Jesus’ call to a ‘let-it-be righteousness,’ awash in basileia imperatives, upends despotic designs. Resistant to rule-following, a let-it-be righteousness confounds and dismantles the 3 P’s of oppressive regimes: propriety, purity, and piety.
The joy of Christmas is always mixed up with the grief of the world’s suffering. One need only look today at the very town the magi came to visit.
All human beings (including me) are capable of dehumanizing others. Moreover, all dehumanizers (including Jesus) can change their minds.
Perhaps the tension between honest reading and creative liberatory “misinterpretation” should not be solved at all but rather retained as an unsettling force in our work.
The third slave, as truth-teller and whistle-blower, validates what Jesus’ listeners know about their reality. They know that the deck is stacked against them, if they choose to buck the system.
Christian nationalism is a form of superstition. It is superstitious because, instead of appealing to the God of all nations, it appeals to a culturally fabricated God for cultural privilege, power, and benefits.
Jesus’ parable identifies chosenness in those who resist, dissent, protest and refuse the invitations of the empire.
If we are willing to listen to those standing around without work, however, a new possibility emerges. Why are they standing around without work? “Because no one has hired us,” they reply (Matthew 20:7). They aren’t lazy, they’re desperate enough to stand around all day waiting for work. The laborers are many; the jobs are few.
We all learn ways of negotiating life from our histories, families, religions, and our broader society. These passages suggest that some of what we learn can be deadly to our siblings and our neighbors, but we can explore different visions of God and abandon the toxic ways of thinking that are so often deeply embedded in our world.
Given the precarious nature of the planet we call home, the need for a scandalous and subversive kingdom animated by the Spirit of God, which advocates justice, mercy, compassion, and healing to the creation, couldn’t be more urgent.
The pairing of Jesus’s celebrated entry into Jerusalem with the story of his Passion by many churches this Sunday presents a kind of emotional whiplash. It offers a warning to how we treat the prophets and revolutionaries of our own time.
Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount unsettles many biblicist ways of understanding Scripture. It may even be better to move from speaking of ‘the Scriptures’ as a noun, to speaking of ‘Scripturing’ as a verb.