)
I believe it’s time to reassess what it means to follow the Jesus of the synoptic gospels. Marcus Borg explains:
“Was Jesus a social revolutionary? In the ordinary sense in which we use the phrase ‘social revolutionary,’ yes. Like the Jewish prophets before him, he was passionate about economic justice and peace, and advocated active non-violent resistance to the domination system of his time. He was a voice of peasant social protest against the economic inequity and violence of the imperial domination system, mediated in the Jewish homeland by client rulers of the Roman Empire – in Galilee, Herod Antipas, and in Judea and Jerusalem, the temple authorities. He spoke of God’s kingdom on earth, as the Lord’s Prayer puts it: Your kingdom come on earth, as it already is in heaven. Heaven is not the problem – earth is.
But he was not a secular social revolutionary. He was God’s revolutionary. And God’s passion – what God is passionate about, according to Jesus – is for an earth in which swords are beaten into plowshares, in which nations do not make war against nations anymore, in which every family shall live under their own vine and fig tree (not just subsistence, but more than subsistence), and no one shall make them afraid (Micah 4.1-4, with close parallel in Isaiah 2.1-4). This was the passion of Jesus, and for Christians, Jesus is the revelation of God’s passion.
Violent revolution? No. Non-violent revolution? Yes.
Of course, Jesus and the Bible are also personal as well as political. Of course. But we have not often seen the political meaning of Jesus and the Bible. It is there – and once one sees it, it is so obvious. Not to see it is the product of habituated patterns of thought, or of willful blindness.
Jesus was (and is) not about endorsing the rule of domination systems that privilege the wealthy and powerful. Jesus was (and is) about God’s passion for a very different kind of world.” — God’s Non-Violent Revolutionary by Marcus J. Borg
Till the only world that remains, is a world where Love reigns.
I love each of you dearly.
I’ll see you next week.
*This is not true of the non-white congregations I have come in contact with, though I am told of existing non-white congregations that are still very colonial in their thinking, as well.
Humanizing the Monsters
by Herb Montgomery
“Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him.” (Mark 16:6)
Tomorrow is Halloween so let’s talk about that first. Halloween has roots in the Western Christian tradition of All Saints’ Day or All Hallows. In the Eastern Orthodox community, Christians celebrate All Saints Day on the first Sunday after Pentecost during the spring, not the fall. But the West has observed it on November 1 since the 8th Century CE, which makes October 31 its eve and thus All Saints’ Day Eve, All Hallows Eve, or “Halloween” as pronounced by the Scots. Over time, Halloween became influenced by Gaelic and Welsh harvest festival traditions and folklore. It is important to keep Celtic Fall Festivals and the Christian roots of Halloween separate in our thinking. They are related; they are not the same.
In these festivals, humanity’s fascination with and fear of death is invoked. Whether we are memorializing the lives of “saints” who have died (in the spring or the fall), or Celtic fall festivals marking the transition from summer to winter, we’re tracing the transitions from light to darkness, plenty to paucity, life to death.
Humanity and Death
Death is at the heart of all our discussions about morality and ethics. That which leads to life is seen as good and right, and that which leads to death is seen as evil or wrong. Our entire moral compass as a race is dictated by how certain behaviors relate to life and death, the continuance of humanity or its end.
Historically, religion has held out hope for some type of existence beyond death (e.g. Egyptian religion, Christianity, Islam) or a more mystical resignation with death (e.g. Buddhism and Ancient Judaism).
The Jesus Story and the Resurrection
The resurrection is the most potent force in the early Jesus movement. The original followers believed they had witnessed Jesus, whom the status quo had executed, alive again, and it was his resurrection event that liberated them from the fear of death. Because of that event, they could stand up to domination systems and threats of execution if they stepped out of line, because death had become a conquered enemy.
Notice how the letter to the Hebrews, in true apocalyptic fashion, states this:
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. (Hebrews 2:14, 15, emphasis added.)
These early Jesus followers could stand against the violence, injustice and oppression of earthly principalities and powers whom they viewed as conduits of cosmic evil Powers, because they no longer feared death and no longer feared what these earthly powers could do to them.
Through Jesus, death had been overthrown and so if his followers were executed by the domination systems as their Jesus had been, they believed they would also follow him in being resurrected at the time of universal restoration (see Acts 3.21; 1 Thessalonians 4.16-18, 1 Corinthians 15.22-23)
As a side note, I find it fascinating when humanists and secularists who do not believe in life after death but are resigned about death are still willing to lay down their lives unselfishly for those who may come after them. The gift of their life is genuinely selfless but is given purely for betterment of others. (Some researchers think Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. may have been such a humanist in his later years.)
Humanizing Monsters
Regardless of how we arrive at that point, from my own experience, being liberated from one’s fear of dying is a breathtakingly beautiful thing, especially when it has the potential to change how we relate to each other.
Morality rooted in our fear of dying influences the way in which we view one another: those who threaten our lives are viewed, too often, as evil. And those who significantly threaten our lives in ways that terrify us the most—those people we deem monsters.
The first step in ridding someone from society is to villainize them. If we can cease to see someone or a group as human and begin to see them as monsters, then we are well on our way to imagining an existence without them. These people must be seen to threaten the “good” —the life—of a society. And if they are, then fear drives out compassion, just as perfect love drives out all fear.
Tomorrow, millions of children will don masks and costumes, and go from door to door asking for cheap chocolate and industrially produced sweets. But underneath each mask is a child. I wonder if there is a deeper lesson in this.
Could the masks we see over the faces of those we fear simply hide children of a divine being, children just like you and I? Whether it’s fear of someone of a different culture or race than you, fear of someone from a different economic status than you, fear of a person with a different gender than you, or fear of someone whose orientation and sexuality is different than yours, our challenge is to pull back the mask that we have fixed upon them in our own hearts, and see that person as the genuine human being that they are. They are a child, just like you, of God, a sibling of yours within the divine/human family. It takes effort to humanize our monsters. Yet it’s only by doing so that we can fully to embody the value of loving our neighbors as ourselves.
Our choices are fear or compassion, death or life.
HeartGroup Application
1. This week I want you to take inventory of the people on this planet that you are afraid of. They can be specific people or simply types of people. I want you actually write down a list. I want you to name your fear this week.
2. Secondly I want you to do some research on your similarities with those you fear. This may be difficult for some, but it will be well worth it. Write down ten ways that those you are afraid of are like you: where do you not differ from them?
3. Journal the insights you gain from this exercise and share your results with your HeartGroup this upcoming week.
We are all children of divinity. We are all siblings of the same divine/human family. Our hope lies in learning how to sit beside one another at the same family table once again. There are no monsters! There are only people, who feel, who love, who hurt, who, like us, are scared. Everyone has a story, and it’s time we give those we are afraid of an opportunity to share theirs.
Till the only world that remains is a world where love reigns.
I love each of you dearly, and I’ll see you next week.
Jesus’ Vision for Community, Wealth Redistribution, and Closing the Inequality Gap
By Herb Montgomery
Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!” (Mark 10:23)
First, I didn’t say the above statement! So don’t be upset with me. But it is in Mark’s version of the Jesus story, so I’d like to address it.
Most believe Mark’s gospel was written just before or just after the destruction of the Jerusalem during the Roman-Jewish war. The events taking place in the Jesus community at this time help us understand re-emphasizing Jesus’ teachings on sharing our superfluous wealth with each other.
According to the book of Acts, the Jesus community practiced communal care: they took care of the needs of those within their community.
All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. (Acts 2.44-45)
All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need. (Acts 4:32-35, emphasis needed.)
What is so amazing about both of these passages is the result: the early Jesus community eliminated poverty in their group. “There were no needy persons among them”—this is what a world influenced by the teachings of Jesus could look like.
One of the purposes of Mark’s gospel is to encourage Jesus’s followers to continue this care-taking. Here’s how he does it. Mark dedicates a large portion of the narrative to this topic.
First, we have the miraculous feeding of the five thousand, with twelve baskets of leftovers in chapter 6:34-44. Then, two chapters later, we have another feeding a multitude (Mark 8:1-10). This time it’s four thousand fed, and seven basketfuls left over.
Just one of these stories would be expected; it’s the repetition of the elements that should cause us to sit up and ask “Why.”
Mark answers this question in verses 14-21 of chapter 8:
“The disciples had forgotten to bring bread, except for one loaf they had with them in the boat. ‘Be careful,’ Jesus warned them. ‘Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and that of Herod.’ They discussed this with one another and said, ‘It is because we have no bread.’ Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked them: “Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear? And don’t you remember? When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?’ ‘Twelve,’ they replied. ‘And when I broke the seven loaves for the four thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?’ They answered, ‘Seven.’ He said to them, ‘Do you still not understand?’
Let’s begin to unpack this exchange: “Are your hearts hardened?,” Jesus asks. In Hebrew folklore, the quintessential hardened heart was Pharaoh’s in Exodus. Within that story, Egypt symbolizes a world empire built on scarcity, accumulation, and storage that over time grew into a domination system rooted in greed, oppression, and ruthless brick-production. The story climaxes with a stand off between Moses the liberator and Pharaoh the oppressor; the story says Pharaoh’s heart was “hard,” meaning that “he would not let the Israelites go.”
Jesus emerged within 1st Century Judaism as a liberator of the poor and oppressed. To the degree that Jesus’ disciples would not participate in this liberation, they, like the Pharaoh in the story, choose the way of a hardened heart. Jesus called for his followers to radically embrace one another to the degree that even the wealthy would embrace the poor and liquidate superfluous assets to eradicate need. Two chapters after the conversation in chapter 8, we see Jesus telling a rich questioner, “Sell everything you have and give it to the poor” (Mark 10:18-25).
There are two obstacles to this level of radical sharing. One is feeling like you don’t have enough to share; the other is having enough today but being so afraid of not having enough in the future that you refuse to share now. The stories of the feedding of the multitudes address the first obstacle, whereas the rich man in Mark 10 represents the second.
In each of the “multitude” stories, there is not enough to go around. But in these stories, each person brings what they have and “miraculously” there is somehow enough with more to spare.
In Mark 8, in the boat, the disciples are bumping up against a “scarcity” mentality once again. There is only one loaf to be divided among them, and their temptation is to revert to the narrative of hoarding or “competing” for what there is. Jesus warns them to beware of the leaven of Herod and the wealthy Pharisees. The leaven Jesus is referring to here is that fear of future scarcity that leads to accumulation, hoarding, greed, and a hard heart that ignores the needs of others today. The hard heart makes you a mini “pharaoh,” one who refuses to liberate those around you from whatever prevents them from being fully human.
Jesus’ solution to the oppression of the poor is not charity, but community. I don’t think there is anything wrong with charity. Charity is vital! Charity takes care of hungry stomachs right now. Certainly following Jesus includes no less than sharing charitably with the needy, but it also includes more. Following Jesus means community, where each person, rich and poor alike, brings what they have to the shared table. Even though we may be tempted to think that we only have two loaves and a few fish to feed an entire community, when we come together, something magical happens. As each person contributes what they have, somehow every person’s needs are met.
A couple weekends ago, I encountered an organization in Glendale, CA, called Communitas. Communitas is a Latin noun referring to an unstructured community in which people are equal or to the very spirit of community. The philosophy is that we can choose to network together in a community where each one of us has something that someone else needs. Our needs put us in touch with one another. As we choose to take care of each other, each ability connecting with each need, we can eliminate need by applying the abilities we already possess. Even those who are “in need” have abilities and talents they can bring to the shared table. Communitas is an amazing organization that does more than offer bandaid solutions to poverty. It’s an organization subversively casts a vision of systemic change.
In Mark, Jesus’ solution to “need” or poverty is to close the inequality gap by inviting each person into community where every need is supplied by another person’s shared ability. Some of the wealthy responded well: think of those among the wealthy tax collectors who had chosen to follow Jesus. Others did not: think of those among the Pharisees who viewed Jesus’ teaching with contempt and dismissal.
Mark finishes his story in chapter 10 with these words:
“Children, how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
Notice that he does not say it was impossible. He did say it was hard. Jesus was simply being honest about the difficulty. In the words of Bob Dylan, “When you ain’t got nothin’, you ain’t got nothin’ to lose.” But for those who felt as if they had much to lose, choosing the way of compassion and bringing what they possessed to the shared table was, at best, a challenge.
An aside: there actually wasn’t a camel gate in Jerusalem that camels had to get down on their knees to enter. This is a myth that began in the 16th Century to allow the wealthy to follow Jesus and still hold on to their wealth. The phrase “eye of the needle” is beautiful Hebrew hyperbole, and also appears in the Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Baba Mezi’a 38b. Jesus is also using an Aramaic play on words. The Aramaic word gamla can be translated as “rope” as well as camel, because most ropes were made of camel hair. And so the phrase can be read as “getting a rope through the eye of a needle.” The pun holds as Mark’s gospel is translated from Greek into Latin: The Latin word for rope is kamilos, and the Latin word for camel is kamelos.
So what does the pun mean? For a rope to go through an eye of a needle, it must undergo a change: it must be pared down significantly. The rope must become thread. Jesus is saying that the way the wealthy are saved is through choosing to let go of their fear of the future, their trust in the safety of what they have accumulated, and to accept instead the way of compassion that values fellow humans more than wealth. Jesus calls the wealthy to place their wealth on the shared table alongside everything that others bring to the shared table. No hoarding allowed.
The emphasis is not about reducing individual wealth; it’s about making wealthy communities. Jesus is casting the vision of sharing communities that create shared wealth. In these communities, as it states in Acts, there will no longer be a needy person among us.
“A needle’s eye is not too narrow for two friends, but the world is not wide enough for two enemies.” — Solomon Ben Judah Ibn Gabirol (Spanish Jew and Collector of Jewish Aphorisms; Spain, c. 1021 – c.1069; see Geary’s Guide to the Worlds Great Aphorists)
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” — attributed to Margaret Mead
HeartGroup Application
This week I have a special activity for each HeartGroup.
- Before you meet as a group make time to personally watch Richard Wilkonson’s 16 minute Ted talk How Economic Inequality Harms Societies. Write down any thoughts, questions, or insights you get as you watch.
- When you meet together for your HeartGroup this upcoming week, watch the short presentation again as a group and then spend some time sharing with each other your response.
- As a group, write down ways you could close the gaps that exist within your own HeartGroup. Then pick one of these ways to experiment with over the next few weeks. Schedule a time a month from now when you can, as a group, discuss what you have discovered through this exercise.
I’d love to hear what your group discovers. Shoot me an email and let me know what has happened.
Till the only world that remains is a world where Love reigns. Here’s to a safer, more compassionate world, through the means of a shared table, for us all.
I love each of you dearly.
I’ll see you next week.
Jesus—Liberator of the Oppressed, Physician of the Sick
BY HERB MONTGOMERY
As Jesus was walking along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him. And as he sat at dinner in Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples—for there were many who followed him. When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to his disciples, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” When Jesus heard this, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” Mark 2:14-17
I want to begin this week by thanking you for your patience over the last couple weeks. We’ve been moving our oldest daughter into college. She is our first-born child, and we’ve felt a mixture of bittersweet emotions: business, grief, excitement, joy and sorrow. I was not prepared for what I’ve been feeling about her leaving home. Please pray for me and for us as family.
We started by reading from Mark’s gospel, chapter 2. Let’s take a look at Jesus and the dinner he attended at Levi’s house.
In Mark’s gospel, salvation is defined as Jesus’ liberation from all that oppresses. Mark’s Jesus is not preoccupied with getting people through life in moral condition so their post-mortem, disembodied soul is eligible for the pearly gates. Mark’s Jesus is busy liberating those he encounters from whatever oppresses them today, right now.
Mark’s gospel also draws from the apocalyptic, dualistic world view that connects everything here on earth with a fight between good cosmic forces and evil cosmic forces. In other words, if someone is being oppressed, their oppressors are the puppets of cosmic evil. Jesus envisioned himself as a conduit of cosmic good, here to liberate those oppressed on earth. This is why Mark jumps into supernatural acts of liberation this early in the Jesus story.
Mark shows us that Jesus possessed a preferential option for the poor. Jesus wasn’t working for the equal opportunity of all to compete in a system of winners and losers. He aimed instead at a radical restructuring of human communities where there are no more winners and losers. Jesus pointed us toward communities of mutual aid, where we each strove to take care of one another rather than competing against each other. In Mark 10, Jesus tells the man, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor.” He envisioned community not rooted in win/lose survival, but win/win cooperation.
In the second chapter of Mark, we see the wealthy tax collectors and “sinners” responding to Jesus’ call to wealth redistribution and the wealthy Pharisees not responding well. We begin here to see in Mark’s gospel a Jesus who prioritizes liberating the oppressed over religiously defined purity and fidelity to religious ritual.
In Luke’s gospel, Jesus makes his mission clear:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to those with prison-blindness,
to let the oppressed go free.”
Jesus, Luke 4:18
The Pharisees in Mark are upset that Jesus is eating with “tax-collectors and sinners.” Jewish tax-collectors were viewed as unfaithful to the national interests of their own people and collaborators with the oppressive political and economic power of Rome. A sinner in the gospels was someone perceived to be living contrary to the Pharisees’ and teachers’ interpretation of the Torah.
Notice that those who were thought to be guilty of nationally infidelity and/or religiously disobedient were responding to Jesus’ economic teachings, yet the Pharisees, who valued national faithfulness and strict obedience to the Torah’s ritual and purity laws, were not.
Mark offers another clue to understanding what’s happening in Mark 2. In the next two stories in his gospel, Mark focuses on the Pharisees and the rituals of fasting and the Sabbath. Asked about the Sabbath, Jesus responds, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food” (Mark 2:25). The Torah declared it was not lawful for anyone but the priests to eat the bread of the Presence. But when it came to feeding the hungry and strict adhering to the ritual laws, Jesus chose to labor for the oppressed and to prioritize feeding the hungry over the Torah rule. The people were a weightier matter than the law.
Jesus’ teaching matches something that Judaism refers to as pikuach nefesh, the principle that the preservation of human life overrides other religious considerations. The Pharisees in our story this week subscribed to a different way of interpreting the Torah; their principle was that ritual and purity laws may not be violated, even when a life is in danger. (You can see this principle at work in Mark 3 as well. Some members of every religion still argue for this approach to religious obedience today.)
Mark’s Jesus prioritizes the lives of those who are being economically oppressed.
Following Jesus is not about greater patriotism to nationalistic interests, nor is it primarily about religious observances. Following Jesus means defining salvation not as getting to heaven but as liberating humanity today from all things that oppress and using the principles Jesus taught himself.
Those who participate in this liberation work are, by definition, following Jesus in his work. Those who don’t may be very religious, yet are not following him in the way he walked while here on earth.
Our story ends with Jesus responding, “Those that are well don’t need a physician. I came to call not the righteous, but the sinners.”
I believe Jesus was using the religious leaders’ own paradigm here. They felt they were “righteous,” and called those Jesus embraced “sinners.” Yet Jesus took on the role of a liberating physician, and those labeled “sinners” and “sick” were responding to him. They were the ones seeing the sickness of the system they’d participated in. They were the ones choosing to move in a different direction. Jesus hadn’t come to affirm or reward those who were “righteous.” He had come to heal the sick, to liberate the oppressed.
Jesus suggests to the religious leaders that even if they were more politically “righteous” than the tax collectors and more ritually “righteous” than those they referred to as “sinners,” they were just as much economic “sinners” as the wealthy tax-collectors, and just as much in need of liberation as the people they condemned. As long as they refused to consider this reality, they could have no part in and no understanding of Jesus’ work for the poor and oppressed.
This week, don’t ask yourself how successful you are in the merely religious aspects of your life. Ask yourself what you and those around you need to be liberated from so you can be fully human. Ask what you are doing in your own sphere to live out Jesus’ liberation.
Just recently, someone responded to one of my critiques of social political and economic abuses. “What are you, Herb,” they asked me. “A minister or a politician?” My response is that I’m neither. I am simply a human being endeavoring to obediently follow Jesus. And it is that obedience that dictates that I must concern myself with more than the afterlife. I must also concern myself with whatever people need liberation from today in order to be what the great Heart at the center of the universe brought them into existence to be.
To the degree that we’re living out Jesus’ ministry of liberation from all things that oppress, to that same degree we’re working alongside Jesus. Unless we live out the wisdom of the Jesus story, we may still possess some assurance that helps us sleep at night, but we’re not following Jesus’ way.
If our Jesus today is not first and foremost a liberator of the oppressed as he declared in Luke 4:18, then we must at least ask whether our Jesus is the same one the gospels describe.
HeartGroup Application
The Jesus story calls us to fundamentally rethink theology from the standpoint of the poor and oppressed, to envision a God who is on the side of the poor and the oppressed of our world. The Jesus story calls us away from being preoccupied with getting people through life in good religious or moral condition so that when they die they can be admitted into heaven. Hope of a post-mortem Heaven, dear as it may be, cannot be our cause for excluding or ignoring the basic conditions anyone lives in today. The Jesus story calls us to ask, “What do we need to be fully liberated from in order to be fully human?”—and that liberation is physical, economic, political, religious, and social.
What do we and those around us need to be fully liberated from?
This week:
- Sit down with your HeartGroup and take inventory: what in your everyday lives do each of you need to be liberated from? List the issues, experiences, or needs.
- Brainstorm ways the group can come together along side of those needs, and live out the liberation values of the Jesus story. Write them down.
- Pick three things you have written down in number 2, and coordinate the carrying out of the actions previously discussed.
Charity addresses our immediate needs, but justice gets at the root of what is causing the oppression. Again, the Jesus story defines salvation as liberation from all things that oppress. Within the teachings of Jesus are the seeds of how we can embody Jesus’ work of healing in this world (see John 3:17). His teachings are where a Jesus follower begins to discover how we live out this gospel in our community and incarnate the values of this story which we hold dear.
Till the only world that remains, is a world where love reigns.
Here’s to Jesus’ safer, more compassionate home for us all. I wish each of you much love, peace and liberation this week.
I love each one of you and I’ll see you next week.
Jesus, the Meek, and the Golden Rule
Jesus’ non-exclusive, non-homogenous, non-kyriachical, shared table.
BY HERB MONTGOMERY
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. (Matthew 5:5)
As we look at the “blessings” of Matthew 5 this week, know that they do not say that any state is an intrinsic blessing. Rather they each say, that if you have any of the experiences Jesus describes—poverty, mourning, or persecution you will be particularly blessed by the changes Jesus came to make.
The first blessing, “Blessed are the poor,” is a great example. It’s not a blessing to be poor. No one strives and works hard so that one day they can be poor. But Jesus was saying that if the present arrangement of this world has left you poor, you are blessed because the changes I’ve come to make are in your favor. This is also true in the statement we’re looking at this week, “Blessed are the meek.”
Merriam-Webster defines “meek” as having or showing a quiet and gentle nature, not wanting to fight or argue with other people. It can also be defined as easily imposed on or submissive. There is no intrinsic blessing in being meek in the present world structure. In fact, meekness is a disadvantage in a world where everyone’s looking out for number one, trying to get ahead, looking out for themselves. The world is presently arranged in such a way that it does not reward the meek, it steam rolls over them.
I experienced multiple examples of the truth of this in my travels this summer.
The first was driving in Los Angeles. Driving in L.A. is very different from driving in Lewisburg, WV. In Lewisburg, we look out for everyone on the road. Even cautious drivers are let in and taken care of. Suffice it to say, it is not this way in L.A. If you drive with any degree of meekness, that’s the degree to which you’re going to get run over!
On one of our flights, a large, muscular young man threw a fit in order to intimidate a flight attendant into giving him the seat he wanted. And it worked! As he passed by my seat, I noticed the tattoo on his arm in large lettering: “I trust no one.”
In this world, a world based on competition rather than cooperation, it’s not the meek who are blessed but those who know how to play the game with the greatest skill. Even in something as simple as getting on the airplane, we don’t look after the meek. Each passenger already has their seat assignment, and we will all be taking off and arriving together at the same time. Yet some people need to be the first on the plane to the degree that they will roll over others to do so.
Jesus isn’t telling the people in his day to be meek. He is telling those listening that the world he was creating would bless even the meek, by contrast to the present world that doesn’t.
Can you imagine a world, where everyone—everyone—treats another simply the way they would like to be treated? Matthew’s Jesus points to that world using the language of his own Jewish tradition:
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. (Matthew 7.12)
Jesus is sharing a universal truth here. This is how it sounds in the language of other cultures:
“Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.” –Confucius (Ancient China)
“That which you hate to be done to you, do not do to another.”—Egyptian, Late Period Papyrus (Ancient Egypt)
“Do not do to others that which angers you when they do it to you.” –DIsocrates (Ancient Greece)
“Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.” —Udanavarga (Ancient Buddhism)
“Do to no one what you yourself dislike.”—Tobit 4:16 (Ancient Judaism, at least 200 years before Jesus)
“Recognize that your neighbor feels as you do, and keep in mind your own dislikes.”—Sirach 31:15 (Ancient Judaism)
“That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”—Talmud, Shabbat 31a (Judaism)
“One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one’s own self. This, in brief, is the rule of dharma. Other behavior is due to selfish desires.”—Brihaspati, Mahabharata (Anusasana Parva, Section CXIII, Verse 8) (Ancient Hinduism)
This universal truth that Jesus teaches in Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels contains the building blocks of a whole new world. And if we follow it to its furthest conclusion, we find it’s a world that takes care even of the meek. Follow closely.
Jesus modeled this new world for us in his practice of a shared table. Let’s look:
“Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” (Luke 15.1)
When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” (Matthew 9.11)
The Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to his disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” (Luke 5.30)
For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ (Luke 7.33-34)
Please remember that Jesus was not a Christian. Jesus was a Jew. In first-century Judaism, unlike in our time and culture, the label “sinner” was not a universal term. It referred only to those within the covenant community who were thought to be living out of harmony with the Torah.
Jesus chose a table that included those who, at best, were politically and religiously marginalized, and, at worst, were excluded by their culture’s status quo. Jesus modeled a table, that to a certain degree, was non-homogenous (think of Simon the zealot and Matthew the tax collector).
In other places in the canonical gospels, Jesus is clear that his table must also be non-kyriarchical.
I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends. (John 15.15)
But he said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you.” (Luke 22.25-26)
But Jesus called them to him and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. t will not be so among you.” (Matthew 20.25-26)
So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you.” (Mark 10.42-43)
After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you?” (John 13.12)
He modeled an inclusive, non-homogenous, non-kyriarchical shared table. And he invited us to sit with him there.
I believe Jesus understood that exclusivity creates a world where certain voices and perspectives are not heard, a world that does not fully take into account how others would desire to be treated or how we would wish to be treated if we were in their position.
I believe Jesus understood that homogeneity creates a world that’s unsafe for anyone who is different or unlike those seated at the table. To the degree that someone is not at the table, to that same degree those present will create an unsafe world. Ultimately, homogeneity leads to exclusion and exclusion leads to extinction.
Jesus understood that hierarchies where one human exercises authority over another human deny the image of God within both, and create a subjugation that leads to oppression.
I see this truth modeled in the Eucharist. We honor the memory of all who have been excluded, subjugated, and exterminated in the past. These were the ones Jesus also stood in solidarity with, and that solidarity cost him his life at the hands of the status quo. We choose, in the name of Jesus and in the face of this world’s present structures, to shape communities in the form a shared meal, a share table.
Regardless of gender, race, orientation, sex, education, and economic achievement, everyone must be invited to the non-kyriarchical, non-homogenous table. And if we would only choose to learn to follow Jesus and sit around this table with others, especially those who are not like ourselves, we could embrace a world devoid of oppression, subjugation and destructive violence.
I have not always understood this myself, but I am continuously learning. Today I see that if we would choose to live in the manner of a shared table, this would create a world respectfully and compassionately shared by and with us all, even the meek.
In that world, even the meek are blessed, for they, too, will inherit the earth.
Many voices.
One shared table.
One new world.
HeartGroup Application
1. What are some ways your HeartGroup can lean more deeply into practicing the universal truth of treating others the way you’d like to be treated?
List, together, at least ten.
2. Discuss what it is going to take to begin putting this into practice.
3. What challenges does your HeartGroup face now that this principle would significantly help?
List them.
It’s my hope that your heart will, with mine, continue to be liberated, healed and renewed, till the only world that remains is a world where Love reigns.
I love each of you.
I’ll see you next week.
Blessed Are Those Who Are Poor . . .
BY HERB MONTGOMERY
Looking at his disciples, he said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. (Luke 6:20)
It’s good to be back home! I truly loved my time in Brazil. It is a very beautiful place, and the hearts of its people are the most beautiful.
I encountered two polar contrasts during my trip: the severe poverty of so many, and the equally shocking, extreme, generous nature of their sharing with one another. I saw that sharing even among the poorest.
As many are aware, when colonialism “ended” in many of the developing countries, another form of oppression took its place: economic oppression. The Empires that had settled in many of these areas passed on their debts to these fledgling countries as they gained their independence. Starting off deeply indebted to those who had previously ruled them, these nations gained independence, but not freedom. Many of these countries then turned to the World Bank, the IMF, and other power brokers of the new global economy for help. The international banks, the IMF, took the form of loans with terms and conditions that would leave more than half of each country’s resources going to debt repayment rather than internal development.
Brazil, for example, owes $1,420,331,037,715 to so called “first world countries” today. Every year, Brazil’s debt incurs $138,250,530,000 in interest. That’s $4384 per second. This debt amounts to 56.08% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), which is the monetary value of all the finished goods and services Brazil produces in its borders in a year.
So most of Brazil’s income repays debt that it wasn’t even responsible for incurring in the first place, and doesn’t maintain the infrastructure for taking care of its 202,768,562 citizens.
Imagine what your world would look like if your municipalities were, overnight, depleted of their resources to pay for water, sewer, trash pickup, road maintenance, emergency personnel, and law enforcement.
Manaus, the place I visited first, has virtually no middle class now. The very few wealthy and affluent live alongside masses upon masses of the severely poor.
I noticed this on Friday when I arrived. But that was just the start of my adventure.
Shortly after I arrived in Brazil, I was informed that my meetings in Manaus and Novo Airão had both been cancelled at the last minute. I learned that one of the “saints,” after seeing that I would be speaking in their church, googled my name and found out I was a friend to the LGBTIQ community. Discovering my love—and I quote—“for the gays,” rumors also began to circulate that I drank, smoked, ate pork, did drugs, had multiple wives, and did not believe in the Holy Spirit. (You can’t make this stuff up.) Those of you who’re not familiar with the teetotaling, kosher nature the Adventist church, please know that just saying that someone drinks, smokes, and eats pork is enough to marginalize an Adventist. Every other rumor was gratuitous. My meetings had been scheduled to begin that first weekend, but they would at best be delayed, and at worst be permanently cancelled.
So I woke up early the next morning and attended the church where I’d been scheduled to speak. Sunday, I spent becoming familiar with the city, and then Monday afternoon, I had an appointment with the Conference President.
The president and I were not the only ones present at this meeting. Accompanying me was my host and an interpreter. It turned into a short meeting, and the president did not discuss why our meetings had been delayed. We did discuss a church policy concerning guest speakers from other countries, and so I had the opportunity to remind everyone present that I was only in the country by their prior invitation. The meetings had been approved a year previously, and we had cooperated with every stipulation they had made in that time.
After the meeting—Im still not sure what made the difference—the administration approved our meetings for the second time. They would now begin on Wednesday evening. Faced with four lost days, I started editing my presentations. I’d already edited them severely for translation, and now I had to cut the series in half. As a result of the delays, however, the Manaus series was poorly attended until the last presentation, when the house was packed.
I chose Luke 4:18-19 as my focus for the week. In these texts, we discover Jesus, the liberator of the oppressed, embracer of the outcast, and proponent of a shared table. Those who did attend repeatedly told us how thankful they were for the meetings, and they shared the different paradigm shifts they had each experienced through encountering Jesus’ teaching in a refreshing new light.
The next series was about 120 miles northwest of Manaus, in Novo Airão. Buy bus that is about a four hours distance. This area was much more economically stressed than Manaus.
For this group, my choice to present Jesus as a first century poor Jewish teacher (Luke 2.24 cf. Leviticus 12.8) who came with good news for his fellow poor resonated deeply. We focused on Jesus’ words in the Synagogue in Luke 4 (emphasis added):
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for those with prison-blindness,
to set the oppressed free.”
Never have I encountered first-hand just how important it is to couch Jesus’ ministry in the context of his liberation of the poor. The Novo Airão group showed me how much.
As we reflected on Luke 4, we explored four themes together.
1. How Jesus taught the poor to survive. Jesus gave the poor a way to transcend “worry” and “fear” by combining what they did have and choosing to embrace, share with, and take care of one another. (See Luke 12:13-34; Matthew 5:25-34)
2. How Jesus empowered the poor and oppressed to move beyond survival. Jesus taught the poor how to affirm themselves by nonviolently confronting oppressors and by staying rooted in enemy-love and enemy-transformation. John Dear, who has done a tremendous amount of work in nonviolence over the years, states: “Nonviolence is active love that seeks justice and peace for the whole human race, beginning with the poor and oppressed. It is the all-encompassing love that embraces every human being on the planet, refuses to kill anyone, and works for social justice for everyone.” (See Luke 4:16-29; Matthew 5:38-42)
3. How Jesus rejected hierarchical structures in the community of his followers. Jesus promoted equity, justice, and compassion for all. This insight resonated with the audience the most as many felt as if they were living lives at the bottom of political, economic, and religious structures. (See Matthew 20:25-28; Matthew 23:8-12)
4. How Jesus replaced systems of oppression and exclusion with a shared table. As each one of us, along with our differences, encounter one another at Jesus’ shared table, we become enabled to integrate all the many diverse experiences of life into a meaningful and coherent whole, producing a safer and more compassionate world for us all. (Luke 6:20-26; Luke 15:1, 25-32)
We ended this series with the ending of Jesus narrative. Jesus was crucified by the powers and systems that his teachings threatened, and God said “NO” to that execution in the resurrection on Sunday morning. Jürgen Moltmann defines the resurrection as a Divine protest to the domination systems of our world. The early church also perceived the resurrection as a decisive clue that a new world, like a mustard seed placed in the ground and like leaven in dough, had begun with Jesus. (See Acts 13:32-33) In overwhelming clarity, we encountered, together, a Jesus who proclaimed that the Heart of the Universe was standing with those who, as a result of the way the present world is set up, are hurting, suffering, going hungry, falling asleep many nights in tears, oppressed, marginalized and subordinated. These are the majority of those who live in Novo Airão. And those who were present found renewed hope as decisions were made to embrace and to follow this Jesus.
On the last night of this second series, one of the more affluent members who attended shared with me this message in broken english:
“I had never looked at things this way before. Thank you so much for coming. I feel as if I cannot continue on the same way I had. If I am to embrace Jesus’ shared table, things in my life where I’m participating in ‘pyramids of oppression’ and ‘circles of exclusion’ must change.”
Over all, I view my trip to Brazil as a tremendous success for Jesus’ new world. The response of the people to the stories and teachings of Jesus was breathtaking, especially in Novo Airão, and I believe the Novo Airão church took significant strides toward Jesus’ new world of compassion and safety for everyone.
To those of you who were praying for this series here at home, thank you. Over the next two weeks the Novo Airão church will be conducting a local school building project: please keep praying for them.
And to each of you who has supported Renewed Heart Ministries, I can’t thank you enough. You made it possible for me to go to Brazil and share with the people I met.
I take Jesus’ words to his disciples, “Freely you have received, freely give” very seriously. Renewed Heart Ministries is a not-for-profit ministry, and we never charge seminar fees for local work. We also make all of our resources available on the web so the people who need to hear this message can access it freely.
This means we are directly dependent on our monthly supporters as well as those who make one-time contributions: you help us to keep lifting up Jesus and his teachings in a hurting world. Jesus’ teachings have placed us on a path that leads to life rather than death, compassion rather than condemnation, and love rather than hate. Like Jesus, we believe our call is not “to condemn the world.” Instead we do this work that the world, through Jesus and his teachings, “might be healed” (John 3:17).
I witnessed the healing nature of Jesus’ teachings firsthand during my visit to Brazil. Jesus’ words to the poor and oppressed, his uplifting of women in a patriarchal society, his embrace of the outcast and excluded, and even his self-affirming nonviolence resonated so deeply with those who participated in these two series of meetings that I, too, walked away having to agree with the Samaritans of Jesus’ day: “This man [Jesus] really is the Savior of the world.” (John 4:42)
Thank you for helping me to see and share that Savior. Till the only world that remains is world where love reigns, let’s keep lifting Jesus up.
And to each of you who support the ministry of RHM as we reach our around the globe, thank you.
I love each of you dearly. I’ll see you next week.
Letting Go of Three Types of Fear
BY HERB MONTGOMERY
“Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.” (Luke 12:32)
I have recently gone through a paradigm shift in the way I look at Jesus and I believe this shift is significant. In short, Jesus and his message were not outside the economically disadvantaged and subordinated in his society. Jesus’ teachings emerged from within this community. Jesus was not speaking to people whose daily experience he did not share first-hand. Jesus was speaking to and with his own peers. In Howard Thurman’s privately published volume of poems, The Greatest of These, he wrote:
“His days were nurtured in great hostilities
Focused upon his kind, the sons of Israel.
There was no moment in all his years
When he was free.”
Jesus was a poor Jew. He was oppressed on two counts: being from the community of “the poor” and being part of the politically subordinated Jewish people ruled by the Romans, he understood first-hand the implications of his teachings. Although he was a Jewish male within a Jewish patriarchal society, he choose to stand in solidarity with Jewish women (see Matthew 9.22; John 8.10; Luke 15.8; Luke 10.42; Mark 10.11; Mark 15.40), and he also also voluntarily chose a life of solidarity with people who were socially marginalized, including the eunuchs of Matthew 19:12, saying there was room in his new world for them, even though many in his day considered them “unclean.” (Deuteronomy 23.1; Acts 8.36-39; cf. Isaiah 56.3)
It is as one of the “least of these” that Jesus spoke to his peers about the topic we’re looking at this week: the continual war carried out on the nerves of the oppressed people that causes them to live in a perpetual state of fear.
There are three types of fear that we will consider this week:
- the fear of going without
- the fear of violence
- and the fear of isolation, helplessness, and insignificance.
Fear of Going Without
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. (Matthew 6:25-34)
I want to point out here that Jesus was not teaching the economically oppressed to sit back and do nothing. Notice the phrase, “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness.” Jesus was speaking to a people who had precious little: security was one of their chief concerns. Jesus is here inspiring them to risks even their own temporary security to make active advancements toward the new world (“the kingdom”). He was casting a vision in their imagination of a just world (“his righteousness”), and assuring them that if they would pursue a world that is just, safe, and compassionate for all, then in the end result, they would see a world where everyone’s needs would be met.
This passage directly refers to the mentality so many downtrodden people have: “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” Those in control use present security, even when it is a facade, to dissuade people from questioning or threatening the status quo.
Fear of Violence
“So do not be afraid of them, for there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs. Do not be afraid of those who destroy your external well being but cannot touch your inner well being. Rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy your entire well being, both your outer as well as your inner wellbeing in Gehenna [(Annihilation of 70 C.E. by following militaristic messiahs)] Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” Matthew 10:26-30 (Personal translation.)
Here, Jesus is speaking with those whose internalized fear of their oppressors (the Romans) had driven them to also internalize hatred of the Romans and the wealthy Jewish aristocrats who had “sold out” to complicity with the Empire. The Zealots would have only been at one end of the spectrum of those Jesus is speaking to. All across the spectrum of those disgruntled with the system, there were those who believed they could overthrow Rome by taking up the “sword” like Judah Maccabee during the Maccabean revolt. In Matthew 5.38-41, Jesus offers this audience another way. Jesus foresaw that if his people chose the way of violence toward their violent oppressors, that choice would only end in Rome’s annihilation of the Jewish people. This is exactly what transpired in the Jewish-Roman War of 66-69 C.E. that climaxed in Jerusalem’s destruction in 70 C.E. Jesus offered his peers a force more powerful than violence, a force rooted not in hatred of one’s enemies and a desire to defeat them but in love and a desire to transform them. Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence were not passive. They did involve noncooperation in some scenarios and they also included nonviolent direct action, risk, and creative imagination. Both noncooperation and direct action have their appropriate use in nonviolently “seeking” Jesus’ new world (“the kingdom”) and its justice (“righteousness”) for all.
But where all of this must begin is deliverance from fear of those in control of the present “dirty, rotten, system” (Dorothy Day). Jesus is offering a way for us to transcend fear of what others can do to our external realities and be internally immunized against the fear that so often leads to a loss of integrity and an embrace of hatred. This is what Jesus means by destroying one’s body and their “soul” as well. Fear, falsehood, and hate have the power to kill you, internally as well as externally. They produce what I would call a living and enduring hell.
Take a moment and reread the above passage in Matthew 10 with this in mind. We’ll consider Jesus’ words through the works of Thurman in just a moment.
Fear of Isolation, Helplessness, and Insignificance
“Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.” (Luke 12:32)
The adjective here for “little” is mikros. It refers not just to size but also to one’s dignity. By comparing the oppressed to a flock, Jesus is purposely drawing attention to the way that, like sheep, they have been objectified and dehumanized, and are simply part of someone’s else’s net worth. And by referring to them as little flock, he addresses the dignity they lack even among others who are objectified and dehumanized. Little flocks were worth far less than large flocks. Jesus was speaking to the least among the disadvantaged, the lowest among the community of the low.
And Jesus says, “It is to YOU, the little flock among the flocks, that the Heart of the Universe is pleased to give this new world.”
These words of assurance are especially for those who are multiply oppressed in the community of the oppressed. (Modern examples of this would be women of color among White feminists, or transgender people in the LGBT community.)
There is something deeply humiliating and foundationally damaging to the self-respect and personal dignity of those who cannot appeal to anyone for protection from their oppressors.
I want to share three passages from Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited that are relevant: I cannot say it better than Thurman did! I’ll simply share his insight here and have only edited Thurman’s words to make them more gender inclusive.
“There are few things more devastating than to have it burned into you that you do not count and that no provisions are made for the literal protection of your person . . . A person’s conviction that they are God’s child automatically tends to shift the basis of their relationship with all their fellows. They recognize at once that to fear another person, whatever may be that person’s power over them, is a basic denial of the integrity of their very life. It lifts that mere person to a place of pre-eminence that belongs to God and to God alone. Those who fear are literally delivered to destruction.
“To the child of God, a scale of values becomes available by which people are measured and their true significance determined. Even the threat of violence, with the possibility of death that it carries, is recognized for what it is— merely the threat of violence with a death potential. Such a person recognizes that death cannot possibly be the worst thing in the world. There are some things that are worse than death. To deny one’s own integrity of personality in the presence of the human challenge is one of those things . . .
“The core of the analysis of Jesus is that every person is a child of God, the God of life that sustains all of nature and guarantees all the intricacies of the life process itself. Jesus suggests that it is quite unreasonable to assume that God, whose creative activity is expressed even in such details as the hairs of a person’s head, would exclude from God’s concern the life, the vital spirit, of the persons themselves. This idea—that God is mindful of the individual—is of tremendous import in dealing with fear as a disease. In this world the socially disadvantaged person is constantly given a negative answer to the most important personal questions upon which mental health depends: ‘Who am I? What am I?’ The first question has to do with a basic self-estimate, a profound sense of belonging, of counting. If a person feels that he does not belong in the way in which it is perfectly normal for other people to belong, then they develop a deep sense of insecurity. When this happens to a person, it provides the basic material for what the psychologist calls an inferiority complex. It is for a person to have no sense of personal inferiority as such, but at the same time to be dogged by a sense of social inferiority. The awareness of being a child of God tends to stabilize the ego and results in new courage, fearlessness, and power. I have seen it happen again and again.” (Adapted from Howard Thurman’s, Jesus and the Disinherited)
Dr. King spoke on fear and faith this way:
“Now it isn’t easy to stand up for truth and for justice. Sometimes it means being frustrated. When you tell the truth and take a stand, sometimes it means that you will walk the streets with a burdened heart. Sometimes it means losing a job…means being abused and scorned. It may mean having a seven, eight-year-old child asking a daddy, ‘Why do you have to go to jail so much?’ And I’ve long since learned that to be a follower to the Jesus Christ means taking up the cross. And my bible tells me that Good Friday comes before Easter. Before the crown we wear, there is the cross that we must bear. Let us bear it—bear it for truth, bear it for justice, and bear it for peace. Let us go out this morning with that determination.
“And I have not lost faith. I’m not in despair, because I know that there is a moral order. I haven’t lost faith, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. I can still sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ because Carlyle was right: ‘No lie can live forever.’ We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant was right: ‘Truth pressed to earth will rise again.’ We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell was right: ‘Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.’ Yet, that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the bible is right: ‘You shall reap what you sow.’
“With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when the lion and the lamb will lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid because the words of the Lord have spoken it. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all over the world we will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last!’ With this faith, we’ll sing it as we’re getting ready to sing it now. Men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. And nations will not rise up against nations, neither shall they study war anymore. And I don’t know about you, I ain’t gonna study war no more.” (Sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967)
Jesus’ new world of compassion and justice for all is possible. We must, just like Jesus, not lose faith in humanity. Jesus spoke as one who himself belonged to the community of the oppressed, and his way to this new world begins with the call to abandon fear.
All that might follow begins with this. For as perfect love drives out fear, fear also drives out perfect love. And it is love for all, and only love, that compels us to sit at Jesus’ shared table and opens the way to that world where the Heart of the Universe has become the Heart of us all.
HeartGroup Application
- This week, go back and spend some time each day contemplating Jesus’ words in Matthew 6.25-34; Matthew 10.26-30; Luke 12.32.
- Journal your thoughts, your questions, your insights, and your breakthroughs as you engage with these passages every day this week.
- Share your journal insights with your HeartGroup, your shared table, for discussion and feedback.
Here’s to a safer, more compassionate world for us all: many voices, one shared table, one new world. Wherever this finds you this week, keep letting go of fear, living in love, and listening with compassion, till the only world that remains is a world where love reigns.
I love each of you.
I’ll see you next week.
The Seven Last Sayings of Jesus; Part 9 of 9
Part 9 of 9
by Herb Montgomery
The Gospel of an Unstoppable Liberation
“We tell you the good news: What God promised our ancestors he has fulfilled for us, their children, by raising up Jesus.” (Acts 13:32-33)
I want to end this series on the seven last sayings of Jesus, not on Jesus’ execution by the domination systems of his day, but with the reversal and undoing of that execution by the resurrection. This is what the early church proclaimed as the gospel.
Notice that the early church did not preach that Jesus had died to pay a divinely demanded penalty so that you can go to heaven instead of hell when you die. It was not that Jesus had died, but that Jesus had been executed and that his execution had been reversed. Remember that the great Hebrew hope was not of one day becoming some disembodied soul in some far distant heaven. No. The hope of the Hebrew people, that which had been promised to their ancestors, is that the Messiah would come and put right all oppression, violence and injustice.
Salvation, to the early church, was liberation from oppression. And this had been accomplished by God’s resurrection of the one who had been executed by their oppressors.
Notice the following passages.
“And we bring you the good news that what God promised to our ancestors he has fulfilled for us, their children, by raising Jesus…. Let it be known to you therefore, my brothers, that through this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you.” [Liberation and a New Social Order] (Acts 13:23-38)
“You that are Israelites, listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as you yourselves know—this man, given to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power…. This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses…. Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.” (Acts 2:22-36)
“The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our ancestors has glorified his servant Jesus, whom you handed over and rejected in the presence of Pilate, though he had decided to release him. But you rejected the Holy and Righteous One and asked to have a murderer given to you, and you killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. To this we are witnesses.” (Acts 3:12-16)
“Let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, but whom God raised from the dead. This Jesus is ‘the stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone.’” (Acts 4:10-11)
“The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Founder and Healer that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.” (Acts 5:30-32)
“We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day…. He is the one ordained by God as LIBERATOR of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” (Acts 10:36-43)
The good news was not that Rome had executed someone or that someone had died. That happened all the time. The good news was that this Jesus, whose teachings offered such radical hope for a transformed world, and who had been executed by the systems his teachings threatened, had been brought back to life. This Jesus had triumphed over the religious, political and economic systems of their day, for his execution had been reversed!
In this great reversal, a new world had begun. Those systems, even the religious one that had claimed to house “God” at its heart, had been exposed, shamed and shown to be what they truly were.
The Presence was not found to be with them, but with the One they had shamefully suspended on a Roman cross.
What I want you to notice is that what liberates us, what “saves” us, for the early church, was not Jesus’ execution, but his resurrection, the undoing and reversal of Jesus’ execution by the powers, but the solidarity of The Sacred (i.e. “God”), The Divine, not simply with Jesus, but will all that had been, or would be the recipients of Oppression.
“And having disarmed the powers and authorities [i.e. religious, social, economic, and political oppression], a public spectacle of them was made, triumphing over them by him.” (Colossians 2:15)
The Sacred Dream of the Divine is of a different world, here and now, where everybody has enough, not as a product of charity, but as a result of the way the world is put together. The present way of assembling the world has been exposed and shamed by the way it executed Jesus. And it has been rendered impotent. The power by which the present systems subordinate others–using “the fear of death” and the threat of being executed at the hands of the present domination systems, what I call the “do what we say, or else” system–has been triumphed over and made of no more consequence. Through Jesus’ execution by the powers and then being resurrected by The Divine, Jesus has liberated “those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” (Hebrews 2:14-15)
Why Do I Love Easter?
It’s not because of its co-opted pagan roots of celebrating fertility and the rebirth of spring, though I genuinely appreciate both. It’s because this is the one time Christianity remembers, though I think many have forgotten what it means, why Christianity, as a revolution (as opposed to a religion) came into being.
The story of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is of an itinerant teacher from prophetic lineage (just like the prophets of old), who travelled the countryside giving a passionate indictment of the religious, political, economic and social systems of his day and putting on display the beauty of a world assembled in the form of a shared nonhomogenous table where every voice is valued and every story heard. A world where we all, from the varied experiences of life that we each represent, learn together how to integrate our differences into a coherent and meaningful whole.
The old order of things was to be deconstructed. Both the voiceless minorities that had been marginalized to the fringes of their society and the voiceless masses that had been oppressed were to find space at this new shared table. Transformed oppressors and the liberated oppressed were going to have to learn how to sit beside (neither above nor below) one another, recognizing each other as the image of God, both children of the same Divine Parents, welcomed to the same family table.
This was good news to the outsiders, the disadvantaged and the dispossessed. THIS was the gospel! But to insiders, and those in top positions of privilege in the current domination system (the Pharisees, the Priests and the Scribes), this was seen as anything but “good news.”
Jesus’ nonviolent confrontation and disruption of the system in the Temple (Jesus shut it down) was the last straw. Who did he think he was? They had had enough. The priestly aristocracy and the Pharisees combined efforts to manipulate the economic systems of Herod and the political system of Pilate to create a cooperative act of lynching this radical named Jesus.
The torn veil in the temple [1] revealed the Sacred was not dwelling in the most holy places of those institutions, as they claimed. No, the Divine, as was mentioned previously, was dwelling in the One shamefully suspended on a Roman cross at the hands of those combined domination forces. [2]
THIS is the good news: Liberation has come. And it is a liberation that is unstoppable. Yes, for those placed in the position of “last” by the present system this is good news, as they learn how they are to be treated as those who had arrived “first.” And for those who had arrived “first,” well, it is at least problematic as they discover they will now be treated equally with those who had arrived “last.” The point is that each person will be “paid the same,” as the parable teaches, or treated simply as equal. [3]
This liberation could not be stopped. And I dare say, it cannot be stopped today.
They tried to kill it. But even that didn’t work.
I want to close this week with Mark’s telling of the resurrection. Very early versions of Mark’s manuscript ended at Mark 16:8. I want to highlight the value of those manuscripts. Notice the open-ended way that these Jesus stories would have concluded.
“When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, ‘Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?’ But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he said. ‘You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here.’” (Mark 16.2-6)
Then Mark’s gospel ends with:
“Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” (Mark 16:8)
What is the unspoken point Mark is endeavoring to make? What is the impression he is trying to leave?
Just as Luke’s gospel would later do, Mark is whispering, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen! Yes, those in charge killed him—but they couldn’t stop him. They crucified him and buried him in a rich man’s tomb. But imperial lynching and a tomb couldn’t hold him. He’s still loose in the world. He’s still out there, still here, still recruiting people to share, to participate in his mustard seed subversively planted in the garden, his leaven placed within the dough, his pearl of great price revolution toward a radically new social order that he called ‘the Kingdom of God’—a transformed world here and now.”
What Mark is whispering to us is the good news that yes, they killed our Jesus, but… it’s… not… over. This liberation is unstoppable, for it possesses the solidarity of The Divine.
“You killed the author of this way of life, but God raised him from the dead.” — Peter; (Acts 3:15)
HeartGroup Application
- This week as Easter is approaching for the West, take a moment and contemplate what the resurrection actually means for us. Lots of people have been killed for standing up against the status quo. Lots of people have suffered for attempting to dismantle the status quo. But Jesus was one with whom the Divine stood in solidarity and brought back to life.
- I want you, as you are contemplating the resurrection and its meaning, to also ponder what it means to follow this resurrected One. What is the most important thing you could be doing right now to further the work of healing, restoration, transformation, liberation and redemption that this Jesus began here on earth?
- Share what you discover with your HeartGroup.
I want to thank each one of you who has checked in each week for this nine-part series. It is my prayer that you have been inspired and encouraged to put on display, as a community, the beauty of what a world changed by that radical Jesus looks like. And who knows? It may do just that. It may change the world.
I love each of you dearly. And for those of you who will be celebrating Easter this coming weekend, The Lord Is Risen! He Is Risen Indeed!
Keep living in love, loving like Jesus, ’til the only world that remains is a world where Love reigns.
I’ll see you next week.
1. “The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.” (Mark 15:38)
2. “God was in Christ, reconciling the world…” (2 Corinthians 5:19)
3. “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard. About nine in the morning he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did the same thing. About five in the afternoon he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’ ‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered. He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’ The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’ But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” (Matthew 20:1-15)
Follow Jesus, He’ll Ruin Your Life
by Herb Montgomery
And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.—Jesus (Mark 1.17)
The Downward Social Mobility of Following Jesus
I’ve chosen to begin this new year with a fresh contemplation of the Jesus story, specifically Mark’s version. And what has jumped right off the page for me right here in the beginning is the social cost for the two brothers Simon and Andrew and the two brothers James and John in their choice to accept Jesus’ offer of following him. It was typical for itinerant teachers within this culture to be sought out by would-be disciples. Yet in the Jesus story, this cultural norm is turned on its head and the teacher seeks out and chooses his disciples instead.[1]
What we find in this though is counterintuitive. Jesus does not seek out the rich to be his disciples, nor does he seek out the poor. Those whom Jesus seeks out are the very ones in motion. They are the ones who are in movement, engaged in social mobility away from those who would be classified as the poor toward those who would be classified as the rich. Both of these sets of brothers are busy at work in a family fishing business. Few people in Galilee were rich; most were relatively poor. Fishermen tended to fall somewhere in the middle (although these types of distinctions were somewhat fuzzier in Galilee). Yet these were not poor men at all as the family business run by their father was doing well enough to also have “hired help.” This family business was providing income for others, not simply their own family.[2]
These were thriving family businesses where the families involved were, by the mere economic success of their business, moving from one social level to a higher one. Jesus comes to them, in the midst of their success, and asks them to walk away from it all.
The Historically Upward Social Mobility of Christianity
The reason this caught my attention is that too often groups associated with Jesus and the Jesus story are vehicles for upward social mobility rather than downward. I’ll explain. I was born here in economically challenged Appalachia. I grew up with parents, no longer married, who belonged to two very different social classes here. I was being raised by the poorer of the two.
I know firsthand the feelings of looking at social classes above you and longing for means of upward social mobility. I know what it feels like to want to move up the social ladder.
I also was raised within a Christian tradition that here in Appalachia provided that very means of upward social mobility for many. Within two generations, I have watched my family go from uneducated, blue collar workers, to a white collar world and the possession of PhDs—all because of the benefit of being connected to “the church.” And it’s not simply my family either. I’ve witnessed it in other families here in Appalachia where grandpa was an uneducated farmer whose grandkids are well on their way to becoming high paid doctors and lawyers.
What Difference Does It Make?
I’m not attaching moral value to either social direction, but simply drawing attention to the contrast of social mobility directions between the Jesus story and my own experience and observations.
There is a danger though. There is a danger that we will excuse the religious disfunction of our “spiritual” community because our personal lives are economically and socially being improved. In other words, we will resist critiquing our religious community because we feel our lives have been benefited by belonging to that community. We will overlook things such as pragmatic racism, gender exclusion, economic bias, educational favoritism, or queer erasure because we mistakenly think our lives have been improved by being a part of something simply because we ourselves have experienced some level of upward social mobility within a system, the very validity of which following Jesus should cause us to question instead.
One example of economic bias and educational favoritism that I have always been puzzled by since I first noticed it, is that typically, with few exceptions, within many of the churches I visit, there is an unspoken hierarchy between the offices of deacon and elder. Deacons typically are composed of the lesser educated, blue collar workers, while being an elder is an office for those with higher educational as well as economic status. This is alarming to me. Something doesn’t feel right. Not just about the hierarchical nature of the structure, but how that hierarchy is expressed as well.
One has to question first off whether upward social mobility is always a blessing. If it is always a good, then why do we find Jesus calling his disciples to abandon this very thing to move in the opposite direction downward in following him?
Christianity was not always like this. Before Constantine and the making of Christianity into the official religion of the empire, Christianity was a movement among the lower classes of society. They were often (but not always) persecuted by those in power. And to become a Christian, for most within the first three hundred years of the Jesus movement, was a clearly defined decision to embrace a downward social mobility. You were letting go of something socially and economically to follow Jesus during this time, not gaining more. The Constantinian shift changed all of this.
Today we are in danger of drinking the Kool-Aid of white, male-dominated, colonial, imperial, Christianity rooted in a theology defined by those at the top of our social pyramids. Jesus, instead, is offering us the opportunity of drinking the “living water” of critiquing these pyramids themselves.[3]
Jesus did not come offering his disciples a means of upward social mobility from disadvantaged to privileged within the current structure. Jesus came announcing the beginning of an entirely different world where the present structure of privilege and advantage are dismantled, where all injustice, oppression, and violence is put right, a world marked by equity and justice for those oppressed by the current structure.[4]
And this new world began with Jesus interrupting twelve men in their endeavors to climb their respective social and economic ladders and inviting them to rethink everything, to abandon the structuring of the world as they knew it, to embrace a cross rather than a throne, and to follow him.
They would not gain the world they were hoping for, they would lose it. For them, following Jesus would not mean upward social mobility, but a downward one.
It would change everything for these twelve.
And it should be the same for us as well.
Follow Jesus, he’ll ruin your life.[5] Yet it’s a life worth ruining for the sake of others. It’s a life worth throwing away for, as some have labelled it, a life of “holy mischief.” There are greater things to live for than mere upward social mobility within the present structures. Following Jesus today doesn’t mean to simply offer upward mobility to those who are presently being held down within the system. Following Jesus means to abandon the entire social structure itself that privileges some at the cost of disadvantaging and subordinating others. For those of us who are privileged in the present system at the cost of those less privileged, this will mean downward social mobility to an egalitarian new world. And each of us who are presently in the process of moving even further upwards are going to have to answer for ourselves whether or not we will accept that ancient invitation: “Follow me.”
HeartGroup Application
Spend some time this week contemplating what downward social mobility for the sake of others, the Jesus narrative might inspire in you this new year as 2015 begins.
Write down what you discover.
Share with your HeartGroup this upcoming week.
Till the only world that remains is a world where Love reigns, keep living in love and loving like Jesus.
I love each of you & I’ll see you next week.
1. John 15:16—You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.
2. Mark 1:20—Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him.
3. John 4:10—Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”
4. Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. (Is. 1:17)
But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream. (Amos 5:24)
A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching. (Is. 42:3–4)
He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick until he brings justice to victory. (Matt. 12:20)
Justice is understood as fairness, correct treatment, or equitable distribution of resources. The Hebrew prophets (including Jesus) speak of justice as a chief attribute of their God. The Hebrew people were given ethical instructions (to the degree that they could comprehend in expanding stages, which also need to be expanded even more inclusively today) about their treatment of widows, orphans, and strangers; the practice of justice was tied to their mission.
The Hebrew tradition is alive with examples of men and women who brought justice to situations of oppression and injustice. From Deborah, the prophet and judge who administered justice, to the 8th-century prophets who called Israel and Judah to act justly toward the poor and oppressed, to Jesus who demonstrated the centrality of justice through his words and actions.
In the Hebrew tradition, justice is the undoing of situations of oppression or injustice. Justice is rooted in the prophets’ descriptions of their God’s character (Isa. 5:16), which Jesus too made central to his teachings and healing ministry. A central concept for the prophets was that the justice of a community is measured by their treatment of the oppressed (Isa. 1:16–17; 3:15). The prophets continually issued a strong call for the covenant community to recognize their God as the God of justice and to repent of their injustice. Their primary message can be summarized in the words of Mic. 6:8: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
If one goes all the way back to ancient Hebrew lore, their Jubilee tradition in Lev. 25 reflected their God’s demands for justice in the midst of an unjust society. Intended to be observed every 50 years, the Jubilee provided for land to lie fallow (ecological justice) and indentured servants to be set free every seven years (social justice). During the Jubilee Year, debts would be forgiven and lands sold because of indebtedness would be returned to the original owners (economic justice). For agrarian societies like Israel, return of land and forgiveness of debts amounted to economic restructuring of society. Undergirding the Jubilee Year is the principle of redress that corrects past wrongs to approximate equality and restores the human community to wholeness. [We have no record of this even once being practiced but that it was part of their ancient stories is interesting to say the least.]
(Gleaned from B. C. Birch, Let Justice Roll Down; S. C. Mott, Biblical Ethics and Social Change; D. N. Freedman, Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible)
5. I’ve used this phrase for the past four years and my intention is that for most of us, we belong to either a middle or upper class. Following Jesus, for us, is not going to move us further up the pyramid of privilege, but be characterized by throwing all of that away. It was the oppressed who would be “blessed” by Jesus’ new world. For those presently benefited by the present structure the new world that had arrived in Jesus would be problematic, to say the least. (See Luke 6:20–26)
Newton’s Amazingly Inaccurate Grace Myth by Herb Montgomery (Title by Keisha McKenzie)
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me…to set the oppressed free.” — Jesus (Luke 4.18)
I want to thank all of you for the overwhelmingly positive feedback I received from last week’s eSight.
I also want to thank Keisha McKenzie for her timely correction of my comments regarding John Newton. For those who missed our exchange on Facebook, let me share it here.
Keisha pointed out:
“John Newton didn’t turn away from slaving ‘immediately’ after his conversion. He didn’t confess support for abolition for another 40 years. He converted to evangelicalism in 1748. Stopped active trading in 1754 (but only for medical reasons—he had a stroke). And he did not write against the slave trade until 1788. In other words, his private conversion had no impact on his relationship to the slave trade for 4 decades. Christianity switched no lights on for him regarding the relationship of white people and black people. For 40 years.”
Keisha went on to say, “we don’t have that kind of time to wait for the privately pious to become publicly concerned.”
And I agree.
According to historians, John Newton gave up profanity, gambling, and drinking after converting to evangelical Christianity in 1748, but continued to work in the slave trade. Although Newton did say, “I cannot consider myself to have been a believer in the full sense of the word, until a considerable time afterwards” (Out of the Depths, John Newton), what I want you to notice is that while he saw nothing fundamentally wrong with the slave trade for another forty years, the first fruit of his Christian life was in giving up swearing, gambling, and alcohol.I do not fault Newton for this; I fault the type of Christianity that Newton became a convert of. Notice, Newton applied to be ordained as a priest in 1757; studied Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac; was a lay minister, and was finally accepted and ordained in 1764. Mind you, he still would not publicly speak out against the slave trade, of which he had been a part, for another twenty years.
In 1788, Newton published Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade (almost a decade after Newton’s famous hymn, Amazing Grace, was published). He also apologized for “a confession, which … comes too late … It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders” (Bury the Chains, The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery, Adam Hochschild).
Newton later joined William Wilberforce in publicly working to end the African slave trade for the next twenty years. Still, he had privately been a “Christian” in the forty years leading up to this.
In last week’s eSight, I made the statement, “If one is privately a follower of Jesus, then one should publicly be involved in ending systems of oppression and privilege”. How does one privately become a Christian, publicly become a priest in the Church of England, but it takes twenty more years of being exposed to Jesus to publicly come out as believing that there is something fundamentally wrong with treating other humans as lesser beings or items of property?
I can speak somewhat to this, for this, to a degree, is my story too.
Before the night of August 27, 2010, when I encountered Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, I too was reading the Bible through the conventional, domestic lens that had been handed to me by white, evangelical, male-dominated, Christian culture. It was this encounter that marked a beginning for me. There I was, encountering Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount alone in a hotel room after a radio interview on the second largest Christian radio station in America, and feeling as if I was meeting Jesus for the very first time. I want to be clear: This was only a beginning. I’m still discovering ways in which I think and interpret the world around me, ways of reading the Jesus story, that are the product of a conventional, domestic Christianity that serves the purposes of a privileged class rather than Jesus’ New World.
This is a Christianity focused more on post-mortem destinations than on healing the world around us in the here and now. [1]
This is a Christianity intent on escaping this world, judging it as too far gone, instead of following a Jesus who is “making everything new”.[2]
This is a Christianity that directs its devotees toward a private, personal, individual, “spiritual” relationship with God, while neglecting the need to be publicly engaged in confronting oppressive systems and cleansing the modern day “temples” of the privileged.
It’s a Christianity that allows its adherents to live respectable, religiously pious lives, rather than be put on crosses or lynched for standing against the status quo.
It’s a Christianity that doesn’t need the resurrection, because it will never find itself upon a cross.
It will never find itself on trial before the economic (Herod), political (Pilate), or religious (Caiaphas) social structures of the day, in danger of an execution that is being demanded by the democratic majority (the crowd).[3]
It has very little to do with changing the world around us, for it is too preoccupied with “getting off this rock”. It fails to embrace the life-giving truth found in an old Spiritual sung by African slaves under the yoke of their white owners, “I gotta home IN that rock”.
In short, what I’m discovering daily is that I’ve been wrong. As I listen to the theological voices of those who read the Jesus narrative through the lens of oppression (whether it be in matters of race, economics, gender, or orientation), I’m discovering that I’ve been wrong. The Jesus I was worshiping was very different from the one I’m encountering and learning to follow in the stories of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The Jesus I was worshipping conveniently never changed the world of the oppressors who hold their tickets to heaven in one hand and their oppression in the other. In the end, it will not be my white, evangelical background that I will be able to credit. Just like John Newton, this background did not “turn the lights on” for me. When I one day take my place at the Creator’s table, it will be the intersectional lenses of black stories, female voices, queer theologians, and the wisdom of those who walk in our societies without two pennies to rub together, that I will be able to thank for introducing this straight, white, cisgender male preacher to the Jesus of the Jesus narrative.
I still believe that a New World began in the first century.
I still believe that those to whom the announcement of this New World was entrusted allowed themselves to experience a radical change.
To this day, many of their progeny are still unaware that their course has even changed.
Others, while feeling strangely out of place in their own spiritual communities, sense that something has gone wrong and spend their lives trying to rediscover what has been lost.
Others simply feel that it’s all too far gone.
Yet, undeterred, the Spirit has continued to speak in every generation. The New World grows—regardless of creed, race, gender, or orientation—in those who were willing to listen to its whispering.
This holiday season, it strikes me that although much of what I’m discovering in the Jesus narrative is revolutionary to me personally, it is a narrative with a long history among this world’s oppressed. I am discovering a path that not only stretches far ahead of me, but far behind me as well (this is not a path we are called to blaze). This is a pathway that reaches all the way back to the Gospels and has woven its way, not through Imperial Christendom, but along its societal fringes instead. It is also a path that we (especially white Christian males like myself) are being invited to step onto today, so that in humility, we may be taught by those already on this path what it has always, truly meant to follow a liberating Jesus: a Jesus who has been standing all along in solidarity with those at the bottom of our societies.[4]
Happy holidays to each of you this week.
Till the only world that remains is a world where Love reigns;
I’ll see you next week.
1. Luke 9:2—“And he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal the sick.”
2. Rev. 21:5—“He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’”
3. Mark 15.15—Wanting to satisfy the crowd, Pilate released Barabbas to them. He had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified.
4. Luke 6:20-26—“Looking at his disciples, he said: ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets. But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.’”
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