God – 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.

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.

What Does Prayer Mean in An Age of Empire? The Dangerous Simplicity of Pope Leo’s “Nonviolence”

Suddenly, everyone is talking about prayer and theology.

That comes as a surprise to many who, since Harvey Cox’s The Secular City, have assumed that secularization had effectively removed God from serious political consideration. Yet recent controversies have forced the issue back into public view.

The debate surrounding Pete Hegseth’s prayer about U.S. policy in Iran –so reminiscent of Mark Twain’s haunting “War Prayer” has reopened questions many thought settled.

It has even produced the strange spectacle of Donald Trump adopting quasi-messianic language, while J.D. Vance publicly disputes Pope Leo XIV about whose prayers God hears and whose God ignores.

I have addressed those developments elsewhere. Here I want to press further into the deeper issue: What is prayer? What are its political implications? And what does the Bible itself reveal about the competing claims made in God’s name, especially about nonviolence?

What Does Prayer Mean?

To begin with, what exactly is being invoked when Hegseth appeals to the Psalms and asks God to “break the teeth” of enemies, to leave women widowed and children orphaned?

And what does the pope mean when he insists that Jesus rejects such petitions outright and stands unequivocally for nonviolence?

In both cases, the underlying assumption seems the same: a supernatural being “out there,” watching events unfold and selectively intervening on behalf of one side or another.

But can such imagery still be taken seriously?

We live in the age of the James Webb Space Telescope, which reveals a universe so vast that our planet becomes nearly invisible within it. We also live in the age of quantum physics, where matter dissolves into energy and probability. In such a world, the idea of a localized deity monitoring human conflicts and deciding which missiles hit their targets strains credulity.

Is God “up there” listening? Is Jesus literally seated at the Father’s right hand, weighing petitions and choosing sides?

Or are such images relics of an earlier worldview that no longer corresponds to what we know about reality?

And Then There’s the Bible

It is true that the Bible itself often reflects that older worldview. Its language presumes a cosmos structured in ways we now recognize as outdated.

Yet that does not render the Bible irrelevant. On the contrary, its enduring significance lies elsewhere.

As scholars such as Pablo Richard have emphasized, the Bible does not present a single, unified picture of God. Instead, it stages an internal conflict– a “struggle of the gods.”

On one side stands the God of Moses: the liberator of slaves, the defender of the poor, the protector of widows, orphans, and immigrants.

On the other side stands the God claimed by kings and elites, beginning with the royal ideology of David and Solomon, a God invoked to justify wealth, hierarchy, domination, and even genocide.

The prophets– Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah– consistently take the side of the former against the latter.

Jesus clearly stands in that prophetic tradition: a marginal figure, an artisan, an outsider, a victim of imperial violence. His execution by crucifixion– Rome’s punishment for political dissidents– makes unmistakable where he stood.

In this sense, while the Bible does not address modern cosmology, it does address a far more urgent question: Whose side is Ultimate Reality on? Does Dr. King’s long arc of history really bend towards justice for the poor and marginalized?

The Bible refuses to let that question be answered cheaply.

Was Jesus Unequivocally “Nonviolent?”

This brings us to the claim that Jesus was simply “nonviolent.”

Stated without qualification, that claim risks obscuring more than it reveals. It can even function as a form of moral disorientation– especially for those subjected to systemic oppression.

“Violence” is not a single, simple category. It has at least four distinct forms.

First, there is structural violence: embedded in laws, institutions, and social arrangements that quietly destroy lives. Slavery, segregation, economic deprivation, denial of healthcare, and wars of aggression all belong here.

Second, there is defensive violence: the response of those who resist such conditions. When oppressed peoples fight back, their actions are immediately visible and condemned by the powers that be– yet they are widely recognized as legitimate, even under international law.

Third, there is repressive violence: the state’s attempt to crush resistance and restore the original injustice, often under the banner of “law and order.”

And finally, there is terroristic violence: the deliberate use of fear and destruction to achieve political ends– a practice historically employed most devastatingly and frequently by states, even as they label resisters “terrorists.”

In this light, to describe Jesus simply as “nonviolent” is not only inadequate; it risks distorting the reality of both his life and his context. The Roman authorities who executed him certainly did not regard him as harmless.

Conclusion

We are left, then, with the question that has been with us from the beginning: What does prayer mean in the world just described?

Whatever it means, it cannot be what figures like Hegseth, Trump, or even the pope seem to assume. Prayer is not a way of persuading a distant deity to intervene on behalf of our causes, bless our wars, or guarantee our victories.

Nor can the question of God’s allegiance be resolved by lifting isolated biblical texts or by invoking abstract slogans like “nonviolence,” as though such words settled anything at all.

The Bible itself will not allow that kind of evasion. It presents instead a conflict– deep, unresolved, and unavoidable– between competing visions of God, of humanity, and of justice. It exposes how easily “God” becomes the sacred cover for power.

But our problem runs even deeper. In the light of the James Webb Space Telescope and of quantum physics, the very notion of God must be rethought. The old image of a supreme off-planet being ” watching, judging, intervening, is no longer credible.

What we have called “God” must instead be understood as the creative energy of the universe– indeed, of a universe of universes– the living source in which everything participates, including the mysterious energy of consciousness itself. This is not an object among others, but the depth of reality, the Thou we may still address, not because it sits above us, but because it lives within and among us.

In biblical language, it is the Creator. In Paul’s words, it is “the one in whom we live and move and have our being.” Such a reality cannot be captured by any nation, claimed by any empire, or enlisted in any war. It recognizes no borders, no chosen peoples in the exclusionary sense, no privileged civilizations. The earth belongs to all. Its gifts are not the possession of a few, but the common inheritance of everyone– each of us entitled to no more than our one-eight-billionth share.

Seen in this light, prayer changes meaning entirely.

It is no longer a request for favors from above. It is an act of alignment with the deepest currents of reality itself. It is a way of opening ourselves to the creative, life-giving energy that stands against domination, exclusion, and death.

And so the issue returns to us, stripped of illusion.

When we pray, we are not stepping outside history. We are locating ourselves within it. We are aligning ourselves– consciously or not– with one side of an ongoing struggle between the forces that sustain life and those that diminish it.

This is not theology as speculation. It is theology as decision.

To pray is to choose.

And the choice we make– however piously we disguise it– places us either with the flourishing of the whole or with the systems that deny it.

So the question remains, now more demanding than ever:

When you pray, are you aligning yourself with the life of the whole– or with the powers that divide and destroy it?

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.

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 . . .?

Wells, Walls, and Manufactured Thirst

Readings for the Third Sunday of lent: Exodus 17:1–7, Romans 5:1–2, 5–8, John 4:5–42.

The readings for this Third Sunday of Lent deal with the very human question of thirst. They raise the question, what are we thirsting for — ultimately?

Our politicians give us a glib answer. They tell us that our thirst is for security — from the threatening humans that surround us. The nation is dying we are told. We have lost our greatness. We are being overrun. Scarcity is closing in.

“Make America Great Again” is not just a slogan; it is an appeal to a deep anxiety — the fear that there is not enough: not enough jobs, not enough cultural cohesion, not enough safety, not enough control.

And so we are offered a diagnosis: the crisis is immigration. The problem is those people (who happen to be the poorest in the world!). The solution is walls, expulsions, exclusion. We are invited to believe that national greatness depends on tightening the circle.

But step back for a moment. The United States has 4 percent of the world’s population and consumes roughly a quarter of its resources. The “crisis” is narrated as though the most powerful nation in human history were a fragile victim of desperate families crossing deserts.

That story itself deserves scrutiny. It feels eerily similar to another story we heard today.

Thirst in the Desert

In Exodus 17, the people have escaped Egypt — escaped forced labor, escaped imperial extraction, escaped brick quotas. But once in the wilderness, they panic. There is no water. And fear rewrites memory. “Why did you bring us out of Egypt?” they ask. “Were there not enough graves there?”

Notice what is happening. A people freed from empire begin to long for the security of empire. Scarcity produces nostalgia. Anxiety produces accusation. Moses becomes the problem. Freedom itself becomes suspect.

And they ask the piercing question: “Is the Lord in our midst or not?”

That question echoes beneath our own political rhetoric. Is God present in pluralism, in equity, in inclusion? Is God present in demographic change? Is God present in movements of displaced people seeking survival? Or is God only present in the imagined stability of a past we have sanctified?

At Massah and Meribah, the people’s fear does not disqualify them. Yahweh brings water from rock. Not from Pharaoh’s storehouses. Not from a border wall. From a rock in the desert. The provision comes not through renewed control, but through trust in a God who sides with vulnerable people.

The biblical tradition has always insisted that this is the decisive revelation: God is known in history through concrete acts of sustenance for those escaping bondage. Not through slogans of greatness, but through water in the wilderness.

The Woman at the Well

Then we move to John’s Gospel, and the political charge intensifies.

Jesus is in Samaria — enemy territory. Centuries of ethnic hatred stand between Jews and Samaritans. Purity codes, historical grievances, competing temples. If ever there were a border crisis, this was it. And yet Jesus does not reinforce the boundary. He crosses it.

He asks a Samaritan woman for a drink.

It is astonishing. The one who will speak of “living water” begins by placing himself in need before someone religiously and socially marginalized. He does not begin with a lecture about law and order. He begins with vulnerability.

And this woman — doubly stigmatized as Samaritan and as female — becomes the first missionary in John’s Gospel. She leaves her jar and runs to her town: “Come and see.”

Our Real Thirst

What if the real thirst in our society is not for greatness, but for encounter? What if the deeper crisis is not immigration, but isolation? What if we have mistaken demographic change for existential threat because we have forgotten how to sit at wells with strangers?

“Living water,” Jesus says, becomes a spring within — not hoarded, not policed, not weaponized. It flows outward.

The irony is painful. The people who once wandered as refugees in the desert now fear refugees at their gates. The descendants of immigrants fear immigration. The community that drinks from a rock fears sharing water.

And beneath it all is that ancient question: “Is the Lord in our midst or not?”

If God is only with the secure, then fear makes sense. But if God is the One who hears slaves, who provides water for rebels, who speaks across enemy lines, then perhaps the presence of the stranger is not a threat but a test.

Paul, in Romans, says that “the love of God has been poured into our hearts.” Poured. Abundance language. Not scarcity language. Not zero-sum logic. Poured out while we were still estranged, still flawed, still confused.

Conclusion

Lent invites us to examine our thirst honestly. Are we thirsty for justice — or for dominance? For community — or for control? For security — or for solidarity?

Greatness, in the biblical sense, is never about territorial assertion. It is about fidelity to the God who brings water from rock and who offers living water at a contested well.

The wilderness is frightening. Demographic change is unsettling. Empires promise certainty. But the Gospel suggests that life springs up not from walls, but from wells.

The bush still burns. The rock still flows. The well is still there.

The only question is whether we will drink — and whether we will let others drink too.

Donald Trump’s Nakedness, His STFU SOTU Speech

Readings for the Second Sunday of Lent: Genesis 12: 1-4a; Psalm 33: 4-5, 18-19, 20,22; 2 Timothy 1: 8b-10; Matthew 17: 1-9

The Gospel reading for this Second Sunday of Lent is about the “transfiguration” of Jesus.

It’s about how the primitive Christian community’s understanding of Jesus and his significance changed following their experience of what they came to call his “resurrection.”

After that experience, whatever it was, they came to see him clearly as the New Moses and the New Elijah. As such he would introduce a New Order that would embody liberation of society’s most marginalized (Moses) and outspoken confrontation against the given imperial order (Elijah).

Jesus himself called that New Order the Kingdom of God.

It is what the world would look like if God were king instead of Caesar.

That vision should take on new meaning for Americans in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s disgraceful State of the Union Message last Tuesday. It should even embolden the profane response STFU.

Trump’s Un-transfigured World

If you watched the speech, you know what I mean.

It seemed like the dying gasp of the ruling Septuagenarian and Octogenarian classes.

It was a flailing, lie-filled proclamation of a Golden Age that never existed and that never will be if we follow the path the failed braggart president celebrated.

It was the opposite of God’s Kingdom – a world with room for everyone.

I mean, Trump’s SOTU celebrated division, wealth and power, and a militarism while targeting the poorest people on our planet. He had the staggering nerve to tone-deafly call them what the Epstein Files are revealing the political class itself to be: lawless rapists, pedophiles, robbers, drug dealers, gang members and murderers. And Trump’s crowd are blackmailers besides.

Making those allegations, the president revealed his own nakedness and that of his mindless Maga colleagues who mindlessly jumped to their feet to applaud the beauty of the Emperor’s non-existent robes.

Yes, the Files, the coverups, the sweetheart deals for Epstein and Maxwell, the redactions, the months-long failures to disclose, and the reduction of Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice to the President’s private law firm are revealing everything.

The Emperor indeed has no clothes. He’s shamelessly parading around stark naked and tiny.

And reminiscent of the Hans Christian Anderson story, it’s the little children he’s imprisoning (with their bunny ears and Spiderman backpacks) who proclaim the emperor’s embarrassing nudity.

No clothes! Naked! Tiny. Or as Joseph N. Welch put it to Senator Joseph McCarthy “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”,

Jesus’ Transfigured World

The tale of Jesus’ Transfiguration tells an opposite story.

It’s the story of a poor construction worker – a former immigrant, a prophetic teacher of unconventional wisdom, the death row inmate whom empire jailed, tortured and submitted to imperial capital punishment – whose life and teaching revealed a New Order that was shining and pure because it had room for everyone.

And in today’s reading, it’s his transformed clothes and the spiritual company he keeps that tell the story.

Matthew puts it this way: “His face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light. And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, conversing with him.”

That is, the one whose imperialized class status would eventually reduce him to nakedness on Mt. Calvary is perceived by his first followers as magnificently clothed.

Even more, Matthew’s account of Jesus’ Transfiguration has him conversing with Moses and Elijah.

Moses, of course, is the great liberator of the enslaved and poor.

Elijah was the courageous prophet who not only spoke truth to power but resisted false gods who take the side of the rich and powerful rather than God’s truly chosen ones, the poor and oppressed.

Don’t Let the Democrats off the Hook

But none of this should let the Democrats off the hook just because some of them refused to attend the STFU SOTU affair. Don’t let them get away with just not being Trump.

It’s time for us to echo Zohran Mamdani, the most popular politician in the country.

In my novella, Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President and Changed America Forever, I imagine a moment like this. Not because of special foresight, but because systems built on secrecy, oligarchy, militarism, and spectacle inevitably crack. In that story, hidden ledgers surface. Blackmail networks become visible. The machinery of power is exposed. The old guard responds the only way it knows how — with louder threats, more force, and louder applause.

Sound familiar?

But exposure alone is not liberation.

Which brings us back to the mountain of Transfiguration.

That scene depicted there is not mystical escapism. It is political theology. It declares that the authority of empire is provisional — that the true sovereignty belongs to the God who sides with slaves, captives, resident aliens, and the poor.

Luke makes the program explicit: “He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor… to proclaim liberty to captives… to set at liberty those who are oppressed.”

That’s a rival social order.

And if the imperial system is unraveling before our eyes — if its nakedness is becoming visible — then what must follow is not nostalgia or revenge, but reconstruction.

In Against All Odds, the answer to systemic collapse is not personality cult or partisan fury, but the institution of a Republic of Care. It is clarity. It is the articulation of a simple, material program centered on ordinary people’s lives. Among others, the items in such a program would include:

Affordability
Universal health care
Full employment
Higher wages
Free education through college
Environmental protection
Expanded voting rights
An end to oligarchic distortions like the Electoral College
Strict term limits in every branch of government
Drastic reductions in military spending.
No endless wars
Immigration reform rooted in dignity
The dismantling of structures whose primary function is coercion at home and abroad.

In liberationist terms, none of that is utopian dreaming. Mamdani’s election proved that. The reforms just listed are what happen when the needs of the poor become the criteria of policy.

Conclusion

Trump’s embarrassing speech was the voice of Caesar defending a crumbling temple.

The Transfiguration is the unveiling of another possibility altogether.

Empires grow louder when they weaken. They shout about enemies. They celebrate force. They promise greatness. That is what dying systems do.

But the biblical tradition suggests something else: when Pharaoh hardens his heart, liberation accelerates. When Ahab clings to power, Elijah’s voice sharpens. When Rome crucifies, resurrection faith spreads.

Lent invites us to see clearly — to recognize naked empire and to imagine, without apology, a transfigured order grounded in justice for the poor.

Our petite impotent emperor is exposed.

The question now is whether we have the courage to climb the mountain with Peter, James and John to see what comes next.

Lent, Empire, and the God We Worship

Readings for the first Sunday of Lent: Genesis 2: 7-9, 3: 1-7; Psalm 51: 3-6,12-13, 17; Romans 5: 12-19; Matthew 4: 1-11.

Today is the first Sunday of Lent. Its readings begin with the creation myth in Genesis. They conclude with the famous story of Jesus’ temptations in the desert.

But let me begin not in Eden or in the wilderness, but in Washington, Brussels, and Tel Aviv — and in the shadow places of our own national story.

We live in a country that represents roughly 4.5 percent of the world’s population yet assumes a decisive voice in nearly every corner of the globe. We maintain military installations across continents. We speak of “rules-based international order” while reserving to ourselves the authority to determine when rules apply.

The war in Ukraine grinds on amid NATO expansion despite promises to the contrary. Gaza has become a landscape of genocide even as our government supplies arms and diplomatic cover.

Regime-change interventions in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan have left instability that outlives the speeches that justified them. And at home, the Epstein scandal remains a symbol of elite circles that appear shielded from consequences that would crush ordinary people.

Whatever one’s political alignment, it is difficult to deny that we inhabit an imperial moment.

That is why the Gospel today matters. Because the final temptation Jesus faces is not about private morality. It is about his rejection of empire.

How Animals Became Human

But before we get to the desert, we must pass through Genesis. And Genesis is stranger than we usually allow. It’s a sacred myth about how the animals became human.

Nonetheless, we were taught — many of us in catechism classrooms that did not encourage too many questions — that this story explains how a perfect world fell apart because of disobedience. But biblical scholarship has long suggested something more subtle and more interesting. The story reads less like a fall from perfection and more like the painful emergence of moral consciousness.

God forms the human being from the soil — adamah — and breathes into it. The human is an earth creature animated by divine breath. The animals are already there. What distinguishes this creature is not biology but awareness.

The serpent does not tempt with gluttony. The fruit is “desirable for gaining wisdom.” The promise is that “you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.” The issue is not appetite; it is autonomy. It is the claim to define good and evil independently of the Giver of breath.

And here is where the text becomes theologically uncomfortable. The God portrayed in Genesis can sound petty and jealous. (In fact, as biblical scholars Mauro Biligno and Paul Wallis have suggested, the plural Elohim in today’s reading might not refer to God at all, but to “Powerful Ones” pretending to divine identity. But that’s another story.) In any case, the prohibition from on high appears arbitrary. The threat — “you shall die” — sounds disproportionate. If we read the story naïvely, we are left with a deity who seems insecure about competition.

Many Christians resolve that discomfort by refusing to wrestle with the text. We flatten it. We moralize it. We turn it into a children’s story about disobedience and punishment. That is the fundamentalism many of us were raised on — including in Catholic form — a fundamentalism that often ignores biblical scholarship and historical context in favor of simple certainty.

But the deeper issue in Genesis is not that God fears competition. It is that humans actually do become like God. In the end the Powerful Ones (Elohim) admit “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.” However, the moment the earth creature claims ultimate moral sovereignty, alienation follows. Shame. Blame. Fear. Violence. The story is mythic, but it describes something real: despite God-like powers, when creatures enthrone themselves as divine, relationships fracture.

The serpent’s whisper — “you will be like gods” — does not remain in the garden. It scales upward into civilizations.

Empires are what happen when that whisper becomes policy.

Jesus’ Temptations in the Desert

Which brings us to the desert. Matthew tells us that Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted. The temptations escalate. First, appetite: turn stones into bread. Reduce humanity to consumption. Then spectacle: throw yourself from the temple and force divine validation. Manipulate religion to secure legitimacy. And finally, the decisive offer: all the kingdoms of the world and their magnificence — in exchange for worship.

This is the climax. Empire is offered as destiny.

And here the contrast with Genesis becomes luminous. The first humans grasp at godlike autonomy. Jesus refuses it. He refuses to reduce life to bread. He refuses to weaponize God. And he refuses political domination secured by kneeling before a lesser power.

“The Lord your God shall you worship, and him alone shall you serve.”

That sentence is not pious abstraction. It is a political declaration. It means that no nation, no military alliance, no economic system, no leader can claim ultimate allegiance. It means that empire — however benevolent it imagines itself — is not God.

This is precisely where much contemporary Christianity falters. Christian fundamentalism, whether Protestant or Catholic, often aligns itself enthusiastically with imperial power. It baptizes national projects. It equates military strength with divine blessing. It reads Scripture in a way that reinforces dominance rather than questions it. The same tradition that once rejected liberation theology for being “too political” now blesses drones, sanctions, and occupation without hesitation.

And yet the Gospel we read today shows Jesus rejecting the very thing many Christians defend.

He rejects empire as diabolical.

Paul & Psalms

Paul’s letter to the Romans reframes the story. Through one human being came sin — the pattern of grasping autonomy. Through another came obedience — the pattern of trust. The contrast is not between sexuality and purity, or rule-breaking and rule-keeping. It is between self-deification and worship.

Psalm 51’s cry — “Create in me a clean heart” — becomes, in this context, a plea for undivided allegiance. A clean heart is not one that never doubts. It is one that refuses to kneel before false gods.

Lenten Conclusion

Lent, then, is not about chocolate or minor self-denials. It is about allegiance. It is about whether we will continue participating in systems that assume the right to dominate the earth and dictate history — or whether we will align ourselves with the one who refused.

If Genesis tells the story of animals becoming human through moral awareness, the desert tells the story of a human refusing to become a god.

And that refusal leads to a cross, because empire does not tolerate rivals or dissent.

We begin Lent in a world intoxicated with power. The kingdoms are still on offer. They are offered to nations. They are offered to churches. They are offered to each of us in smaller ways — security in exchange for silence, comfort in exchange for complicity.

The question is not whether temptation exists. The question is before whom we will kneel.

Dust breathed upon by God does not need to become divine. It needs only to remain faithful.

And that, perhaps, is the most subversive act of all.