While deeply engaged with the concerns of everyday life such as healing, feeding, and engaging people in matters of justice and community, Jesus offers an alternative vision: one shaped by self-giving love and radical faithfulness to God’s kingdom, rather than by the structures and strategies of empire.
A colonial understanding of resurrection has only associated it with life after death, whereas a decolonial Dalit theology engages with new life experiences by breaking the grounds of death here and now, in life before death.
One alternative to a disorienting retributive hierarchy … is repentance, offered to the living, not the dead. This is the honest acceptance of one’s own sin that leads to a turning from the destructive habits of assigning greater or lesser guilt to others. The activity of repentance, in turn, becomes the basis for the possibility of reconciliation between God and offender, between offender and the offended.
We all experience our own wildernesses in our lives… What we do with the experience is what matters. Do we use it as a foundation to be altruistic in how we live our lives, or do we end up embodying the same mindset of those who hurt us?
The part I find most difficult to accept in Jesus’s teaching from Luke 6 is not the extent of the love he commands, but rather his matter-of-fact acknowledgment that his followers will have enemies.
For those of us who have experienced marginalization, are we confident that God is actively seeking the lost and rejected souls in our communities? And for those of us with social privilege, do we embody this confidence by extending love to those on the margins—the outcast, the silenced, those with no voice or vote?
At best, a community’s accumulated power lies not just in its ability to tear others down but in a desire to use Grace-given resources to affirm what oppression never can – that all are worthy of love, care, life, and dignity.
By reimagining belonging as Jesus did—focusing on relationship rather than societal status—we are called to open the doors of God’s family wide, embracing the diversity of God’s creation with love, dignity, and grace.
In inaugurating this new world through this birth, Luke shows us that God is and will not be bound by these political structures. Joseph went with Mary, but the baby was ultimately born under cover of darkness, nameless, undocumented, and outdoors.
Access to the sacrament of the Eucharist has been weaponized against all those the church deems unworthy, immoral, or in sin. The sacrament that was meant to be a way of knowing and encountering the risen Christ through breaking and sharing of bread has been made into its opposite.
In the face of systemic injustice, it is difficult to hold space for a desire for peace and the knowledge that empires usually outlast the people who protest against them. While it may be tempting to shut down at feelings of powerlessness, the Magnificat gives us another option. We can be like Mary and the generations before her, singing and hoping and praying for change.