Flipping the Scales

John 2:13-22

13 The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. 15 Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. 16 He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” 17 His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” 18 The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” 19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The Jews then said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?” 21 But he was speaking of the temple of his body. 22 After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

Nature has brought certain combinations together, like two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom in a water molecule or chocolate and peanut butter, that we can confidently assert that they were meant to be soul mates. On the other hand, there are also things in this world that simply do not and should not go together, like: Pineapples on pizza or work on a Monday morning. I think today’s passage places the marriage of wealth and faith in the latter category. Jesus’ dramatic outrage in the temple is in direct response to the economic activity being carried out in the name of God. Perhaps the most volatile and dangerous of combinations, even more so than pineapple pizza, is when the unlimited power of our divine imaginings reacts with the greed of exploitive economics. Such a compound is capable of producing a vicious machine that spirals beyond our control until it begins to exploit its very creators. It was this kind of machine that we find Jesus confronting in the temple, for profiteering machines are an unholy affront to the communal love of the Triune God. In the words of Mario Savio, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

Jesus enters the temple not as the crucified one we are often inclined to imagine but rather as the revolutionary who must stop the machine. It’s probably worth noting here that there isn’t a crucified Christ without Christ the revolutionary. While John places the scene earlier in Jesus’ ministry, Matthew, Mark, and Luke have placed the scene right before Jesus’ journey into Jerusalem, the place where he is arrested, flogged, and crucified for subversion. John adds the provocative detail of Jesus making the claim that He would rebuild the temple in three days after it is destroyed. For all the reasons that Jesus may have been crucified, we should remember, at the very least, that he hangs on a Roman cross because he drove the religious establishment from the seat of their power: the Jerusalem temple.

There are a couple possible explanations for Jesus’ disruptive action in the temple. The first explanation is the idolatrous exchange of foreign currency. For those paying for the sacrifice of Passover, the currency was to be paid in silver or its value. As Jews were only permitted to mint coins in bronze or copper, it was more convenient to use a different type of currency. Rather than use Roman coins, which were used to pay taxes to the empire, Jews of this time opted to use the silver shekel of Tyre, which was an autonomous mint. However, although the Tyrian coinage was more expedient, it also bore the head of the god Melkart on one side and the Tyrian eagle on the other. Thus, devout Jews had no choice but to use the silver shekel of Tyre, a symbol of pagan religion, to pay for their Passover sacrifice. In other words, a foreign god had been introduced into the temple, the Jewish holy place.

Further, it is also possible that Jesus’ actions can be viewed as a response to new Temple practices that were inherently exploitive. It is possible that the Temple authorities had introduced the new practice of selling animals in the Temple in order to generate more revenue. The additional revenues would have been directed towards the costs of running the Temple or the completion of its construction. Thus, we see that pious Jews, who were no doubt predominantly among the impoverished of their society, were being taken advantage of in order to complete Herod’s building of the Temple.

Whether it is idolatry or exploitation, Jesus charges the vendors and money changers of turning God’s house into a marketplace of impersonal transaction. Elsewhere, Jesus accuses them of turning God’s house into a “den of thieves.” Amy-Jill Levine notes that this slight is to indicate that the Temple has become a place where thieves and robbers feel comfortable. She writes, “A den of thieves is not where robbers rob; it is a place where robbers go after their crimes to count and stash their loot. The modern analogy would be a thief who enters church on a Sunday morning, puts stolen money into the collection plate, and feels reconciled to God and community.” Jesus is enraged that the house of God, the place where God’s abundance and mercy are celebrated, has been turned into a shopping cart full of commodities and capital.

If Jesus was enraged then, I wonder how he would react today if he happened to slip in the back door of one of a church’s eight satellite campuses or a football stadium of young Christians summoning the name of God through heavy smoke and blinding lights. While I can’t say for sure, it is certainly possible that the alliance of faith and wealth has only gotten stronger since the days Jesus flipped tables in the temple. We find ourselves subjected to the exploitation and economic power of churches who are often more concerned with Financial Peace University than they are the Prince of Peace. In our American economy, it isn’t always easy to discern whether any given Christian institution has arranged its life for the accumulation of more assets and capital or whether it has arranged its life for the adoration of the crucified Christ. But this is the reality of the imperial economics that have almost always directed the American empire’s domestic and foreign policy.

In his book The Enchantments of Mammon, Eugene McCarraher argues, “…neoliberals seek to remake the state – and everything else – into the image and likeness of the market. Aiming to refashion not only the state but also the moral and metaphysical imagination as well, neoliberals elevated the market to a position of absolute ontological sovereignty. At the same time, if evangelicals called on the Christian God to sustain ontological legitimacy of capitalism, American neoliberals represented an elusive repudiation of the jeremiad tradition. Neoliberals realized that a beloved community could not be built on capitalist property; but rather than reject the property relations, they renounced and maligned the hope of community…In the neoliberal theology of the market, the world is a business and money is the measure of all things” (591).

If this is our reality and the water we all swim in, then we have to realize that flipping tables and driving out our corporate money changers will be much harder than we had imagined. It should come as no surprise that our churches have remade themselves in the image of neoliberal economics. It’s hard to imagine that our life together is in anyway salvific for the life of the world if the economics we condone and champion are extracting and exploiting every corner of the globe as we speak. This realization was one of the toughest to accept as I began to consider what it means to be a follower of Christ. In my experience, Christian discipleship is often defined by how we can be nicer and more respectable consumers. For example, at one point my Sophomore year of high school, I remember wearing a “Christian” t-shirt every day of the week in order to prove that I was unashamed of the Gospel, completely on par with my 116 Clique car decal that publicized my admiration for Lecrae and Trip Lee. While it’s easy for me to look back now and chuckle at my “Jesus Freak” phase, I believe this is exactly the kind of moral and ethical imagination that most American Christians possess. The House of God has become nothing more than another place of business for us to buy and sell our social capital. But our consumeristic practices turned Christian isn’t the worst of our problems. Rather, we must deal with the fact that our desecration of God’s House with our commodities and performances has given divine legitimacy to an economic order that literally must crush our bodies and communities in order to survive.

In the words of Katie Geneva Cannon, “The form of Christianity shaped by obeisance to economic interests of a capitalist system is a new form of Christianity, one that legitimates exploitation. This type of exploitive religious rationale accommodates to all sorts of social ruthlessness so long as profits increase. Christianity conflated to the dominant system invariably rejects the claim that the essence of the gospel mandate is liberation of the oppressed. Instead, a form of capitalist Christianity combines defense of the sanctity of the economic system with racial and theological conformity. Such Christianity separates the spiritual person from the bodily person and calls on people to be spiritual and avoid politics. The freedom and radical human equality professed in early Christian proclamations are assimilated into the propagation of a capitalist worldview…Thereby the church sanctions and stabilizes the mundane interests of the ruling class.”

Although we may be the working class whose labor is appropriated against our wills, our unwillingness to see the capitalist class, and its mechanisms of control and exploitation, in the light of God’s good news to the poor is an indictment of our own tendencies to reduce God’s kingdom to a nonprofit dispensing charity and band aids. While it may not be less than, the Kingdom of God is certainly more than merely supporting the poor with the profits of our tables. The Kingdom of God is about the reversal of this world’s practices and values until we recognize the House of God as a house of prayer and communion once again. The One who turned over tables and drove out money changers continues to call the people of God towards justice, equity, and mutuality. Thus, there is no cause for celebration if the poor finally get a drip of assistance in trickle-down economics, especially while the rich and powerful still feast on the misappropriation of God’s name.

The American empire may attempt to atone for its sins by placing “In God We Trust” on its sacrificial offering to Mammon, but we resist this idolatry and exploitation by confessing that God has become flesh in the life and person of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the temple of God where God has come to dwell with us. No longer can God’s name be put on the inequality, hoarding, and greed of this nation. God’s very being has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ, who enacts the revolution of flipping social hierarchies and cleansing our own temples for their proper use: Love.

Friends, we are those who confess Jesus as Lord. We are those apostles commissioned to bring good news to the mission fields of church and world alike. Our political leaders, both blue and red, as well as our corporate plutocracy seems content living in a “One Market Under God” kind of society. Yet they have failed to realize that capitalism creates its own gravediggers. Our vocation as those called to flip unjust tables is to assist capital, and its brutalities, into the grave where God may resurrect a new world from its ashes. In this work, we bring the good news that salvation can be found, even in this country, if we tear down the marketplaces of profiteering and follow Christ into the House of God where love and compassion are the only currency. Amen.

BENEDICTION

In a world where there are tables needing to be flipped and graves needing to be dug, may God grant us the courage to do the work of justice and love as if a different world were possible. 

Can Anything Good Come from Nazareth?

John 1:43-51

43 The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” 44 Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. 45 Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” 46 Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” 47 When Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him, he said of him, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” 48 Nathanael asked him, “Where did you get to know me?” Jesus answered, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” 49 Nathanael replied, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” 50 Jesus answered, “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.” 51 And he said to him, “Very truly, I tell you,  you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

I remember the first time I realized I was from central Appalachia and not somewhere else. Of course, I knew our hollers had no skyscrapers or concrete jungles, but I’m talking about the first time that someone pointed out to me that I couldn’t sound “proper” even if I tried. I remember attending a basketball camp at a local high school when I was a kid and one of my fellow campers wasn’t quite understanding what I was explaining. While I don’t really remember the topic of the conversation, I do remember him asking me why I kept saying “Not.” It didn’t take long for me to realize that every time I said “Night” (N-I-G-H-T) he kept hearing “Not” (N-O-T). When I realized why he was confused, I blushed in embarrassment because I apparently was speaking in such a way that gave the impression that I wasn’t very smart. In my small little world, I didn’t know that other people talked differently and that other ways of talking was somehow perceived as superior to my own. This was the first time I felt like a hillbilly, but it was not the last. Most of the vacations my family has taken, someone without fail usually asks us where we are from and requests we keep saying things “because they could listen to us all day.” Certainly, these experiences aren’t the epitome of what I would define as oppression, actually far from it, but they remind me that my roots were planted in Nazareth, where supposedly nothing good can grow.

 I’m reminded every time my mom says “worsh cloth” instead of “wash cloth” or my uncle lights a “far” instead of a “fire” that what the world defines as normative determines much of our social hierarchy. Although in many ways my kinfolk are your typical middle-class family, they are often told implicitly that they aren’t much more than dumb hillbillies without college degrees or a means of social mobility. It’s within this context that Nathanael’s words have cut sharp over the years as I tried to rehabilitate the Appalachia out of my words and thinking. Few things cut us as deeply as the messaging that convinces us that who we are is not worthy or beautiful or desirable. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that our culture is hooked by the pull of curated images and unrealistic mirages as we attempt to be seen as the type of people that naturally exude beauty and grace. I think often without our permission, our insecurities of who we should be overwhelm the truth of our own goodness to the point that we dress ourselves up in conformity and respectability until we no longer recognize who we are.

In her book The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown writes, “If we want to live and love with our whole hearts, and if we want to engage with the world from a place of worthiness, we have to talk about the things that get in the way – especially shame, fear, and vulnerability.” (36) Nathanael’s question to Philip drips of insecurity as he is seemingly trying to imply that his story and his place are at least average, probably even decent, because thank God he isn’t a dejected deplorable from Nazareth. There is no reason to expect that the Messiah of whom Moses and the Prophets had spoken would come from Nazareth of all places. Nathanael seems to make the same assumption, one that we often do as well, in that we expect power and authority to be found in capitols and imperial centers of consolidated strength, not in the forgotten hills and hollers of the weak. But little does he know that the good-for-nothing Nazarene of which he is told, is the eternal Word of God through which all things were made.

This is already a cool story because Jesus somehow knows that Nathanael was sitting under a fig tree before Philip invites him to meet Jesus. But I think the most interesting thing in this passage is the fact that Jesus doesn’t feel the need to defend himself to someone who doubts his goodness and identity. Jesus knows who he is and he is quite comfortable being God’s Beloved, even in the face of those who would say otherwise. He shows us that when we accept our own beauty and goodness, in the very person God created us to be, then we don’t have to seek affirmation and acceptance from other people. In the words of Bell Hooks, “It is silly, isn’t it, that I would dream of someone else offering me the acceptance I was withholding from myself.”

Jesus is radically free to fulfill and embody the will of God because he has accepted for himself the love we attempt to solicit from others. Rather than play into the Nathanael’s projected insecurities, Jesus greets him with a compliment. There is something about being able to fully accept one’s own beauty and goodness that frees them and enables them to name the beauty and goodness in others, without the burden of overcompensating. It’s by our willingness to be completely vulnerable and authentic in who we are called to be that we offer others the permission they need to be completely vulnerable and authentic as well.

This is how I define discipleship. Rather than the work of discipleship being a marketing campaign where we pressure others into becoming something they aren’t, I think discipleship is the simple invitation to “come and see” the beauty of Christ that allows us to accept and live into the beauty of our own souls. Thus, making disciples is less about the work of making others conform to a specific understanding of holiness and more about accompanying each other in the process of more fully identifying the beauty and goodness of Christ that already resides within each of us. For when we identify the One in whom heaven and earth have collapsed into a single life, we are given the gift of seeing the world and our lives in light of Heaven’s beauty.

One of my favorite textbooks from divinity school is a book called Bridge to Wonder by Cecilia González-Andrieu, and I think her perspective is worth quoting at length. She argues:

“In the practice of seeing and then imagining in love, humanity is given something – an insight, a yearning for, and a willingness to work toward a better, truer, and more beautiful life. The prophetic is generally understood more readily as a call to repentance, but when we look at the terms of seeing and imagining joined in love we can see it more dynamically as a call for life-affirming transformation. Once we see, we must care … It becomes difficult to right wrongs if we hold nothing sacred, because we are unable to find beauty in anything, and thus unable to care. Without an ability to recognize the truly beautiful, we cannot mourn its absence, and thus, wrong or sin becomes difficult to identify, let alone oppose. Finding something very beautiful is to have it awaken love in us.” (36)

Just as Nathanael is awakened to the God of love in his encounter with Jesus, I believe we, too, are awakened to the beauty and wonder of love such that it melts away our inhumanity. In other words, following Jesus is less about becoming gods and more about becoming more fully human. The salvific nature of the incarnation is that we are presented with the embodiment of eternal love and beauty in the life of Jesus Christ…and when we cast our eyes upon all that he is, we cannot help but to long for that love and beauty to flood our pained existence.

This is what Jesus means when he tells Nathanael that he will see heaven opened and angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. Much as Jacob’s ladder connected Heaven and earth, it is now in the person of Christ where heaven and earth become one. Beauty and love are now no longer virtues to be imagined, but rather, they are a person to meet, trust, and follow. The Word becomes flesh in John’s prologue to make sense of people willingly accepting the invitation to follow a poor, Jewish rabbi all over Palestine. But I suspect they realized that following Jesus was not only about following a wise teacher, but it was more so about following embodied Beauty and Love into the path of their own healing.

Beauty heals us because it reminds us that we were not made to accept the ugliness of dehumanization. Love restores us because it reminds us that we were never meant to normalize fear and insecurity. The incarnation has given us permission to love the beauty that we find within us, even if it’s not considered normative or popular. I figured if God can choose an eccentric place like Nazareth as an acceptable birthplace for the Messiah, then surely I can be a proud Appalachian hillbilly who tends to draw out his vowels, sometimes to the point of others’ confusion. But I also hope my LGBTQ siblings also see that they are good regardless of those who claim being queer is some disease to be cured. I hope my black and brown siblings see just how beautiful they are even as our culture continues to idolize and perpetuate the cruelty of racism. I hope my fellow comrades working for minimum wages and no rest believe that they are worth more than the possessors of capital could ever pay them. Friends, we do not have to exhaust ourselves trying to prove our belovedness. May we follow Christ into the beauty of our own souls, and there will we find the freedom to simply invite those who oppress and dehumanize us to come and see the beauty of Christ that they have so long hoped to find. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Our benediction is the poem from Mary Oliver called “Wild Geese”

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Amen.

With the Smell of Sheep

John 10:11-18
11 “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. 12 The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. 13 The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. 14 I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, 15 just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. 16 I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. 17 For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. 18 No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.”

The stories we tell in order to make sense of our lives matter a great deal. Each of us have imagined ourselves as characters in some particular story, specifically a story that gives meaning and purpose to our existence. Our goals, desires, and convictions shape the contours of a narrative that reassure us that what we do and who we are is good and beautiful. We often capture the meditations of our hearts by assigning titles or labels to ourselves as identity markers, a simple way to inform others of the story, or stories, that are dictating what kind of characters we hope to be. For instance, I inherited a story in the form of a name. In naming me “Hunter,” my parents were simply passing along a generational narrative of family (The Taylor’s and Greene’s), traditions (like fighting eggs at Easter), and place (the beautiful mountains of Appalachia). My name serves as my own identity marker that indicates to others that I have not appeared in a vacuum but rather from other stories that have converged into my own.

Another example is found in my vocational identity as a minister. When I identify as a minister, I am, of course, signaling that I have certain professional duties and obligations, but my title also serves to communicate that my own life story is only intelligible within the story of a particular church, in my case Jubilee Baptist, whose story is only intelligible within the story of Christianity and the universal church, whose story is only intelligible within the story of Jesus, whose story is only intelligible within the story of Israel, whose story is only intelligible within the story of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. All this is to say that we aren’t just random individuals flying around performing random acts. Rather, we are characters who learn to be and act in the world only by adopting shared stories that tie us to other characters in a community such that we are able to discern who we are individually.

So when Jesus self-identifies as “I am the good shepherd,” what story is he telling in order to make sense of his own life and ministry? It’s at least probable that Jesus is reinterpreting the story of Israel, particularly the story of Israel’s shepherds, in order to make a claim about who he is and what he came to do. Such a reference can be found in Ezekiel 34:1-4, which reads, “The word of the Lord came to me: 2 Mortal, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel: prophesy, and say to them—to the shepherds: Thus says the Lord God: Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? 3 You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. 4 You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them.”

Not all stories generate meaning or purpose for us. Some stories serve as counter narratives through which we understand what kind of characters we don’t want to be. So when Jesus says he is the “Good Shepherd,” he is making the claim that he is the one who will fulfill the narrative expectations placed upon the shepherds of Israel. Unlike those of the past, Jesus will be a shepherd who will not only feed the sheep and tend to their wounds, but he is the one who will even lay down his own life for the sheep. The passage from Ezekiel portrays an image of shepherding rooted in the exploitive practices of extracting value and resources from the sheep for personal gain, perhaps not all that different from the ways that many pastors are trained today to extract money, emotions, and social capital from their congregants. However, Jesus challenges the very notion that such practices should even be considered remotely pastoral by identifying as the Good Shepherd. In other words, Jesus seems to be arguing that one cannot identify as a good shepherd unless they are willing to lay down their own life in solidarity with the sheep.

Before we go any further, it is important to note just how much influence this particular story about sacrifice can have on other stories we tell to make sense of God, our faith, and justice. For instance, when Nancy Pelosi held a press conference after Derek Chauvin’s guilty verdict to thank George Floyd for “sacrificing [his] life for justice,” she is attempting to tell a particular story of justice in which lives need to be sacrificed for the greater good. Rather than admit that George Floyd was senselessly murdered by a government employee paid to protect and serve the citizenry, Pelosi elected to reframe Floyd’s death as an atoning sacrifice gifted to the public for the advancement of American justice and equality.

As outlandish as Pelosi’s comments were, they derive from the same stories of atonement that Christians often tell about Jesus and his willingness to lay down his life for the sheep. For many in Western Christianity, when they read that Jesus has willingly died on his own accord for the sake of the Father, they immediately construct a salvific story about how we are saved from God’s wrath by Jesus’ sacrificial death. This particular atonement story argues that the crucifixion, in all its gory brutality, fulfilled the proportionate punishment Christ must endure from God in order to save humanity. Within this understanding of atonement and salvation, Christ is our substitution, who receives the full weight of God’s wrathful vengeance so we don’t have to.

The stories we tell in order to make sense of our lives matter a great deal because there are consequences for believing some stories and not others. It is important we realize that the story we tell about Jesus and his death has all sorts of implications for how we live in the world as well as for what we are willing to accept as normative. Historically, the story of Jesus laying down his life for the sheep has been used to justify all kinds of violence and suffering. I mean if God is willing to kill God’s own son as a means of securing eternal salvation for all humanity, then what atrocity couldn’t be justified as an advancement of the common good? There is a reason many Americans are okay asking their 18-year-olds to “pay the ultimate price” for the sake of a greater cause. There is a reason many accept the death penalty as a means of protecting the wider public from dangerous threats. There is a reason people justify slavery, genocide, and inhumane working conditions as long as it develops the American economy. All these examples reveal that we are far too comfortable tolerating the suffering of others as long as some greater good is accomplished.

However, if we look at today’s text closely, I think we will see that Jesus’ willingness to lay down his life for the sheep reveals that an alternative story of sacrifice and salvation is at work here, at least it is an alternative to American justice usually defined by retribution, prisons, executions, and militarized policing. First, we must note that Jesus says he has the power to lay down his life and take it up again. He is no powerless victim. He is God who has chosen the vulnerability, fragility, and weakness of human existence. He is sure to remind us that whatever death he dies for the sheep, he does so of his own accord. Thus, we must reject any interpretation of this passage that justifies the suffering and death of those who truly are victims of powerlessness in the name of some greater good. In other words, this is not a passage encouraging the sheep to accept their place on sacrificial tables. It is a passage that affirms the power of the Good Shepherd to overcome those who seek to devour the sheep.

Second, we can observe that Jesus is willing to lay down his life for the sheep because of his proximity and compassion for the sheep. It is the hired hand, whose only concern in shepherding is compensation, who runs at the first sight of trouble. But the Good Shepherd sticks with the sheep to ward off danger. In a world that rewards the greedy appetites of lions, tigers, and bears, the Good Shepherd assumes the vulnerability of the sheep, not to die in their place, but rather to suffer with them if need be. I think a good way to label this risky behavior is compassionate solidarity. The Shepherd does not feed himself to the wolves as a sacrifice because that would leave the sheep defenseless. Instead, the Shepherd stands in solidarity with the powerless sheep, willingly accepting the consequences of positioning himself in a place of weakness. Yet, it is precisely because of the Good Shepherd’s power and privilege, not his weakness and victimization, that he is able to assume the place of weakness with the sheep in order to fend off the vicious wolves. Jesus is teaching us that we have no right to demand the lives or sacrifice of those who already live in a state of marginalization. If anyone is expected to risk their life, it should be those whose social location enables them to do so without fear of social obliteration. In other words, the Good Shepherd is willing to die for the sheep precisely because he is also the Lion of Judah.

This image of Shepherd becoming sheep, of power becoming weakness, of God becoming flesh is what, I think, the salvific work of Jesus is all about. Our atonement story is not one of sacrifice but one of solidarity. Julian of Norwich explains this beautifully in her work Revelations of Divine Love. She writes, “When Adam fell, God’s son fell, because of the true union made in heaven, God’s son could not leave Adam, for by Adam I understand all men. Adam fell from life to death into the valley of this wretched world, and after that into hell. God’s son fell with Adam into the valley of the Virgin’s womb, in order to free Adam from guilt in heaven and in earth; and with his great power he fetched him out of hell.” As humanity falls towards death, Christ falls into Mary’s womb so that he may be with us. Similarly, as the sheep fall into danger, the Good Shepherd falls to our defense. Suffering is not a virtuous good or a noble goal, but it is often the result of compassionate solidarity. This is the salvific message of the cross.

Jesus is the Good Shepherd because he lives and dies, in the words of Pope Francis, “with the smell of the sheep.” Christ offers us a picture of justice that is not punitive but compassionate. Justice, which I define as the right ordering of relationships, is accomplished when we live in solidarity with those who are marginalized, oppressed, and rejected…when we live with the “smell of the sheep.” 1 John 3:16-18 tells us as much. It reads, “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us – and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s good and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”

In this moment of history, I think we have failed if we are not asking how we may use our good, our resources, and our privilege to help our neighbors in need. I’ve noticed that Divinity School has taught me much about analyzing and theologizing about the plight of sheep, but if I may be honest, it has done very little in teaching me how to contract the smell of sheep. I suspect this is because institutions that were built off the backs of the marginalized, institutions like Duke, much of Western Christianity, and the United States of America, have a hard time imagining what their life would look like if they chose solidarity over sacrifice. If it is true that we protect what we value and police what we don’t, then it isn’t unreasonable to assume that we don’t have a clue what our country would look like if it was ordered to prioritize people rather than sacrifice them for profits. Realizing the aspirations of this country, aspirations of justice and equality, becomes more and more unlikely as it seems the powers that be are entirely willing and ready to deploy the National Guard against its own citizens but completely unwilling to feed, clothe, and shelter them. 

Such neglect of vulnerable populations is what we call institutional violence. Not all enemies of the sheep come showing their teeth and growling like wolves. Sometimes, the sheep’s enemies are the very systems that make it easier for wolves to devour them, and here in the US, the cards are not exactly stacked in favor of those who live under the constant threat of violence. While we celebrate the fact that institutional violence no longer manifests itself as chattel slavery, public lynchings, and the like, we must also lament the fact that institutional violence will always adapt and mutate to accommodate whatever social prejudices and fears that remain.

In her observations of the culture that enabled and encouraged public lynchings, Womanist theologian Angela Sims helps us consider why racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and xenophobia are able to persist today, although they take varying forms. She writes, “In these lynchings, men gathered with boys at the foot of the cross to participate in a tradition that reflected that their sense of personhood was shaped by learned behavior that was intricately connected to the vile dehumanization of someone deemed less than human…White males gathered to participate in a sacrificial ritual condoned by members of the respective communities. Lynching spectators gathered to perpetuate a practice whose existence depended on the passing down of hatred from one generation to the next. They lynched because they could, without fear of retaliation, kill at will.”

When the stories of our identities are birthed from the cultural stories of insecurity and fear, we necessarily dehumanize others in order to secure our own sense of self-worth. But what does social insecurity have to do with the Good Shepherd? I would argue that the Good Shepherd, through his solidarity with powerless sheep, exposed the social fears and insecurities of his own day, ultimately leading to his crucifixion. Similarly, because people of color force white people to deal with their own self-hatred, because women force men to deal with their feelings of inadequacy, because LGBTQ folks force homophobes to deal with their fear of vulnerability, because the poor force the rich to deal with their loneliness, the sheep continue to face the brute force of an insecure empire. Although we perhaps see crucifixion and public lynchings as barbaric practices of the past, we would do well to recognize that the very fears and insecurities that crucified Christ and normalized lynchings are still the same motivations behind the disproportionate killing of black and brown bodies at the hands of police officers, behind the increase of anti-trans legislation, behind the efforts of powerful corporations to squash workers’ attempts at unionizing, and behind the campaign donations to politicians who knowingly resist the fight for better wages, healthcare, or education.

In the words of James Cone, “[Christ] was crucified by the same principalities and powers that lynched black people in America. Because God was present with Jesus on the cross and thereby refused to let Satan and death have the last word about his meaning, God was also present at every lynching in the United States… Every time a white mob lynched a black person, they lynched Jesus. The lynching tree is the cross in America. When American Christians realize that they can meet Jesus only in the crucified bodies in our midst, they will encounter the real scandal of the cross.”

If it is true, as I believe it is, that we can only meet Jesus in the crucified bodies in our midst, then we can’t expect to follow the Good Shepherd unless we emit the smell of sheep, which is perhaps more unpleasant than we’d like to admit. But we don’t really love the oppressed until we stand in solidarity with them. We don’t really stand in solidarity with the oppressed until we are proximate with them. And we aren’t proximate with the oppressed until we suffer with them.

Friends, what if Jesus died, not as an atoning sacrifice for a God thirsty for blood, but rather because God will always run to the places where the sheep are hurting or in danger? What if Jesus was crucified as a lamb led to the slaughter because that’s exactly where he could be with his sheep? Good shepherds lay down their lives for the sheep, even if the sheep are nailed to crosses. We do not carry our crosses because suffering is good or noble or respectable. Rather, we carry our crosses, laying down our lives by our own accord, because that is the only way we can be with those who are exploited, neglected, and forgotten. Our crosses are simply the result of our solidarity with the hurting. Solidarity may lead to suffering, but if we suffer in Christ’s name, we know that our lives are marked by the love and justice of God’s beloved community. In a world that routinely sacrifices sheep for political power and economic expansion, to reek of sheep is the work of God. Thus, to lay down our lives in abandonment of social respectability, security, and power is to take it up again with Christ, who will wipe away our every tear.

Judgment Day

Matthew 25:31-46

Jesus said, “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’ Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

This passage contains one of the very first Bible verses I ever committed to memory as a young 5-year-old, for it was the verse that I heard over and over and over again for every alter call – “Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’” – I’m not sure that I could read yet, but I did understand that it was better to be a sheep than a goat. I knew Jesus was good and the devil was bad. I knew eternal life was better than eternal punishment, and I knew Heaven was the home of the saints while Hell was the prison of sinners.

All these decisions loomed large in my young imagination. It seemed as if my soul rested on the dualism of a ‘Yes or No’ question. My ‘No’ to God would mean an eternal ‘No’ to my innate desires for love and acceptance. On the other hand, my ‘Yes’ to God represented such a small investment in exchange for the promise of not being eternally tortured at the hands of an angry God. When life, as well as eternity, was portrayed as one large dichotomy between the Good and the Evil, it didn’t take long for me to decide that I’d prefer to live in the certainty of self-righteousness rather than live with the risk of being surprised at the day of judgment.

As you know, I did, indeed, learn to read, and as a teenager trying to prove myself as one of the ‘good ones’ by reading my Bible religiously, I came across this passage for the first time on my own terms. I immediately recognized the verse that had framed so much of the world for me, but the verses surrounding it were completely foreign. The verse that had justified my belief in a God who left behind the ‘bad ones’ of our world seemed to actually be about the judgment of those who had left behind their hurting neighbors.

I don’t know if you remember the first time the foundations of your faith were shaken, but mine came when I read a passage of red letters on eternal punishment and they didn’t affirm what I already knew to be true about who was good and who was bad. I found myself in an identity crisis as a self-proclaimed Christ follower because all the spaces I had been looking for Jesus, like church, revivals, and youth retreats, were not listed as the places Jesus spent most of his time. Even worse, Jesus didn’t seem to be spending much time in places anyways…because he was with people who were without a place. And there I sat, a decade after I first came across these words, holding the broken pieces of a worldview built by the security and comfort of dualistic judgments.

The element of surprise has a way of shattering dichotomies that statistics and rational arguments never can. God seems content with letting us assume as much as we want about the world and ourselves just to remind us that Her love and power lie just beyond our certainty. Of course, we should expect nothing different on the Day of Judgment. Matthew 25, I would argue by conservatives and progressives alike, has a way of revealing our tendency to resort to our need for personal validation that we are good, and “they” are bad. What seems like a polarizing passage of sheep and goats, left and right’s, and good and bad’s, turns out to be a story dripping in complexity and surprise. A story about God’s future judgment turns out to actually be about our present judgments. A story about a King coming in his glory turns out to actually be about those with no power at all. A story about recognizing Christ as Lord turns out to actually be about not being able to recognize him at all.

A story as apocalyptic as this one, with its images of separation, fire, and judgment, is not meant to scare us, in my opinion, but rather surprise us. It is difficult not to read this passage and leave it reflecting on what truly matters in this life. What is morality? What counts as righteousness? While we aren’t given answers here, we are given hints that righteousness is perhaps more about solidarity than respectability. Saying the right things, scratching the right backs, and voting the right way may be a good way of securing a reputation as good, or even “Christian,” amongst our peers, but it doesn’t seem to be the way to cultivate a relationship Christ. In actuality, it seems as if the more intimate we become with a world that exalts the few and oppresses the many, the more we distance ourselves from Christ.

However, this isn’t some mandate for volunteering at Thanksgiving Day soup kitchens or dropping off used clothes to the Salvation Army. In other words, this story isn’t Christ providing us yet another check list with which to measure our own self-righteousness, even for us who are particularly generous with our yearly surplus. No, this story is about the denial of relationship. It is an indictment of the lives and institutions ordered in such a way as to maintain the suffering of human beings in exchange for the hoarding of wealth, property, and power. It is a warning to those who choose highways of backed-up cars waiting on food and water for their families over an end to hunger and scarcity. It is a warning to those who label the strangers and immigrants among us as “illegal aliens” yet subject them to cheap labor as a means of protecting their profits. It is a warning to those who are unbothered by 400,000 preventable deaths because catastrophic death is preferable to paying workers to stay home during a pandemic. It is a warning to those who depend on the naked and destitute to work long days with little rest just to afford survival to the next paycheck. And it is a warning to those who threaten to make anyone a prisoner if they refuse to comply and conform in the systems of oppression. This story is a condemnation of those who refuse to see us as human beings and treat us as nothing more than mere tools for their advancement. These people and these systems deny that we belong to each other, and in so doing, they’ve obstructed the very paths toward their own healing.

Although the powers that be seem content with structures that divide and destroy, Jesus offers the hope that the seeds of social healing can be found at the very margins these systems have created. For those who have been left out know exactly what will be required of us to create a world where no one is left out. It is the hungry and thirsty who will show us a new table of abundance where all may eat their fill. It is the stranger who will teach us about community and friendship. It is the sick who have much to tell us about how to get well. It is the naked who are ready to clothe us with love. It is the prisoner in chains who can lead us towards freedom.

It is the ‘least of these’ who are true royalty, for they live in the presence of the King. According to Jesus himself, there is no easy distinction between the Lord of Lords and the Least. Jesus and the poor are entangled so intimately that any attempt to separate them would be futile. Consequently, our affiliation with Christianity must be more than intellectual belief, a profession of faith, or a vote for our Christian values. Our membership in the kingdom of God is directly related to the relationship that we forge with Christ in the margins of our community. Simply, we are who we accompany.

Theologian Daniel Bell Jr. writes, “The works of mercy remind us that the struggle for justice is of a piece with the expansion of community, with the ever-widening proliferation of the bonds of friendship, which is the wisdom behind the liberationists’ insistence that the Church that struggles for justice cannot be a Church for the poor, but must be a Church of the poor.”

May we keep fighting the evils of corporate greed and the ways in which it feeds on the poor to survive. May we keep preaching about the injustice of the world’s richest empire which refuses to care for its citizens with health care, education, and food. May we keep struggling and organizing to change it all….but I remind you, in our attempts to secure more rights and liberties for our neighbors, may we never forget to make them our friends along the way.