Faith – About Things That Matter

Seventy-Seven Times—and the Debts Americans Refuse to Forgive

Readings for 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Sirach 27:30—28:7; Psalm 103:1-2, 3-4, 9-10, 11-12; Romans 14:7-9; Matthew 18:21-35.

Americans live in a society obsessed with debt—and strangely selective about forgiveness.

When banks gamble recklessly and threaten the economy, governments rescue them. When corporations fail, bankruptcy courts allow them to reorganize and begin again. When wealthy investors lose money, tax laws often permit them to deduct those losses from future income.

But when poor people cannot pay medical bills, student loans, rent, or credit-card debt accumulated simply to survive, forgiveness suddenly becomes morally objectionable. Then we hear about personal responsibility. Then every dollar must be repaid. Then mercy will supposedly encourage laziness.

The same double standard operates internationally. Wealthy nations accumulate enormous debts and continue functioning. Poor countries are forced by international lenders to cut food subsidies, healthcare, education, and public employment to satisfy creditors whose loans have often enriched local elites and foreign corporations rather than ordinary people.

We readily forgive from the top down. We become merciless when forgiveness might benefit those at the bottom.

That is precisely the contradiction exposed in this morning’s Gospel.

Peter asks Jesus how often he must forgive someone who sins against him. Seven times? Peter probably thinks he is being extraordinarily generous. But Jesus answers, “Not seven times but seventy-seven times.”

In biblical language, that does not mean keeping a notebook until offense number seventy-eight. It means refusing to make vengeance a way of life. It means breaking the cycle in which injury produces retaliation, retaliation creates another injury, and violence continues from generation to generation.

To explain, Jesus tells a story about debt.

A servant owes a king “a huge amount.” The original Greek is more dramatic: ten thousand talents. A single talent represented roughly fifteen or twenty years of a laborer’s wages. Ten thousand talents, therefore, was not merely a large personal loan. It was an unimaginable sum—more than a worker could repay in thousands of lifetimes.

In other words, this is not simply a story about hurt feelings. It is about an economic system capable of creating impossible indebtedness.

The king orders the servant sold, along with his wife, his children, and all his possessions. That single sentence reveals the violence hidden beneath respectable financial arrangements. Debt has become a claim not only upon the servant’s labor, but upon his body, his family, and his entire future.

The servant falls to his knees and begs for time. Instead, the king does something astonishing: he cancels the entire debt.

That is Jubilee.

According to Israel’s ancient ideal, debts were to be periodically forgiven, enslaved debtors released, and land returned to families who had lost it. The purpose was to prevent wealth from accumulating permanently in a few hands while everyone else sank into hereditary poverty.

Jesus stands within that Jubilee tradition. At the beginning of his public life, he announces good news to the poor, release to captives, and liberation for the oppressed. In the prayer he teaches his disciples, “forgive us our debts” is inseparable from “as we forgive our debtors.”

The servant in today’s parable has been offered a new life. But he has not undergone conversion.

Leaving the king’s presence, he encounters a fellow servant who owes him one hundred denarii—a real debt, but tiny compared with the ten thousand talents just canceled. He grabs the man by the throat and demands payment. The second servant repeats almost word for word the plea the first servant had made: “Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.”

But the forgiven servant refuses. He has received mercy without learning mercy. He has escaped the machinery of oppression, yet immediately uses that same machinery against someone weaker than himself.

That is the central sin in this story.

The problem is not merely personal ingratitude. It is the refusal to extend downward the liberation received from above.

That makes this parable especially relevant to Christians in the United States. Our country has received advantages that cannot honestly be attributed to virtue alone: fertile land taken from Indigenous peoples, labor extracted from enslaved Africans, resources drawn from colonized countries, and a privileged position within the global financial system.

Yet instead of recognizing our enormous inherited debt, we often seize poorer nations by the throat and demand, “Pay what you owe.” We impose sanctions, collect interest, confiscate resources, and punish entire populations for resisting an international order designed largely without them.

The same pattern appears within our country. People whose families benefited from subsidized mortgages, inexpensive education, union wages, Social Security, and public investment may oppose similar assistance for younger workers, immigrants, or the poor. Like the servant in the parable, we forget what has been forgiven, subsidized, or simply handed to us.

But here we must make an essential distinction. Christian forgiveness does not mean that privileged observers may forgive crimes committed against other people.

I cannot forgive the slaughtered child’s killer on behalf of the child’s parents. Settler societies cannot absolve themselves of crimes against Indigenous peoples. White people cannot declare slavery and segregation forgiven without the participation of their victims. Governments responsible for war, torture, ethnic cleansing, or genocide cannot invoke reconciliation while the killing continues.

Only victims can forgive the injuries done to them.

Nor does forgiveness eliminate the need for truth, accountability, restitution, or protection of the vulnerable. There can be no genuine reconciliation without truth. Stolen land and wealth may require restitution. Those who remain dangerous may need confinement—not for revenge, but for rehabilitation and the protection of others.

Forgiveness is not forgetting. It is not pretending that evil did not happen. It is not allowing abusers to continue abusing. And it is never a command to the oppressed to accept oppression more politely.

Instead, forgiveness means refusing to become what has wounded us. It means relinquishing vengeance without relinquishing justice. It seeks restoration rather than humiliation, conversion rather than annihilation, and a future not permanently imprisoned by the past.

That is why Sirach asks, “Could anyone nourish anger against another and expect healing from the Lord?” Notice the word healing. Forgiveness is not presented primarily as obedience to an arbitrary rule. It is a form of healing. Hatred binds the injured person to the offender. Vengeance allows the perpetrator to continue occupying the victim’s heart and imagination.

Paul adds another dimension: “None of us lives for oneself.” That is the direct opposite of the individualism our culture teaches. We are not isolated competitors whose debts and injuries concern only ourselves. We belong to one another. Our lives are entangled. The suffering of immigrants, Palestinians, prisoners, impoverished workers, and sanctioned populations is not somebody else’s problem.

If none of us lives for oneself, then none of us is saved alone.

The Gospel’s final image of the unforgiving servant handed over to torturers is disturbing. It should not be used to portray God as an eternal torturer. The parable is showing what a world without mercy becomes. When we organize society around unpayable debts, resentment, punishment, and revenge, we build our own torture chambers—and eventually everyone lives inside them.

Jesus offers another possibility: receive mercy, practice mercy, and reorganize life around mercy. That means personal forgiveness, certainly. Families and communities cannot survive if every injury is preserved forever as ammunition.

But it also means social forgiveness: canceling predatory debts, ending sanctions that punish civilians, releasing those unjustly imprisoned, repairing the damage of racism and colonialism, and replacing retributive systems with restorative justice.

The test of whether we have understood God’s mercy is not how beautifully we praise it in church. The test comes when we meet someone who owes us—or someone our society has placed beneath us.

Will we seize that person by the throat? Or will we remember how much we ourselves have received?

“The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion.” A church that sings those words must become what it sings: a community that tells the truth, repairs what has been broken, defends victims, cancels impossible debts, and refuses to surrender the future to vengeance. That is forgiveness from the heart.

And that is what God’s Kingdom looks like when it enters history.

Birthday Reflection: Disney’s “Soul”

[On September 6th, I celebrated my 86th birthday with my family here in Westport CT. It was so much fun for me. During our pre-breakfast conversation (I suppose because of my age) the topic turned to death, the afterlife, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. My son-in-law remarked that someone should make a modern adaptation of that famous 14th century trilogy. I said that I think Disney has already done it in his classic “Soul.” The conversation sent me back to the following essay I wrote along those lines five years ago. Rereading it made me want to republish what I wrote then. That was even before I started studying Tarot, which I now see would have enriched the piece enormously. Anyway, here it is without that enrichment.]

Pixar’s “Soul”: Profound Spiritual Wisdom from a Soulless Corporation

Isn’t it ironic that one of the most powerful businesses in the world, the Disney conglomerate, has ended up being one of our nation’s most effective spiritual teachers?

I mean, in Disney you have a typical heartless corporation that controls so much of our deceitful mainstream media and our superficial entertainment industry. Yet that very transnational firm has consistently produced popular art that calls viewers to introspection, identification with wildlife and nature, and to qualities of generosity, selflessness, and love.

I’m thinking of celebrated productions like “The Lion King,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and even “Bambi.” Arguably, such animated films issue more effective calls to spiritual values (especially to the young) than do most churches.

How that’s possible remains a mystery to me. It’s probably because even Disney Productions discerns a deep hunger for meaning in audiences throughout the world. So, in its effort to enhance its bottom line, it acquires scripts authored by spiritually attuned writers. But that’s only a guess.

The Film

Nevertheless, that was probably the case with Disney’s latest issuance, “Soul” whose screenplay was written by Pete Docter, Mike Jones and Kemp Powers. It’s a charming, comedic yet penetrating probe into the meaning of life and death. Its depiction of the afterlife suggests characterization as a poor man’s version of Dante’s Divine Comedy. It has all the ingredients: a guided trip through the great beyond, a painful process of purgation, and finally arrival at peaceful beatitude.

(At this point, some might think it appropriate to give a “spoiler alert,” though that hardly seems necessary for a spiritually themed work like “Soul.” It’s not some cliffhanger. In any case, be forewarned.)

More specifically, as Disney’s first all-black production, “Soul” tells the story of Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a frustrated middle school band teacher obsessed with jazz and landing his dream job of playing piano in a quartet headed by a diva saxophonist named Dorothea Williams.

Joe is himself an unappreciated musical genius as becomes evident every time his riffs transport him into the “Zone” of his prodigious brilliance. In his audition for the Williams quartet, the diva immediately recognizes Joe’s talent and hires him on the spot.

Joe is overjoyed. On his way home, he practically floats and dances down the streets of NYC. In his distracted oblivion he is narrowly missed by busses, cars, motorcycles and bikes. However, Joe himself doesn’t miss an open manhole, which swallows him up and apparently ends his life.

The next thing he knows, he’s is in the afterlife on his way towards the Bright Light invariably reported in the accounts of most near-death experiences (NDE). But possessed by his obsession with finally realizing his dream job, Joe refuses to die.

The Underworld

So, instead of escalating into the world of light, he’s returned to heaven’s underworld – a kind of limbo – a so-called “Youth Seminar” where unborn souls are prepared by the recently departed to enter into bodies on planet earth. There Joe is introduced to a rebellious unborn soul (Tina Fey) called #22 (seemingly because she was the 22^nd soul ever created).

Despite its status as a truly “old soul,” #22 has remained unembodied for eons because she finds the prospect of life on earth boring. No mentor, no matter how prestigious – not Copernicus, Marie Antoinette, Abraham Lincoln, Karl Jung, George Orwell, Mother Theresa, or Muhammad Ali – has been able to successfully coax 22 to incarnate on the Milky Way’s “stinky rock,” where she knows that life is inevitably soul crushing.

Despite that history, Joe Gardner accepts the task of mentoring #22 in hopes that if successful, he might be allowed to return to earth and his dream gig. Joe is convinced that if he can help 22 find her passion – her Spark – then her fierce resistance to life on earth will dissolve.

So, acting like Dante’s Virgil, Joe leads 22 through the “Great Before.” She accompanies him as he reviews his own life and identifies jazz as the spark which had given his frustrated existence the modicum of meaning it’s had. From there the two travel through the Hall of Everything where Joe shows 22 her own life’s possibilities as a baker, fire fighter, artist, librarian, mathematician, gymnast, office worker, or astronaut. Not surprisingly, 22 remains unmoved.

However, it’s at this point that roles suddenly reverse as the unborn soul takes pity on Joe. He’s unlike any of her previous mentors, she says, because his life has been so sad and pathetic. Despite the fact that 22 can’t imagine why Joe wants so desperately to return to such pathos, she leads her mentor to the Zone – a state between the physical and spiritual – where he’s made to recall the times his music has induced a state of happiness and bliss.

From there, 22 takes Joe to the Realm of Lost Souls where she introduces him to “a guy I know” – a mad psychedelic captain, a self-described “mystic without borders.” Captain Moonwind (who doubles as a NYC sign spinner on the other side) helps lost souls find their way out of obsessions and anxieties that leave them disconnected from life. For instance, he once helped liberate a soulless hedge funder from his alienated labor. In the aftermath, the frustrated Wall Streeter completely trashes his obsessed, anxious and confining work environment while finally screaming “I’m alive! I’m alive!”

To the tune of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” Moonwind ferries Joe and 22 across the Sea of Lost Souls. On the way, the captain tellingly instructs Joe that lost souls are not that different from those striving to live constantly in the Zone. In both cases, he warns, “When your joy becomes an obsession, you end up tragically disconnected from life.”

With the warning ringing in his ears, and after entering a deep state of meditation, Joe and 22 suddenly find themselves returned to earth – to the intensive care unit where Joe’s NDE began. He’s not dead after all. However, both Joe and 22 are surprised to find that they remain completely displaced. Joe’s personality is now located in the hospital’s therapy cat, Mr. Mittens. Meanwhile, 22 finds itself animating Joe’s just-revived body.

Desperate and confused, the two narrowly escape from intensive care and emerge onto NYC’s noisy, smelly and dirty streets. It’s in this Purgatorio that Joe resumes his role as 22’s Virgil. Trapped in the cat’s body, he is intent on leading his newly ensouled form to what he imagines as heaven – the Half Note Jazz Club where his platonic Beatrice (Dorothea Williams) awaits him impatiently.

Purgatorio

On the way, 22 learns more about inhabiting Joe’s body. For the first time, she discovers the soul-purging joys of pizza; of simply walking, sky watching, taking a shower, tasting toothpaste, and of fitting into a comfortable old brown suit. She recognizes a kindred spirit in 12-year-old Connie, Joe’s gifted middle school trombonist who finds school stultifying. When Connie expresses her boredom with school, 22 approvingly quotes her former mentor, George Orwell, “State-sponsored education is like the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.”

22 even revels in subway rudeness and in the talent of an underground street musician. Above all, 22 likes “jazzing” – spontaneous self-expression or any kind.

Now Mr. Mittens is the one to object. “No,” he insists, jazz is a completely other category. “Music and life,” he says, “operate by very different rules.”

Undeterred, 22 continues jazzing during a visit to Joe’s neighborhood barbershop. There, with Mr. Mittens sitting in her lap, Dez the barber reveals the possibility of finding joy in a second-choice career even when one’s first choice has been frustrated. Despite his genius at cutting hair, Dez explains that he originally wanted to become a vet. However, since barber school was less expensive than training for veterinary medicine, Dez chose the former. But it’s made him “happy as a clam.”

The lesson is not lost on Mr. Mittens. His wide eyes tell that he’s thoughtfully considering his own life in the light of Dez’s revelation. Meanwhile he listens incredulously as 22 philosophizes free form while Dez cuts the hair on the head she’s now thinking with.

Everyone’s enthralled as she pontificates about “existing as a theoretical construct in a hypothetical waystation between life and death. . . left wondering whether all this (obsessed and over-focused) living was really worth dying for.”

Then she responds smartly to Paul, a hip barbershop customer, who rips Joe for falling short of his dreams. 22 fires back, “He’s just criticizing me to make up for the pain of his own failed dreams.” Her barbershop audience laughs at Paul derisively.

Later, 22 ecstatically explains to Joe: Didn’t you see? “I was jazzing.”

22’s jazzing continues through the next stage of Joe’s purgatory – an encounter with his mother who has constantly urged her son to abandon his musical ambitions in favor of steady employment with pension and health care.

Still encased in Joe’s body and tentatively coached by Mr. Mittens, 22 boldly responds on Joe’s behalf, “Mom, I’m just afraid that if I died today, then my life would have amounted to nothing.”

That particular jazz riff opens Mrs. Gardner’s heart. In tears, she embraces her son and tells him how proud she is of him. She adds that his deceased father would have been proud too. She even gives Joe his dad’s handsome wool suit to wear at the anticipated performance that evening. (Joe’s father too had been a musician dependent for support on his wife’s real job as a seamstress. No wonder she was worried about Joe.)

Paradiso

Finally, Joe arrives at the Half Note Jazz Club. By now, with the help of Captain Moonwind and a brief return to the Great Before, the difference between Joe and 22 has been completely overcome. Joe’s come to realize that 22 is the same as his own unappropriated unborn soul.

Whole at last, Joe is now ready for his beatific vision. Imagining that it will happen on the Half-Note’s stage, Joe persuades Dorothea Williams to rehire him despite his late arrival at the jazz club. Reluctantly, she acquiesces.

However, all doubts vanish as Joe gives the performance of his life thrilling everyone present including his mother and Ms. Williams herself. Amid the applause, Joe’s mother is heard shouting proudly, “That’s my son!”

Nonetheless in the aftermath, Joe remains strangely detached. In effect, he wonders aloud, “Is that all there is? I’ve been waiting for this my entire life. I thought it would be different.”

The diva explains, “You’ve been like a fish discontent with his water habitat because he’s been searching for the ocean. You’ve had what you’ve been looking for all your life. It’s what you live in, move in and where you have your being.”

With that, Joe’s penny finally drops. Now his life flashes before him summarized in the symbolic trinkets that awakened the soul of # 22:

A Metro pass
A pizza crust
A piece of a bagel whose other half had been thrown into the tip basket of that subway musician
The lollypop Dez the barber shared during the session in his “magic chair”
A spool of blue thread that Joe’s mother used to refashion his father’s wool suit
A seed from a maple tree brought by a gentle breeze into Joe’s waiting hand

Yes, Dorothea’s version of Beatrice was right: Joe’s had everything he’s needed right from the beginning – in his father’s sharing his passion for jazz, in fireworks over New York City, in the heat blowing from city street grates, in the taste of pecan pie, in the star filled sky . . .

So have we all.

Conclusion

Such “morals of the story” might strike some as typically Hollywood – trite truisms generated algorithmically by pretentious but ultimately soulless corporations interested only in easy pandering to the peasant gallery. However, conclusions of this sort overlook the fact that most preaching and motivational talks contain similar messages. Fact is: we need the reminders.

Nonetheless, the morals of “Soul” go far beyond what’s already been itemized. A more comprehensive catalog might include the following.

Life on planet earth need not be boring or meaningless.
Death is not our enemy, but a portal to profound insight and expanded awareness.
Animals from which we evolved (symbolized in Mr. Mittens) continue to guide us.
So do previous human incarnations (like 22’s George Orwell and Muhammed Ali) who somehow persist as our mentor guardian angels.
When our joys become obsessive, they disconnect us from life’s richness.
Even our “dream jobs” are comparatively insignificant – carried out in the equivalent of a small basement jazz club.
The same holds true for the heroes we idolize (like the self-important diva Dorothea Williams).
In the light of impending death, (if we’re lucky) consciousness of such relativity eventually dawns as we realize that wish fulfillment isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Instead, life is about overcoming separations – male from female, black from white, animal from human, body from soul.
It’s important “to jazz” and free flow at every opportunity; music and life both operate by the same rules.

These insights merit not only superficial review, but serious meditation by those whose spiritual hunger evokes them from sensitive writers like Docter, Jones and Powers despite their employment by Disney.

Do yourself a favor and see Pixar’s “Soul.” It will set you on the path of Dante, Virgil, Beatrice — and Joe Gardner.

Autumn Hill, The “Crime” of Anti-Fascism, & the Price of Radical Christian Love

Thirty-year-old Autumn Hill is serving a 50-year federal prison sentence for participating in an anti-ICE demonstration outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Texas.

I bring up her case because Ms. Hill identifies herself as a Christian committed to a politics of “radical love.” And that is exactly what today’s Gospel reading calls us to.

But before I get to that please consider the “crime” for which this young Christian woman has been punished with a sentence of life behind bars.

The “Crime” of Anti-Fascism

The protest in question occurred on July 4, 2025. Participants brought fireworks for a noise demonstration supporting immigrants imprisoned inside. Later that evening, a police officer was shot and wounded by another protester. Autumn says she had already left and never intended or expected violence.

Nevertheless, prosecutors described her and eight other defendants as an “antifa terror cell.” Autumn was convicted of terrorism-related offenses and received a sentence that may keep her imprisoned for most of her remaining life. Another activist who was not even present reportedly received 30 years for moving a box of anti-fascist literature.

All of that leaves me puzzled by the word “antifa.” It is not the name of an actual national organization with membership cards, officers, or headquarters. It is shorthand for anti-fascism. Yet it is now routinely classified as a dangerous “left-wing” ideology—as though opposing fascism were some extremist position that loyal Americans should reject.

I had thought anti-fascism was one of the few convictions Americans on both the left and right shared. After all, the Second World War—or what might more accurately be called the Second Intercapitalist War—was presented to Americans as a great struggle against fascism. Millions fought, sacrificed, and died to defeat it. Are we now supposed to approve of fascism because it has somehow been reclassified as “conservative” and anti-left? Or has the word “antifa” been turned into a label that allows the government to criminalize anyone who actively resists authoritarianism?

Christian Radical Love

Speaking from jail, Autumn told Democracy Now! what had led her to Prairieland. Growing up Christian, Ms. Hill said, she had been deeply moved by Jesus’ “radical love tradition,” which she saw continued by Quaker Abolitionists, Martin Luther King, Vincent Harding, Malcolm X, and Thich Nhat Hanh.

For Autumn, radical love was not a sentimental feeling. It meant recognizing everyone as equally deserving of dignity, care, and protection. “Justice,” she said, “is bringing love into the public space.” Standing outside Prairieland expressed the biblical command to love the alien, stranger, and sojourner.

Then she added something chilling: “If you resist the mass incarceration of immigrants, they are going to bury you.” She meant that when radical love moves beyond words and enters public space, when someone does more than admire Jesus and instead stands with people imprisoned by the powers of our time, they are vilified, persecuted, arrested, and jailed with the key thrown away.

Today’s Gospel Reading

Last Sunday, Peter identified Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” We saw that the “rock” upon which Jesus builds his community is not Peter’s perfection, much less the authority of popes and bishops. The rock is Peter’s dangerous recognition that divine authority resides not in Caesar but in a poor teacher from an occupied country.

This morning’s Gospel begins with the very next verse. Almost immediately, the man Jesus praised for his rock-hard faith suddenly becomes “Satan.”

This happens after Jesus explains what being the Christ will actually mean. As God’s anointed he must go to Jerusalem, confront the establishment, suffer at the hands of “the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,” and be killed. Together those groups represented an alliance of political power, religious authority, and officially approved interpretation of law – a syndrome that should not be unfamiliar to contemporary Americans.

In other words, Jesus does not go to Jerusalem because he desires suffering or because God requires blood before forgiving humanity. He goes there to continue his mission. His execution will be the predictable consequence of confronting institutions that cannot tolerate radical love entering public space.

Peter wants none of that. He apparently wants a triumphant Christ who will seize power, defeat enemies, protect his followers, and reward them with important offices. He wants victory without vulnerability, salvation without confrontation, and discipleship without consequences.

Jesus responds, “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me.” The man whose expression of faith Jesus recognized as foundational suddenly becomes “Satan” for wanting to separate Christ from Jesus. He wants the Messiah’s power and glory without the troublesome teacher who welcomes foreigners, challenges religious authorities, and confronts empire.

That remains Christianity’s central temptation. The Church can worship an exalted Christ while refusing to follow the historical Jesus. It can place jeweled crosses above its altars or on necklaces around throats while supporting systems that continue crucifying people. It can proclaim Christ as king while siding with presidents, billionaires, prisons, and empires against their victims.

Put otherwise, Peter’s confession was therefore incomplete. It is not enough to say Jesus is the Christ. We must understand what kind of Christ he is.

The Christ is not another Caesar. As interpreted by Jesus’ example, he is the victim of Caesar’s system and the leader of resistance to it. He is found among immigrants confined inside Prairieland, Palestinians buried beneath rubble, Cuban children deprived of medicine, families separated by deportation, and prisoners serving grotesque sentences designed to frighten others into silence.

Any Church that confesses Christ while protecting today’s crucifiers has abandoned Peter’s rock and become Peter’s obstacle – his Satan.

Deny Yourself; Take Up Your Cross

Jesus then says, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”

Those words have often been weaponized against suffering people. Women have been told abusive marriages are “their cross.” Workers have been instructed to accept poverty. Colonized peoples have been promised compensation in heaven. Victims have been encouraged to suffer silently.

That cannot be what Jesus means.

Roman crosses were not symbols of private inconvenience. Crucifixion was public execution inflicted by imperial power upon people considered threats to established order. To take up the cross meant accepting the risks involved in joining Jesus’ movement.

Jesus is not telling oppressed people to submit to crucifixion. He is calling his followers to resist crucifying systems—even when resistance is costly.

“Deny yourself” does not mean despising yourself or surrendering your dignity. For the privileged, it means relinquishing wealth, status, racial advantage, national supremacy, and insulation from suffering. For the oppressed, it can mean refusing the degrading identity imposed upon them. In both cases, it means abandoning the imperial self and joining a community of solidarity.

Conclusion

That helps explain Autumn Hill’s radical love. Love becomes discipleship when it moves from feeling to material action—from saying immigrants are human beings to standing outside their prison; from admiring Martin Luther King to risking the treatment King received; from wearing a cross to confronting those who construct crosses for others.

What I’m saying here is that Christians cannot allow one violent incident—or the government’s description of an entire movement as “terrorist”—to erase the injustice being protested. We must ask why immigrants are imprisoned, why anti-fascism is being criminalized, and why enormous punishments are imposed to frighten others into silence.

Jesus concludes with a question directed not only to individuals but to nations and churches: “What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?”

What profit is there for the United States to dominate the world while sacrificing its soul? What profit is there in controlling borders, armies, and prisons if that control requires mass deportation, endless war, genocide, and suppression of dissent? What profit is there for the Church to preserve its authority if it abandons those with whom Jesus identified?

The question is no longer simply, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answered that correctly.

Today’s question is more demanding: Will we follow the Christ we confess when radical love leads us outside the prison gates where he resides—and when the authorities threaten to bury anyone who protests his incarceration?

Free Autumn Hill!!

IS Our Next War against Cuba? Who Really Threatens Whom?

Readings for 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time: Isaiah 22:19-23; Psalm 138:1-2, 2-3, 6, 8; Romans 11:33-36; Matthew 16:13-20

This week, the United States once again identified Cuba as a grave threat to our national security.

Think about that. I have in connection with this Sunday’s readings about keys that open and close the gates of life and death.

Start by considering the hell that the U.S. has created to starve Cubans into submission to the United States empire.

Cuba’s Plight

Cuba is an impoverished island of approximately ten million people. It has no fleet stationed off Florida, no military bases surrounding the United States, and no economic blockade preventing Americans from obtaining food, fuel, and medicine. Its electrical system is collapsing. Its people endure blackouts, food shortages, inadequate medical supplies, and transportation increasingly paralyzed by lack of fuel. And all of this has been caused by our government.

Nevertheless, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s department recently issued a hundred-page report titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism. It accuses that struggling island of mounting a vast subversive campaign against the United States—one allegedly connected with the George Floyd protests, campus activism, peace organizations, socialist groups, and even journalists such as Amy Goodman.

This week Melissa Ford Maldonado of the America First Policy Institute went further. Her report calls Cuba “The Dictatorship Next Door” and a “massive national security threat.” It recommends “sustained maximum pressure,” a permanent U.S. military presence in the Caribbean, weakening Cuba’s government, and restoring “American dominance” throughout the hemisphere.

Retired Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis sees where such rhetoric can lead. He asks: Is Cuba to become our next war?

Who”s the Threat?

But first we should ask: Who is threatening whom?

The United States has nearly thirty times Cuba’s population. Its economy is hundreds of times larger. Washington maintains a naval base on Cuban territory at Guantánamo—against the wishes of Cuba’s government. For more than sixty years, it has subjected the island to an embargo condemned almost unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly. Now it is tightening that blockade while ordinary Cubans endure hunger, blackouts, and economic collapse.

And yet Cuba is called the threat.

It is as though Goliath, armed from head to foot and standing on David’s chest, cried out that the boy beneath him was threatening his life.

That reversal of victim and aggressor is essential to empire. The powerful portray those who resist them as dangerous. Enslaved people become threats to enslavers. Colonized people become threats to colonizers. Palestinians become threats to the nuclear-armed state occupying their land. And an impoverished Caribbean island becomes a “massive threat” to the most heavily armed nation in history.

Cuba’s unforgivable offense is not that it intends to invade the United States. It is that Cuba maintains relations with China, Russia, Iran, and other governments Washington calls adversaries. According to that logic, the United States may establish alliances and military bases across the planet, but Cuba may not choose its own friends. The entire Western Hemisphere is treated as Washington’s property.

George Kennan’s Memorandum

That is also the logic behind hostility toward BRICS and the emerging multipolar world. The United States contains only about 4.3 percent of humanity, but its rulers still claim the right to determine everyone else’s economic relationships. Cuba must remain isolated. China must be contained. BRICS must not challenge the dollar. Formerly colonized nations must not become independent enough to close the gap between themselves and their former masters.

George Kennan stated that purpose honestly in a top-secret 1948 memorandum. The United States then possessed approximately half the world’s wealth with only 6.3 percent of its population. Our task, he wrote, was to create “a pattern of relationships” allowing us “to maintain this position of disparity.”

Not eliminate the disparity. Maintain it.

Today’s Readings

That confession helps us understand today’s readings. They concern palace officials, keys, gates, authority, and the difference between power used for the people and power used to protect privilege.

The first reading concerns Shebna, “master of the palace.” He is a high official, keeper of the keys, accustomed to opening doors for some and closing them against others. Immediately before today’s passage, Isaiah condemns him for carving an impressive tomb for himself. Shebna has converted public office into private privilege. So God tells him, “I will thrust you from your office and pull you down from your station.”

That warning addresses every president, secretary of state, bishop, CEO, and ruling class. No one owns authority. It remains legitimate only insofar as it serves the community. When officials use power to enrich themselves, exalt their nation, punish opponents, or preserve an unjust “position of disparity,” they become Shebna.

Eliakim is appointed in his place. God puts “the key of the House of David” upon his shoulder. But the key is not given for personal enrichment. Eliakim must become “a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem”—protecting the household, especially its weakest members.

The criterion for judging government, then, is not military supremacy or the number of countries it can intimidate. It is whether government feeds the hungry, heals the sick, welcomes migrants, protects children, and permits weaker nations to control their own resources and destinies. By that standard, a policy deliberately intensifying deprivation in Cuba stands condemned.

Today’s responsorial psalm makes the criterion unmistakable: “The LORD is exalted, yet the lowly he sees, and the proud he knows from afar.” The powerful notice generals, investors, contributors, and fellow officials. But God sees the lowly. The psalmist invites us to look at history from that same perspective—from below, through the eyes of those who pay for decisions made in palaces.

That brings us to the Gospel. Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?” Significantly, he asks the question at Caesarea Philippi, a place identified with imperial power. In the shadow of empire, Peter identifies not Caesar but an impoverished Jewish teacher as God’s chosen one: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

“Christ” is not Jesus’ surname. It means Messiah—God’s anointed agent of liberation. Peter is saying that God’s saving presence is found not in Caesar’s palace, imperial wealth, or occupying armies, but in the peasant Jesus and the grassroots movement forming around him.

However, Peter does not yet understand what kind of Messiah Jesus will be. In the verses immediately following today’s reading, Jesus predicts that the political and religious establishment will kill him. Peter objects. In response Jesus calls him “Satan.” Peter has the right title but the wrong understanding. He still imagines divine power too much like conventional power.

Jesus will not defeat Caesar by becoming another Caesar. He feeds hungry crowds, heals the sick, forgives debts, welcomes the excluded, challenges religious hypocrisy, and confronts exploitative power. His community is organized not around domination but around service, sharing, forgiveness, and the dignity of those society considers disposable.

As Eliakim receives the key to the House of David, Peter receives “the keys to the kingdom of heaven.” Once again, the keys represent delegated responsibility. Peter does not own the kingdom. Neither does the Church. Its task is to open what domination has closed: food to the hungry, medicine to the sick, shelter to refugees, dignity to the humiliated, truth to those deceived by propaganda, and political agency to the voiceless. This is the thrust of Jesus’ program announced in Luke 4: 14-30.

The Gates of Hell

Jesus’ promise follows: “The gates of the netherworld shall not prevail.” We often picture the Church defending itself against attacking gates. But gates do not attack. Gates keep prisoners inside. Jesus commissions his community to break them open.

The gates of hell today include war, hunger, racism, sanctions, unpayable debt, ecological destruction, and propaganda that transforms victims into enemies. For Cuba, they take the form of fuel deprivation, economic strangulation, medical shortages, blackouts, and threatened military intervention. Those gates were built by human beings. They can be opened by human beings.

Paul offers a final warning: “How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways!” No nation, party, economic system, or Church possesses God. That includes the United States, despite its pretensions to be exceptional or indispensable. God is not America’s counselor, chaplain, or military ally.

Nevertheless, God’s mysterious ways have a recognizable direction. The God whom no empire can possess sees the lowly, removes Shebna, entrusts authority for service, and becomes visible in the crucified Jesus.

Conclusion

So today’s question is not merely, “Who do you say that Jesus is?” It is also: What kind of world does our answer create?

If we proclaim Jesus as Christ while worshipping empire, strangling Cuba, protecting inequality, and keeping the poor locked behind the gates of hell, our doctrinal answer may be correct. But our practical answer is false.

The Church stands upon rock only when it helps break those gates open.

Bread or Blockade? Jesus, Gaza, and Cuba

Readings for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Isaiah 55:1-3; Psalm 145:8-9, 15-16, 17-18; Romans 8:35, 37-39; Matthew 14:13-21

Today’s Gospel is about hunger. And so, unfortunately, is today’s world. But the kind of hunger I want to talk about today is not simply the tragic hunger caused by drought, crop failure, poverty, or some mysterious shortage of food. I want to talk about something far more disturbing: deliberately inflicted hunger, the use of food, water, medicine, and even fuel as weapons of war.

That’s hardly a new idea. Siege warfare has been around almost as long as warfare itself. If you can’t defeat your enemy on the battlefield, surround his city, cut off his food and water, and wait until hunger accomplishes what your weapons could not. Eventually, the thinking goes, people will become so desperate that they will surrender or overthrow their own leaders.

What’s disturbing for us this morning is that our own government is deeply involved in precisely that kind of warfare today.

Think first of Gaza. For years now Israel has bombed that tiny strip of land, displaced most of its population, destroyed homes, hospitals, farms, bakeries, water systems, and other elements necessary for ordinary human survival. At crucial points it has also blocked or severely restricted the entry of food and other humanitarian supplies. The United Nations Human Rights Office has not minced words about the result. It has said that famine in Gaza resulted directly from Israeli restrictions on goods necessary for civilian survival and has reminded the world that using starvation as a method of warfare is a war crime.

And let’s not pretend that this is simply Israel’s doing and therefore none of our concern. The United States has supplied the weapons, the money, and the diplomatic protection that have made Israel’s war possible. Whatever distinctions lawyers might want to make about degrees of responsibility, as Americans we cannot simply wash our hands and say that the starvation of Gaza has nothing to do with us.

Then there’s Cuba, where our responsibility is even more direct. For more than sixty years, the United States has maintained an economic embargo whose purpose has always been to make life sufficiently difficult on that island to produce political change.

Now the Trump administration has intensified that strategy by going after Cuba’s supply of oil. President Trump has publicly declared that there will be no more Venezuelan oil or money going to Cuba—”ZERO!” was his word—and has told Cuba to “make a deal.” His administration has gone further by threatening economic penalties against countries that supply Cuba with oil.

Think about what that means in practice. Cuba is an island of roughly ten million people. Oil doesn’t simply fuel automobiles. It generates electricity. Electricity refrigerates food and medicine, pumps water, illuminates hospitals, and keeps factories running. Fuel powers tractors and trucks that move food from farms to cities. Cut off the oil and eventually you affect virtually everything necessary for ordinary human life, including food itself.

All of that makes today’s familiar Gospel story about the loaves and fishes sound remarkably contemporary. For what happens there represents almost the exact opposite of what we’re witnessing in Gaza and Cuba.

Today’s story comes from Matthew the Evangelist, but it’s found in all four canonical Gospels. Matthew tells us that five thousand men were present. As so often happens in patriarchal accounts, the women and children disappear from the statistics.

And yet I want to suggest that those invisible women may actually hold the key to understanding what happened.

In any case, a huge crowd has followed Jesus to the other side of the Lake of Galilee, and the people become hungry.

In John’s fuller account, Jesus turns to Philip and asks where they might buy enough bread to feed everybody. Philip effectively replies that they can’t. Even a year’s wages wouldn’t provide everyone with more than a mouthful. So the market solution is briefly considered and dismissed. There simply isn’t enough purchasing power to solve the problem that way.

Jesus solves the problem by doing something surprisingly simple. He has everybody sit down. Mark’s version adds that the people organize themselves into groups. An anonymous crowd begins to look more like a collection of communities. People who had been strangers can see one another’s faces.

Then a child steps forward with five barley loaves and two fish. He offers what he has, Jesus receives it, gives thanks, and begins distributing the food.

And here’s where those invisible Jewish mothers come in. Can you imagine thousands of Jewish mothers setting off with their husbands and children for an all-day excursion into the countryside without packing something to eat? I can’t. Surely there was food scattered throughout that crowd—in bags, beneath cloaks, tucked away for one’s own family. The real scarcity may not have been food at all. It may have been trust. Everyone was holding tightly to what little they had because everyone feared there wouldn’t be enough.

Now, Matthew doesn’t tell us that’s what happened, and I don’t want to pretend he does. But I’ve always found this interpretation of the story compelling. Perhaps when that child opened his bag and offered what he had, others began doing the same. Perhaps the women who had packed food that morning began opening their baskets. Generosity became contagious. What had been privately guarded became commonly shared. And suddenly there was enough—not merely enough, but twelve baskets left over.

If that’s what happened, the “miracle” was a miracle of sharing. In any case, that’s surely part of the story’s meaning. The world God has given us contains enough. The problem begins when some hoard while others starve, when access to life’s necessities depends entirely on the ability to pay, or, even worse, when those necessities are deliberately withheld in order to force people to submit.

And that’s where Gaza and Cuba return to the story.

Jesus confronts hungry people and asks how they can be fed. Our government and the Israeli government it supports are doing something very different. They are asking how control over the necessities of life can be used to achieve political ends. In Gaza that has meant restricting food and other necessities amid a genocidal war.

In Cuba it means deliberately trying to cut off the fuel upon which food production, refrigeration, transportation, hospitals, and water systems depend. In both cases ordinary people—including children who have absolutely no control over the policies of their governments—are made to suffer in hopes that their suffering will produce somebody else’s political surrender.

Today’s Gospel rejects that logic from beginning to end. Jesus doesn’t ask the hungry people whether they support Rome or oppose it. He doesn’t demand that they renounce the Zealot revolutionaries. Nobody has to recognize Caesar, change governments, “make a deal,” or prove political innocence before receiving bread. They’re hungry. For Jesus, that’s enough.

That’s also why today’s responsorial psalm is so important. It says that God opens God’s hand and satisfies “the desire of every living thing.” Not merely Americans or Israelis, not merely Palestinians or Cubans, and certainly not merely people whose governments we happen to approve of. Bread is God’s gift to everyone.

And if that’s true, food cannot morally be turned into a weapon. Neither can water, medicine, electricity, or the fuel upon which access to all of them depends. Children cannot be starved because we disapprove of their parents’ government. Sick people cannot be deprived of medicine in hopes that their suffering will produce regime change.

Those things may be called foreign policy, sanctions, leverage, or national security. But today’s Gospel invites us to call them something else. It invites us to ask whether deliberately depriving human beings of what they need to live is compatible with following Jesus.

That’s the uncomfortable part of this Gospel for Christians like us. It’s easy to oppose hunger when hunger is nobody’s fault. It’s easy to contribute to Catholic Relief Services after a hurricane or drought. But things become considerably more difficult when our own government is causing the hunger or enabling others to do so. At that point charity isn’t enough. Christian faith becomes political, because following Jesus requires us to oppose policies carried out in our name.

And perhaps that’s the real meaning of those twelve baskets left over at the end of John’s story. There was enough all along. There is enough today as well. The question is what we do with what God has given us. Do we share it, or hoard it? Do we feed people, or blockade them? Do we treat bread as God’s gift to every human being, or as leverage to force our enemies to their knees?

The Jewish mothers in today’s story, at least as I imagine them, opened their baskets. The child opened his. Jesus blessed what they shared. And everyone ate.

That leaves us American Christians with an uncomfortable question. When our government uses hunger and deprivation against the people of Gaza and Cuba, whose side are we on?

Our government’s?

Or Jesus’?

Pentecost and the Sin of Christian Nationalism

Readings for Pentecost Sunday: Acts 2: 1-11; Psalm 104: 1, 24-34; 1 Corinthians 12: 3b-7, 12-13; John 20: 19-23

Last Sunday thousands gathered on the National Mall in a celebration blending Christianity, nationalism, military imagery, and devotion to Donald Trump. Crosses stood beside flags. Speakers praised America as a specially chosen nation. Calls for “strong borders,” “Christian values,” and “taking our country back” blended almost seamlessly with prayers and worship songs.

Watching it, I found myself thinking about today’s feast of Pentecost.

Because Pentecost presents us with a vision of God exactly opposite to the spirit of Christian nationalism.

Christian Nationalism

Christian nationalism tells us that our divine Creator belongs especially to one nation, one culture, one language, and one people. It imagines God as the protector of borders, armies, national destiny, and cultural purity. At its extremes, it turns Christianity into a religious justification for fear of outsiders, suspicion of immigrants, and hostility toward those judged foreign or threatening.

Pentecost says the very opposite.

The first reading from Acts could not be clearer. Luke almost overwhelms us with his list of peoples gathered in Jerusalem: “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia…” The catalog continues almost tediously. But Luke’s purpose is deliberate. He wants us to understand something essential about the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit descends not upon one nation, but upon “devout Jews from every nation under heaven.”

And the miracle is not that everyone suddenly speaks the same language. The miracle is that each person hears the apostles “in his own native tongue.”

That detail matters enormously.

Pentecost vs. Empire

Empires always demand conformity. Political power typically insists on one approved language, one authorized culture, one acceptable version of reality. But at Pentecost, diversity (D.E.I.?) itself becomes the medium through which God speaks. The Spirit does not erase difference; the Spirit honors it.

Which means Pentecost stands as a direct challenge to much of what now passes for Christianity in the United States.

We are living through a period where immigrants are routinely described as invaders, criminals, parasites, and threats to civilization itself. Families fleeing violence or hunger are treated as enemies. Human beings seeking asylum are loaded onto airplanes in chains while politicians boast about deportation numbers to cheering crowds.

And all of this is increasingly wrapped in Christian language.

Crosses appear beside assault rifles. Bible verses are quoted at political rallies. Jesus is invoked to justify cruelty at the border and indifference toward refugees. The faith of the Sermon on the Mount is steadily transformed into a religion of walls, exclusion, punishment, and fear.

Pentecost vs. Locked Doors

Yet today’s Gospel begins with disciples hiding behind locked doors “for fear.”

That line may describe not only the apostles but our nation itself.

Fear locks doors. Fear builds walls. Fear turns strangers into enemies and neighbors into threats. Long before barriers are erected at borders, barriers are erected within hearts. We begin dividing humanity into “us” and “them,” the deserving and undeserving, the saved and the dangerous.

Then Jesus enters the room.

Notice what he does not say. He does not urge the disciples to protect themselves from foreigners. He does not call for the defense of traditional culture. He does not speak of national greatness or civilizational conflict.

He says simply: “Peace be with you.”

Then he breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

That image of breath is deeply important. In both Hebrew and Greek, the words for breath, wind, and spirit are intimately connected. The Spirit is the breath of God shared with humanity itself. In Genesis, God breathes into the earth creature and Adam becomes alive. Here in John’s Gospel, Jesus breathes once again, recreating humanity.

This means that every human being carries the same sacred breath. Not just Americans. Not just Christians. Not just people with passports or legal documents. Everyone.

That conviction lies at the center of biblical faith. Again and again Israel is reminded: “You yourselves were once strangers in Egypt.” The test of fidelity to God is never simply doctrinal correctness or patriotic fervor. It is always social practice. How are the vulnerable treated? How are outsiders welcomed? How are the poor regarded?

A Reversal of Babel

In terms of language, inclusion, equality, and understanding, Pentecost reverses Babel.

At Babel humanity united around domination and imperial ambition. The result was confusion and division. At Pentecost humanity rediscovers unity not through forced sameness but through mutual listening and understanding. The Spirit creates communion without demanding uniformity.

St. Paul expresses the same vision in today’s second reading: “There are different gifts but the same Spirit.” Different languages, different cultures, different histories — yet one body.

That understanding could hardly be further from the spirit now overtaking so much of American religion and politics with their denigration of diversity, equality, and inclusion.

Today Christianity is often reduced to tribal identity politics draped in religious symbols. The cross is wrapped in the national flag. Compassion is dismissed as weakness. Cruelty becomes strength. Public humiliation of migrants and refugees is treated as proof of political courage.

And those who seriously challenge such cruelty are quickly denounced.

In this context, think of Renee Goode and Alex Pretty. Their offense was their willingness to identify publicly with the excluded, the displaced, and the demonized. In response they have been ridiculed, attacked, and condemned — often by people who loudly proclaim themselves followers of Jesus.

That should not surprise us. The Spirit of Pentecost has always made respectable religion uncomfortable.

Because the Spirit exposes the contradiction between our worship and our politics. We pray “Come Holy Spirit” while supporting systems that degrade the foreigner, punish the poor, and normalize indifference toward suffering.

The Sequence we heard today may contain the most important prayer in the entire liturgy: “Bend the stubborn heart and will; melt the frozen, warm the chill.” For ours has become a frozen society.

We have grown numb to suffering on a massive scale. Migrants die of thirst in our deserts and drown in our seas. Families disappear into detention systems. Entire populations are bombed, displaced, or starved while much of the world watches passively. And most of us continue our ordinary routines scarcely disturbed.

Pentecost interrupts that numbness.

It insists that the foreigner speaks with a voice we are spiritually obligated to hear. It insists that God’s Spirit cannot be confined within national borders. It insists that no people are illegal in the eyes of the One in whom “we live and move and have our being.”

Of course, nations have the right to regulate immigration. Few would deny that. But Pentecost also makes clear that whenever fear, cruelty, and dehumanization become public policy, Christians are obligated to resist.

After all, Jesus himself entered history as a refugee child carried into Egypt by terrified parents fleeing political violence.

Today many who claim to follow him would likely report the Holy Family to immigration authorities.

That irony should stop us cold.

“Lord, send out your Spirit and renew the face of the earth,” we prayed in today’s psalm.

Conclusion

But renewal cannot happen while hearts remain locked behind doors of fear. The Spirit enters only when those doors are opened — when we finally recognize that the breath within ourselves is the same breath carried by the stranger, the refugee, the immigrant, and the excluded.

That is the real meaning of Pentecost. And it remains just as dangerous today as it was two thousand years ago.

Locked Doors: Faith After Iran, After Epstein

Readings for Second Sunday of Easter: Acts 2: 42-47; Psalm 118: 2-4, 13-15, 22-24; 1 Peter 1: 3-9; John 20: 19-31

What if life can be no different from what our senses relentlessly report? Turn on the news. Cities in Iran and beyond reduced to rubble. Children buried beneath concrete. Leaders speaking of “security” while entire populations live in fear.

And at the same time, the slow, unsettling revelations surrounding the Epstein files continue to expose networks of wealth, privilege, and exploitation that reach into the highest levels of our political and economic life. Taken together, such realities make it difficult to sustain even the most basic trust in the goodness of the world or the integrity of those who govern it.

In such a moment, it is not hard to recognize ourselves in doubting Thomas centralized in this morning’s gospel. His voice is not foreign to us. It speaks from deep within: life is tragic, death wins, power protects itself, and truth is buried along with its victims. Yeshua is gone, and anyone who imagines otherwise is clinging to illusion.

More than that, Thomas’s fear feels painfully contemporary. The forces that executed Jesus have not disappeared; they persist in new forms. They still silence, still threaten, still destroy. One can almost see him glancing toward the door: Are you sure it’s locked?

Today’s Gospel reading does not dismiss that voice or treat it with contempt. It takes Thomas seriously precisely because his doubt is grounded in what appears self-evident. Dead bodies do not return. Empires crush resistance. Those who challenge entrenched power rarely prevail. In that sense, Thomas is simply being realistic. And yet, in the midst of that closed and fearful space, something happens that exceeds every expectation.

Yeshua appears again among his fearful friends. Not as a denial of crucifixion, but bearing its marks. The wounds remain visible. Violence is neither erased nor explained away; it is exposed and, somehow, rendered powerless. He turns to Thomas not with reproach, but with warmth. “Look at my hands,” he says in effect. “It’s really me.” Thomas’s response is immediate and unguarded: “My Lord and my God.”

But what is striking is not Thomas’s confession so much as Yeshua’s response to it.

There is no rebuke. No shaming. Instead, one can almost hear an acknowledgment born of shared experience. You are only human, he seems to say, and I know what that means. On the cross, my own senses told me that I had been abandoned. I too felt the darkness closing in. I too knew what it was to stand at the edge of despair. Faith, in that moment, was anything but easy.

That recognition changes everything. It tells us that faith is not the absence of doubt, nor the refusal to see what is plainly before us. It is what emerges in spite of misgivings. And from there, the Gospel moves to its most challenging point.

What truly astonishes, what truly delights, is not simply that Thomas eventually believes, but that there are those who commit themselves to God’s future without the reassurance of seeing. Those who trust life’s ultimate goodness when the evidence points in the opposite direction.

Imagine that kind of trust in a world such as ours. Imagine holding fast to the conviction that another future is possible, a future with room for everyone, when war and exploitation seem to define the present. That is the faith Yeshua blesses. It is not credulity; it is courage.

At this point, the first reading from Acts takes on a new and unsettling clarity. The description of the early Christian community is not a sentimental aside. It is a direct social and economic alternative to the world Thomas fears and we recognize all too well. They held everything in common. No one claimed private ownership. There was not a needy person among them. In other words, they organized their life together around the conviction that God’s future had already begun to take shape in their midst.

Set that alongside what we see in our own time. A world where wealth is concentrated, where the vulnerable are exploited, where violence protects privilege, and where even the exposure of wrongdoing seems unable to bring about accountability. Against that backdrop, the Acts community stands as a quiet but radical contradiction. It embodies a different logic, one rooted not in fear or accumulation, but in shared life and mutual care.

This is what resurrection faith looks like when it takes flesh in history. Not an escape from the world’s suffering, but a refusal to let that suffering have the final word. Not a denial of death, but a commitment to life that persists even in death’s shadow. The doors may still be locked; the threats are real enough. But within those very conditions, another way of living becomes possible.

That is the invitation extended to Thomas, and to us. Not simply to believe a proposition about life after death, but to participate in a way of life that anticipates and embodies God’s promised future. A way of life that insists there can, and must, be a world where no one is left in need.

Working for that world, for fullness of life for everyone even when the evidence seems to deny its possibility, that is what faith finally means. May it be ours.

Palm Sunday: Jesus and the Politics of Empire

Readings for Palm Sunday: John 12:12-16; Isaiah 50:4-7; Psalm 22:17-24; Philippians 2:6-11; Mark 14–15

This year we enter Holy Week while the world watches scenes of immense human suffering. In Gaza’s genocide, entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble and thousands of children have been buried beneath the debris of bombs.

In Iran, threats of widening war grow louder each day, with our country once again demonstrating its willingness to ignore international law and rain destruction on distant populations in the name of security, stability, and geopolitical dominance. The language used to justify such violence is familiar: order must be preserved, enemies must be crushed, and empires must defend their interests.

A Revolutionary Demonstration

Against that backdrop we hear the readings for Palm Sunday. The contrast could hardly be sharper. The story begins with a procession—crowds shouting, palms waving, cloaks spread on the road. Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey while the people cry out, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

For many Christians this scene has been domesticated into a harmless religious pageant. Children wave palm branches. Congregations sing joyful hymns. The political edge of the story disappears.

But in its original setting, Palm Sunday was anything but harmless.

Jerusalem at Passover was a tense and dangerous place. The Roman Empire ruled the region through military force and economic exploitation. The Temple establishment collaborated with the occupiers, helping maintain order among the population. Passover itself commemorated Israel’s ancient liberation from imperial Egypt, which meant the festival carried explosive political symbolism. The Roman authorities knew this. Every year they reinforced their garrisons to prevent revolt.

Into this volatile situation comes Jesus.

The Gospel story describes a demonstration in which people wave palm branches and shout “Hosanna, Son of David.” Those details matter. In Jewish history palms were symbols of national liberation. They had been waved during the successful revolt of the Maccabees two centuries earlier. To raise palms during Passover was to recall a moment when a foreign empire had been defeated.

The chant “Hosanna”—“Save us!”—carried similar meaning. Addressing Jesus as “Son of David” invoked the memory of Israel’s ancient kings and the hope that God would once again deliver the people from foreign domination.

Even the donkey was political theater. Roman generals entered cities on war horses after military victories. Jesus deliberately stages a counter-procession: a working class king riding a peasant’s animal, representing an entirely different vision of power.

In other words, Palm Sunday was not simply a religious celebration. It was a dramatic public protest against imperial domination.

The authorities understood that immediately. Within days Jesus would be arrested, tortured, and executed by the Roman state using a form of capital punishment reserved for insurgents: crucifixion.

This political dimension of the story is essential if we are to understand the rest of Holy Week. Jesus was not killed because he preached kindness or interior spirituality. Rome crucified him because his message and actions threatened the stability of empire.

Palm Sunday Today

That should force us to examine our own historical moment.

We live in a world still organized around imperial power. Military alliances, economic sanctions, and overwhelming military force are used to maintain global hierarchies of wealth and influence. Our own country claims the right to intervene anywhere always with devastating consequences for civilian populations.

The suffering we witness today—from Gaza to Yemen to Sudan, from Ukraine to Iran—is inseparable from those structures of power. The victims are always the same: the poor, the displaced, the children, the elderly. The language used to justify the violence consistently echoes the rhetoric of ancient empires. Security must be protected. Order must be maintained. Resistance must be crushed.

But the biblical tradition consistently stands with those who suffer under such systems. It stands against systems like our own.

Isaiah, in today’s reading, speaks of the servant who refuses to turn back even when struck and humiliated. Psalm 22 gives voice to a victim surrounded by violent enemies. Paul’s letter to the Philippians describes Christ emptying himself, taking the form of a slave rather than grasping power.

These texts reveal a God who sides not with imperial might but with those crushed beneath it.

That is why Jesus’ vision of the “Kingdom of God” was so dangerous. It promised what biblical scholars often call the Great Reversal. In that kingdom the last would be first and the first last. The hungry would be filled while the rich would be sent away empty. Power would flow downward toward those who had been excluded and oppressed.

Empires including America’s cannot tolerate that kind of vision. Their stability depends on maintaining existing hierarchies. And so prophets who speak of reversal—whether in ancient Jerusalem or in our own world—inevitably find themselves marginalized, silenced, or worse.

Which Jesus Do We Follow?

Palm Sunday therefore asks us a difficult question: Which Jesus do we follow?

Is it the harmless spiritual teacher who promises inner peace while leaving unjust systems untouched? Or is it the historical Jesus who rode into Jerusalem as part of a protest movement against empire, proclaiming a radically different social order?

The answer matters.

Because if the Jesus just described is the real one, then discipleship cannot be separated from questions of justice, war, and the suffering of the vulnerable. Following him means asking uncomfortable questions about the systems in which we ourselves live. It means refusing to baptize violence simply because it is carried out by our own government or allies.

Against Despair

It also means refusing despair. Holy Week ends not with the cross but with resurrection. The powers of empire believed they had eliminated a dangerous troublemaker. Instead they unleashed a movement that at its best has continued to challenge systems of domination for two thousand years.

So as we wave our palms today, we should remember what those branches originally signified: a people’s hope that God’s justice would one day overcome the violence of empire.

That hope remains as urgent now as it was on the road into Jerusalem.

Jesus’ Words: “Lazarus Come Forth” — Their Meaning in Gaza — and Iran

Despite distractions provided by the carpet bombings of Trump’s Epstein War in Iran, the genocide in Gaza continues.

For the past two years it has confronted us with images almost too painful to watch. Entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble. Hospitals destroyed. Families digging through shattered concrete searching for loved ones.

Human-rights organizations report that thousands remain buried beneath collapsed buildings—men, women, and children entombed by the violence of heartless slaughter.

The irony is difficult to miss. The state carrying out this devastation identifies itself as the homeland of the “People of God,” heirs to the biblical tradition that again and again insists that God’s special concern is for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner.

Yet today the land of the prophets has become the site of mass graves of those very categories of victims buried under concrete and dust. In such a moment the Gospel summons we hear today presses itself upon us with frightening relevance: “Lazarus, come forth.” What could such words addressed to the dead possibly mean when so many lie buried under the rubble of war?

For an answer, consider the story’s details. They are a command to resist empire – Rome’s then and the condominium represented by Israel and the United States today.

Today’s Gospel

Today’s Gospel—the raising of Lazarus—may appear at first to be simply a miracle story. Jesus raises his friend Lazarus from the tomb after four days of death. But the narrative is much more than a display of supernatural power. In the Gospel according to John, the raising of Lazarus is the turning point that seals Jesus’ fate.

Notice what happens immediately after the miracle. The authorities in Jerusalem convene an emergency meeting. Their concern is not theological but political: “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy our place and our nation.” In other words, belief in Jesus is ipso facto inimical to empire.

Here’s why.

Jerusalem at the time was a colonial city under Roman occupation. Imperial troops controlled the land. Local elites—both political and religious—had learned to maintain their own authority by cooperating with that imperial system. They managed the Temple economy, collected taxes, and preserved order on Rome’s behalf. In return they enjoyed prestige, wealth, and protection.

Religion and empire were joined at the hip.

Jesus and the entire prophetic tradition he embodied contradicted that juncture. It’s as simple as that.

Israel’s Prophets (Including Jesus)

The prophets of Israel had seen this arrangement many times before.

Again and again, they warned that the covenant was never meant to enrich the powerful — much less gentile imperialists. The law of Moses insisted that society must protect those with the least power: the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the resident alien. Those four groups appear constantly in the Hebrew Scriptures because they represent people who cannot defend themselves.

Whenever rulers forgot them, the prophets spoke.

Amos for example thundered against those who “sell the righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of sandals.” Isaiah condemned leaders who accumulated land while the poor lost everything. Jeremiah denounced kings who built luxurious palaces through forced labor.

Those prophets were not enemies of their nation. They were faithful Israelites calling their society back to its founding vision. But because their words threatened the powerful, they were treated as dangerous troublemakers – in today’s terms, as “anti-Semites.”

Jesus stands squarely in that prophetic line.

Like the prophets before him, Jesus’ ministry constantly returns to the same themes: good news for the poor, release for captives, healing for the broken. He heals without payment, eats with social outcasts, and proclaims a God who prefers mercy to sacrifice. In him the ancient prophetic voice speaks again.

The raising of Lazarus becomes the moment when that voice can no longer be tolerated.

Why? Because Lazarus is more than a man returning to life. He represents what happens when those who have been buried—socially, politically, economically—begin to rise again. When the forgotten begin to breathe, when the oppressed stand up, when those written off as dead reclaim their dignity—systems built on injustice begin to tremble.

“Anti-Semitism” Weaponized

Throughout history, whenever prophetic voices expose injustice, the powerful rarely answer the criticism itself. Instead, they attack the critic. Jeremiah was accused of weakening the nation in time of war. Amos was expelled from the royal sanctuary because his preaching threatened the ruling class. Jesus himself is now declared a threat to public order.

From that day forward, the Gospel tells us, they decide to kill him.

We see similar dynamics in our own time. Criticism of violence, occupation, or injustice—particularly when directed toward the policies of the Israeli state—is often dismissed with the charge of “anti-Semitism.” The term properly refers to hatred of Jews as a people, and such hatred is sometimes real. But when the accusation is used to silence moral criticism of Zionist genocide, it becomes something else entirely: a political shield protecting power from accountability.

The prophetic tradition refuses such shields.

Its loyalty is never to rulers, governments, or empires. Its loyalty is to the God of justice who demands protection for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner.

And that brings us back to the question with which we began.

The Threat of Resurrection

What does “Lazarus, come forth!” mean in a world where thousands lie buried beneath the rubble of Gaza – and Tehran?

It cannot simply mean a miraculous resuscitation of individuals. The Gospel is pointing toward something larger. The command is addressed to all who have been buried by systems of domination—those crushed by war, poverty, and political violence. It is a summons to life, dignity, and resistance against the forces that entomb human beings.

That is why the miracle becomes so dangerous.

Because once the dead begin to rise, the powerful begin to panic.

In fact, the irony deepens as the Gospel story continues. Not only do the authorities decide to kill Jesus. Later we are told they also plan to kill Lazarus himself—because his very existence is evidence that something new has begun.

Life is breaking out of the tomb.

Conclusion

The story of Lazarus therefore prepares us for what lies ahead. The conflict between prophetic truth and imperial power will soon reach its climax.

The cross was Rome’s instrument for eliminating those who threaten the system.But the Gospel insists that even the cross cannot bury the truth forever.

Because once the dead begin to rise, it becomes impossible to keep them in their graves.

Our call on this Fifth Sunday of Lent is clear: don’t allow yourself to be gaslit or intimidated. Recognize the burial of the innocent for the genocide it is. Name it.

Don’t be intimidated by weaponized charges of “anti-Semitism.”

What the Gospel of the Man Born Blind Says About War, Empire, and Biblical Illiteracy

Readings for Fourth Sunday of Lent: 1st Samuel 16: 1b, 6-7, 10-13a; Psalm 23: 1-6; Ephesians 5: 8-14; John 9: 1-41

If you have been following the news the past couple of weeks, you know that the world seems once again to be sliding toward catastrophe. The bombing of Iran by the United States and Israel represents a case in point.

Reports describe cities under bombardment and civilians trapped beneath collapsing buildings. On the first day of the conflict alone, a missile strike destroyed a girls’ elementary school, killing scores of children.

Yet amid such horrors, political leaders insist that these acts defend freedom, protect civilization, and even fulfill God’s purposes. Meanwhile a powerful current within contemporary Christianity—especially among right-wing interpreters of the Bible—assures us that geopolitical violence somehow fits within the divine plan.

None of this is new. For centuries religion has been used to sanctify empire and to bless the ambitions of the powerful. The prophets of Israel knew this. Jesus knew it.

And the readings for this Fourth Sunday of Lent expose the pattern with remarkable clarity. Taken together, they ask and answer a disturbing question: who actually sees the truth of history—the powerful who claim to interpret God’s will, or the people pushed to the margins of society?

The answer in today’s readings is that the marginalized see more clearly than the powerful.

Unlikely Choice of David

The first reading from First Samuel tells the familiar story of the prophet Samuel searching for Israel’s next king. Samuel arrives at the house of Jesse and begins inspecting the man’s sons. The eldest looks strong and impressive. Surely this must be the Lord’s anointed. But God interrupts Samuel’s expectations with a startling correction: “Not as man sees does God see. Man looks at appearances, but the Lord looks into the heart.” One after another the impressive candidates pass before Samuel and are rejected. Finally, Samuel asks whether there are any more sons. Jesse answers almost as an afterthought: “There is still the youngest, who is tending the sheep.” In other words, the boy so insignificant that no one even thought to invite him. Yet it is precisely this overlooked shepherd—David—whom God chooses.

Biblical scholars have long recognized something profoundly political in this story. Again and again the biblical narrative reveals a God who acts from below rather than from the centers of power. The decisive figures in salvation history are rarely kings or priests or generals.

Instead, they are slaves in Egypt, shepherds in Bethlehem, fishermen in Galilee, a construction worker from Nazareth. The logic of empire assumes that leadership belongs naturally to those who are wealthy, impressive, and already powerful. The Bible insists on the opposite: God’s future consistently begins among those whom society overlooks.

Lord & Shepherds

Psalm 23 deepens this theme. “The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want.” We often hear those words as gentle religious poetry. Yet in the ancient world they carried a quiet political edge.

Kings throughout the Near East loved to describe themselves as shepherds of their people. Pharaoh was a shepherd. Babylon’s emperor was a shepherd. Caesar claimed to shepherd the Roman world. But the psalm rejects that claim. The psalmist does not say that the king is my shepherd or that the empire guarantees my security. Instead, he says that the Lord alone is shepherd. The source of life, protection, and abundance is not the machinery of power.

The psalm imagines something very different: green pastures, quiet waters, and a table prepared in the presence of enemies where cups overflow. It is an image of a world organized around care rather than domination.

Paul’s Wokeness

Paul’s words to the Ephesians introduce another theme running through today’s readings: the contrast between light and darkness. “You were once darkness,” Paul says, “but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light.” Notice how Paul defines that light. It is not merely personal piety or private virtue.

“Take no part in the fruitless works of darkness,” he writes, “but rather expose them.” In other words, light reveals what systems of power try to hide. Unjust structures survive only by persuading people that their violence is necessary and their privileges natural. But when those illusions are exposed—when reality becomes visible—the system itself begins to tremble.

What the Poor See

That insight prepares us for the extraordinary drama in today’s Gospel from John. Jesus encounters a man blind from birth. The disciples immediately ask a question reflecting the dominant ideology of their time: “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

It is the ancient version of a familiar argument: suffering must be someone’s fault. Victims must somehow deserve their fate. Jesus rejects that entire framework. The man’s blindness is not the result of personal guilt. Instead, it becomes the occasion through which God’s work will be revealed.

Jesus then performs a strangely earthy action. He spits on the ground, makes clay, and spreads the mud across the man’s eyes. The gesture echoes the creation story in Genesis where humanity is formed from the dust of the earth. It is as if Jesus is re-creating the man, giving him new sight. But the real miracle unfolds afterward.

Once the man can see, he becomes the center of a storm of controversy. Neighbors question him. Religious authorities interrogate him. Even his own parents become frightened and refuse to defend him.

Why such anxiety? Because the healing threatens the authority of those who claim to interpret God’s will. If Jesus truly comes from God, the leaders who oppose him might be wrong. So the authorities attempt to discredit the miracle. They accuse Jesus of breaking the Sabbath. They pressure the healed man to denounce him. When he refuses, they ridicule him and eventually throw him out of the synagogue.

Meanwhile something remarkable happens within the man himself. His understanding of Jesus gradually deepens. At first, he knows only that “the man called Jesus” healed him. Later he declares that Jesus must be a prophet. Finally, he encounters Jesus again and proclaims, “Lord, I believe.” The man who began the story blind ends it with the clearest vision of all.

The irony is unmistakable. Those who claimed to see—the religious experts—become increasingly blind. Those who were supposedly ignorant perceive the truth. Jesus summarizes the entire episode in a single unsettling sentence: “I came into this world so that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.”

Conclusion

The pattern repeats itself throughout history. Empires convince themselves they are bringing peace even as they spread destruction. Religious authorities persuade themselves they are defending God even while they silence prophets. And ordinary people—the ones dismissed as insignificant—very often see the truth far more clearly than those who wield power.

That is why Paul’s words sound less like poetry and more like a summons: “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”

Lent is not simply a season for private self-examination. It is a call to wake up—to recognize how easily faith can be manipulated to justify violence, to question the narratives that normalize suffering, and to listen to voices that systems of power would prefer us never to hear.

Again and again, Scripture insists that God’s work in history begins in unexpected places: among shepherd boys forgotten in the fields, among beggars sitting at the roadside, among those cast out by respectable society.

Those who appear powerless often become the clearest witnesses to truth. And that may be the most unsettling lesson of today’s readings. The future of God’s kingdom does not depend on the calculations of the powerful. It emerges from the courage of those who have learned to see.

Which brings us back to Jesus’ words at the end of the Gospel: “I came so that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” The question these readings place before us is simple but disturbing.

Are we willing to let the light of the Gospel open our eyes—even when it forces us to see realities we might prefer to ignore? Even when it forces us to see from the viewpoint of immigrants, the homeless, the impoverished, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Cubans, Iranians, Palestinians, the LGBTQ+ community, the addicted, the imprisoned . . .?