Liberation Theology on Easter and Passover

On this Easter Sunday which falls during Passover, Pastor Joshua talks about Liberation theology though the story of Jesus’ righteous anger as a model for challenging oppressive systems.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

So in seminary, can you still do this, right? Yeah, okay. In seminary, I took a foundational course called Community Studies, and students were required to commit to a full academic year of social justice engagement at a single organization for the whole year, this whole uh calendar academic year. So at the time I was living in living in the suburbs of Detroit, so I volunteered that year at CASS Community Social Services, down in the heart of Detroit. CASS is a food program that serves three meals a day, every day, 365 days a year. They're serving it today. And they serve it to people who are experiencing poverty and homelessness. So for months I showed up every weekend. I would go every weekend and I'd help cook and I'd help serve the meals and I'd do the dishes and more dishes and I'd do more dishes, and then I do some dishes. Endless stream of dishes. But I did learn to cook. And one weekend, during a Jewish holiday, I don't think it was Passover, but anyways, a Jewish holiday where many families engage in acts of service. Some Jewish families will go out, they'll do acts of service. I walked into the kitchen that weekend and I saw a familiar face. It was a friend from high school who I hadn't seen in decades. And he was there with his family. His parents and his teenage children. They told me that this was their annual volunteer day in honor of this Jewish holiday. And I remember this family had been very well off when we were younger. And I knew from social media that my friend, who I knew in high school, who's much older now, had become quite wealthy himself. So my first thought was genuinely positive. This is great. They're taking their kids out of their normal life privilege and they're exposing them to service. I'll admit though that I had a flicker of cynicism as well. I was there every weekend. And they were coming just as once. Still, once is better than not at all. But my cynicism increased, however, when at one point one of their family members went out to serve food into the dining area and came back into the kitchen visibly excited and astonished. And they told the others in the family, oh, you have to see this, referring to the dining room full of unhoused people. And the tone, it was feeling less like compassion and more like a spectacle. As if the guests were something to observe. Now, to their credit, the family did work hard that day, mostly doing dishes, thank goodness. I appreciated that great. But when that family left, they mentioned they were heading to dinner themselves. And this isn't an exaggeration for a fact, at one of the, if not the, most exclusive and expensive restaurant in Detroit. That left more of a bad taste in my house. Let me be clear. I'm not saying people shouldn't volunteer, even if it's only once a year. It's one or that people with means shouldn't enjoy nice things. Absolutely should. Many people I care about, many people in my family do both of these things all the time. And I also hope, and I very much assume, that this well-to-do family donated money in addition to their health. And I'm sure Cass Community Services was grateful. But the juxtaposition was striking. A day serving people in deep poverty, founded by a celebratory dinner in extreme luxury, combined with that objectifying moment in the dining room, it just revealed something deeper, not only about them, but about myself too. The apparent lack of awareness of, or guilt for, especially as a white wealthy person, or as white, wealthy white people, I'm not necessarily who they were. The lack of awareness, a lack of guilt for the very systems that enable and support, that produce the suffering that they were briefly encountering. And this lack of awareness was poignant to say the least. So the following passage is from the Gospel of Mark, chapter 11, verse 15 through 17. On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple courts and he began driving out those who were buying and selling there. My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations. But you have made it again of robbers. You may be familiar with this. Verse from Mark chapter 11, verses 15 to 17. Jesus, in that parable, also overturned the tables of the money changers. And he overturned the benches of those selling doves. And he would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts. He felt they were making it into a den of robbers, the temple. And Jesus was pissed. Can I say that?

SPEAKER_00 6:35

No.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

He was angry. So here were people participating in religious life. They come to the temple to celebrate Passover, like we do now. And many of them were well-meaning, like the people I met at Cast. Yet in his view, in Jesus' view, they were undertaking actions that exploited the poor and corrupted this sacred place. I can't help but notice the parables. I mean the parallels of the parable. My friend's family came to Cast Community Services to serve humanity. It's a sacred act. But in subtle ways and without any compunction, seemingly, they also reproduce the very dynamics that contribute to inequality and dehumanization. Now, mind you, what I read in my interpretation of that Christian reading is a Christian reading of the Gospel of Mark. It's important to note that there's also a Jewish perspective that complicates the picture. And that perspective is that the temple was not inherently corrupt. Money changers were necessary because pilgrims came from across regions and they needed to exchange currency for the required temple coin, the Tyrian Lancer. No, that's Game of Thrones. The required temple coin, the Tyrian shepherd. Further, animal sellers in the temple provided approved sacrifices for those who couldn't bring their own, because they were pilgrims coming. So its commerce was necessary, supposedly, especially during Passover, which is when this parable is said. As I mentioned, Jerusalem would have been flooded with visitors. So these services they were selling were likely essential. That's the Jewish perspective. The scene, then, is likely not a simple condemnation of these individuals doing this commerce. The focus is shifted to a critique of exploitative systems that take advantage of the vulnerable. When those systems work in one's favor, even well-meaned people can become comfortable within these systems. It then becomes easy to believe that the systems work for everybody as they work for me, or that occasional acts of charity are sufficient to address any harm. But increasingly, especially today, people are recognizing that the scale of inequality today cannot be addressed merely by sporadic acts of goodwill. It requires sustained attention to the systems themselves. These two examples I mentioned, one is a scriptural parable for the Gospel of Mark, and one a modern-day reality from my experience in Detroit. They highlight this concern about capitalism. It functions today by some people taking advantage of others. Fair trade in other systems might be justifiable, a grant that, but the very, very wealthy that we see can only become that way by taking advantage of a system which permits and even encourages exploitation and inequality, and from which people can benefit without confronting the system itself. As we saw in the trial in New York of Donald Trump's business practices, a lot of these systems, most of them, all of them, are accepted as just how business works. And this is where liberation theology enters. It reframes how Christians understood poverty and justice. Liberation theology began with the convening of Vatican II in the 1960s. It was 1962 to 1965. The Catholic bishops got together at the Vatican. And this was largely in response to a disconnect between the church and the modern world. The Catholic bishops decided that instead of rejecting modern innovations as they had been doing, mostly doing, and consequently losing Catholic's adherence, they decided that they would embrace the world. They would embrace modern modernity. And they also decided that instead of adherence to a strict top-down orthodoxy as much as they can, they would engage directly with the populace, especially attending to human dignity through social justice. It was truly revolutionary, Vatican II. And it was also one of the most diverse, at the time the most diverse Vatican convenings. It included African bishops, Asian bishops, Latin American bishops, and even had female auditors for the first time. It'd never been done before. They had no voice or no vote, and they weren't bishops, but it was a set. However, even with the diversity of Vatican still, the Vatican II in Vatican City was still mostly white European men. The majority of those bishops. And the Latin American clergy that were in attendance of Vatican II were very encouraged by the proclamations of Vatican II, but they also looked around and they were like, uh, we're really not represented here. And our people are not really represented here. So the Latin American bishops convened another conference that was just Latin American bishops in Medici and Colombia in 1968. And these two gatherings of Catholic clergy were the genesis of liberation theology. Liberation theology is simply put a theology that, focusing at the time when it began and still, focusing specifically on Latin America's widespread poverty and inequality, it introduced a new direction for the interpretation of the gospel. And it introduced a new locus for the heart and for the identity of the church, not outside of, but within the struggling masses of the poor in Latin America. The church was declared not separate from the poor. It was called to identify with the poor, as Jesus did. Poverty was no longer seen primarily as, oh, it's their misfortune or they did something wrong. It was seen as a result of unjust social systems and structures.

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And these gatherings declared that to save the poor was to save the church.

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One of Liberation Theality's central figures, who I read earlier, Gustavo Gutiérrez, argued that what is needed is not merely development, but liberation, freedom from systems that produce oppression. He talked about developmentalism, is what he called it, as the idea that the developed countries could facilitate the development of poorer countries through technical changes and economic planning, including investment and industrialization and modernization and other capitalists, adventures, endeavors. But he said this really doesn't make sense. Since developed countries amass money and power through exploitation of poorer countries, so who would poorer countries then exploit to achieve the same? Unfortunately, the answer is the poorest among their population. Which increases poverty, it doesn't solve it. So liberation theology adopted the framing of Jesus' righteous anger at Pass on Passover, which was the passage I read from Mark. And that righteous anger is not simply anger at individuals buying and selling. I'm so mad that these people are buying and selling, but he was angry at a system that allows sacred practice to coexist with exploitation. It is a refusal, liberation reality, to accept a world in which devotion and injustice operate side by side. It was an anger Jesus had, not rooted in hatred, but rooted in love that refuses to tolerate harm. Passover also commemorates liberation from slavery. Liberation theologists refer to the Exodus story, liberation from slavery in Egypt. The story of God acting decisively against oppression. So for liberation theologists, Jesus' actions that day in the temple actually echo that tradition. We're celebrating Passover, celebrating the Exodus. You know, liberation, let's liberate ourselves. So this brings us to today, Easter Sunday. If the Temple incident represents confrontation, naming and disrupting injustice for Christians, Easter represents what comes next. The possibility of transformation, the possibility of a new life. In a liberationist reading, it is a declaration, Easter, that systems of death, whether political or economic or religious, do not have the final word. They can try and kill us, but we will rise. Liberation theology insists that faith is not merely about belief or occasional charity. It is about praxis, reflection, and action together, aimed at transforming the very conditions that produce suffering. This idea has expanded beyond its Latin American Catholic roots, actually. Still very strong Latin American Catholic roots, but it's expanded. There are many Protestant liberation theological movements today. There is black liberation theology associated with James Cohn, the writings and preachings of James Comb. There is Mujerista Theology, Liberation Theology, developed by Ada Maria Isasi Diaz, which talks about liberating the pressed Latin American women from oppression. There are even traditions that center human dignity, values around love, human dignity exclusively in their work to take decisive action, agnostic, atheistic traditions that center their work to dismantle systems of oppression. Can you name one? It's Unitarian Universalism. Yes. Across these contacts, the core insight remains. Faith must take sides with those who suffer and work to change the conditions that cause that suffering. What does that mean for us today? It means that although volunteering certainly matters, as does enjoying life's pleasures, those things by themselves no longer suffice. They do not address the deeper issues. We are all participants in some way in systems that produce inequality. The call of liberation theology is to see those systems clearly and to act consistently and courageously in order to change them. That kind of action involves discomfort, risk, struggle, pain, I know. It certainly requires more than occasional gestures. I'm sorry, but that's what's needed. Jesus' anger in the temple is often called righteous. But what makes it righteous is not simply the emotion, it is what the anger is for. It is anger and injustice. It is anger on behalf of others. It is anger that leads to transformation rooted in love. I still think about that day, Cass. I think about how easy it is, especially for me as well, to move between these worlds. To serve for a few hours and then return to comfort. Something I've done and continue to do countless times. I think about how easy it is to feel good about small acts while leaving larger systems untouched. And as we celebrate Easter and Passover, I think about the challenge posed by both that experience at Cass and the gospel story, Mark. The challenge not just to care, not just to help, but to change the systems that make help necessary in the first place, in order to liberate every person on earth, including ourselves, may it be stopped.