I visited a Unitarian Universalist church for the first time in 2013. One of the first people I met there was a Christian. He said he joined the church because he grew tired of his old Lutheran church always talking about the death of Jesus. And at his new church they talked about the life of Jesus. I was also searching for a community that emphasized the life of Jesus.
Constant discussion of the death of Jesus often leaves people unsure about what to do with their lives. I grew up being told that Jesus died on the cross as God’s punishment for our sins so that we may go to heaven. That’s neat if I’m looking for a ticket to go somewhere nice after I die. It doesn’t tell me much about how to live my life. Christians often told me we are called to spend our lives persuading other people to get that ticket to the good place, but that doesn’t seem to be the life Jesus called people to.
Jesus doesn’t call people to escape this world, but to transform it. His death on the cross is a consequence to living a life devoted to radical transformation. This transformation within the reign of God was a direct challenge to the ruling authorities of his day. Jesus was executed on the cross, as were all crucifixion victims, for the crime of sedition. “King of the Jews” was written on the cross above Jesus’s head because his crime was claiming there was any other king but Caesar. He was executed in public on a hill, so everyone could see what happens to those who challenge the rule of Rome.
This is why it can be a little tricky to refer to Jesus as “innocent,” as Christians often do when telling the story of the crucifixion. Jesus caused a destructive riot in the temple, threatened the destruction of the temple, and preached the reign of God—all seditious acts in the reign of Rome.
We tend to call Jesus innocent because we have an understanding that the laws Jesus broke were unjust. When looking at someone we admire, like Jesus, in a distant environment, it is easy to determine his innocence. We are not burdened with the respect for first-century Roman law. Without this burden we are capable of recognizing the difference between crime and harm. Not every crime is harmful. And not every harmful act is a crime. From a distance we can clearly recognize this distinction. Jesus’s crimes were not harmful. The harm came from the Roman state that crucified people. But, of course, crucifixion was not a crime. State violence hardly ever is. Protesting state violence, however, no matter how unharmful, is always framed as immoral when interpreted through the lens of crime.
When we commit the crime of protesting the harm of state violence, we must make this distinction. If we make the mistake of seeing everything through the lens of crime, then we end up condemning protests for not fitting within the boundaries that the state requires. Seeing everything through the lens of harm allows us to properly protest harm.
Fighting for a new world is always a disruption of the current world. In fact, the values of the new world necessarily function as a disruption of the values of the current world. This is why protests often lead to property damage and looting. As people unite for the values of a new world, the values of the current world—such as protecting private property—become exposed as one of the tools that suppress the development of a new world.
The property damage that occurs during an uprising is always popularly perceived as morally wrong by the values of the current world because we see it through the lens of crime. Then, in the new world, people struggle to comprehend how people of the old world were so offended by the occasional moments of property damage that occurred during the necessary protests against harm. This is why we struggle to condone the property damage that occasionally occurs during Black Lives Matter demonstrations, but don’t have any problem with Jesus’s property damage in the temple.
In an interview with Ill Will, Richard Gilman-Opalsky said,
We have to consider what happens to people, and especially to young people, when they participate in a revolt … Nobody thinks they will end racism by burning a cop car. But people are changed by the experience of revolt. Listen to what they say. They are fed up and fighting back. They are experimenting with their own powers, their creative capabilities to fight the reality that threatens them. These existential, cultural, psychic, historic, and political experiences are not nothing. They may end up being everything in the long run.1
One of the ways people commonly disrupt the current world is by challenging the way we frame property. One of the easiest crimes to condemn during times of sustained protest is looting, which tends to happen as protests escalate. Cases of looting are often sensationalized in the mainstream media. The common narrative is that looters don’t care about the reasons behind the protest and that they use the protest as an excuse to steal expensive items for themselves. When you look deeper at the nature of looting, however, that’s not what we see. In In Defense of Looting, Vicky Osterweil says, “When something is looted, that thing’s nature as a commodity is destroyed by its being taken for free, out of the cycle of exchange and profit. Everything in the store goes from being a commodity to becoming a gift.”2
The motivation at the heart of looting is more about sharing than it is stealing, which is why we often see looting lead to piles of goods thrown into the street, free for everyone to take. That sharing of wealth “points to the collapse of the system by which the looted things produce value,” Osterweil says. When people are condemned for looting, it is not just because they broke the law. They are condemned because looting “points to and immediately enacts a different relationship to property.”3
Jesus’s disruptive actions in the temple also enact a different relationship to property. We especially notice this in the Gospel of John’s account of the event:
In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”4
Most people imagine Jesus with his whip of cords when they imagine this scene. That detail comes from John. Another detail John adds is that Jesus uses the whip to drive out not only the buyers and sellers but also their products: the sheep and cattle. John also uniquely depicts Jesus pouring out the coins of the money changers. Jesus is literally looting here. Looting doesn’t always mean keeping looted items. It simply means removing them from “the cycle of exchange and profit.” Jesus loots the animals being bought and sold and loots the money too. He then accuses them of making the temple a “marketplace.” The temple was supposed to be dedicated to the God who had liberated the Jews from slavery, but it had become complicit in another form of slavery that the Jews found themselves in under the Roman Empire: the slavery of debt.
Jesus also destroys property when he flips the tables, which were likely fragile and destroyed when flipped. Jesus’s demonstration, like many demonstrations, led to property destruction and looting. Some may want to refute this comparison and argue that the difference is that Jesus didn’t destroy property and loot just for the sake of destroying property and looting. Here’s the thing though: Modern-day protesters don’t either. Jesus and modern-day protesters participated in this kind of riotous behavior to send a message that was being suppressed.
Many people dismiss property destruction and looting by claiming that it’s led by “outside agitators,” and not by the “real” protesters who “really” care. Osterweil calls this caricature “a white supremacist classic, going all the way back to slavery.”
Under slavery, Osterweil says, plantation owners blamed “scheming Northerners” for stirring up their enslaved workers, deluding them with “ideas of freedom and equality.” The racist assumption at the root of this claim “forms the logic behind the ‘outside agitator.’ ” The phrase emerged during the Civil Rights era and continues to be used today, along with its various contemporary forms, such as “white anarchists,” “antifa,” “agent provocateurs,” or the fictional “George Soros–funded career activists.” Osterweil sharply challenges the assumptions that any of these groups is responsible for stirring protesters up:
This logic strips those who protest of their power, claiming that their experiences, lives, and desires are not actually sufficient to inspire their acts of resistance—implying that they don’t know what they’re doing. It also begins from the presumption that the world is fine as it is, and so only nihilistic or paid troublemakers could challenge it. But it is a racist idea on its face. What actually is wrong with an outside agitator?5
Jesus’s critics could have easily labeled him an outside agitator as well. Coming from a poor town in Galilee, Jesus riots in the temple, causing trouble and stirring up others. His arrest and execution were inevitable.
Protesting oppressive institutions in a way that has an impact will always have deadly consequences. This is the risk taken by all who participate in this process. Fighting for this new world is the most honorable cause in the eyes of those in the new world, and the most dishonorable cause in the eyes of those in the current world. Those who fight to preserve this world as it is are idolized. Those who fight for a new world are vilified.
Many will condemn a protest as illegitimate when protesters break the law or resist arrest. But it is nonsensical to require those protesting the unjust law to follow the unjust law they are protesting. The law is a representation of the state’s monopoly on violence. The law permits state forces to enact violence by any means necessary to protect the law, so their actions are not popularly perceived as violent since they are not technically “breaking the law.” All forms of counterviolence, even counterviolence through property damage, are popularly perceived as wrong because of the law that was designed to suppress their resistance.
Of course, there will always be parts of different protests that we condemn because we do not always act in our best interests. However, the actions of protesters that we condemn should be observed through the lens of harm, not through the lens of crime. Determining harm and determining whether some harm is ever morally justifiable should be discussed, but that determination should not be made through the lens of crime, since the interpretation of crime depends on who holds the monopoly on violence. Condemning protests through the lens of crime obscures the harm that people are protesting, perpetuating the lie that protesters who break the law are just as bad as those they’re protesting against.
Jesus broke the law, but we proclaim him innocent because he did not cause harm. Let’s keep that same energy with everyone else.
It’s clear Jesus knew he would be arrested and executed, as he and his disciples snuck back and forth through the Mount of Olives to stay in Bethany at night. Jesus was finally arrested in the Mount of Olives when his disciples, who were supposed to keep watch while he prayed, fell asleep. Jesus knew his resistance would lead to his execution, and his disciples knew they were risking their own lives as well.
A common saying of the Christian life since the early church is “Pick up your cross and follow me.” This saying has been interpreted alongside other New Testament passages that speak about rejoicing in suffering. Unfortunately, many have interpreted this idea as a command for passivity in the face of oppression. Oppressors teach the oppressed to “rejoice in suffering” and passively accept their abuse with gratitude.
However, the New Testament’s idea of rejoicing in suffering had nothing to do with passivity. Firstly, the suffering being referred to is the violent suppression from the powerful when you commit to a life of liberation. The apostle Paul tells Christians to rejoice in their suffering because of the larger process of justice that is enacted in the world through those who are willing to struggle for the cause of liberation. A life of passivity would be one that avoids resistance and is safe from potential suppression. Taking up your cross and rejoicing in suffering is about accepting that you will suffer more than others because you choose a life of resistance to injustice, and not a life of passivity that may warrant less suffering.
In Luke 23, Jesus says on the cross, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”6 This is the only instance in Jesus’s ministry where he forgives someone who isn’t in a marginalized position in society, and he gives it to the soldiers who kill him. Jesus always forgives those who are the most dehumanized by society, and before he dies, he forgives these soldiers who are also dehumanized—albeit in a much different way—by the Roman power structure.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire explains how oppressors gradually dehumanize themselves the longer they dehumanize others. The oppressed must struggle for their own freedom and dignity as they restore their humanity by abolishing the systems that sustain their oppression. However, another important part of this process is the oppressed restoring the humanity of their oppressors too by taking “away oppressors’ power to dominate and suppress.” Freire argues, “It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors. The latter, as an oppressive class, can free neither others nor themselves.”7
Taking away the ability to oppress from those in positions of oppressive power is difficult, because to the oppressor, taking away their power feels like a form of oppression. They won’t have the ability to understand how oppressive their role in society is until their ability to oppress is taken away. Just as Jesus said, “they do not know what they are doing,” because by dehumanizing others they have dehumanized themselves to the extent that they can’t comprehend the impact of their actions. We can never expect our oppression to end by the hand of those in positions of power. We cannot persuade them to see the error of their ways. The only way they can understand the impact of their actions is through the oppressed taking away their power.
Authentic transformation can come only from below, not above. Only those who experience the constraints of the current world can figure out how to build a better world and then build it. Those who significantly benefit from the power and privilege they hold in the current world cannot lead the transformation our world desperately needs because they “do not know what they are doing.”
Jesus commands his followers to love their enemies. We can love every human on the planet and still have enemies because our society is still structured in a way that gives some people unjust power over others. The best way to love our enemies is by removing them from oppressive positions and restoring their humanity through that process.
This work of liberation includes all of us, but it is led from below, not from above. It is first named by those who experience the constraints of the current world, and the new world is developed as a solution to the problems they name. Even if we do not see the new world we desire in our lifetime, we still get the honorable opportunity to commit our short lives to this long and difficult work of liberation.
The only way we can relate to each other in healthier ways is by transforming our material conditions so that we may open up space to relate to each other in ways we couldn’t have before. Religion has been used to suppress these efforts by justifying our social divisions, but religion can also be used to empower our resistance to our social divisions. This is the tension we live with. Awareness of this tension can help us intentionally choose the form of faith that truly frees us.
That’s the kind of religion I’m interested in.
That’s the kind of Jesus I’m interested in.
That’s the kind of God I’m interested in.
That’s the kind of life I’m interested in.
A life lived to the fullest is a life committed to our collective liberation. That idea drove Jesus to the cross. We can debate endlessly about what happened metaphysically when Jesus died on the cross and what it means on a cosmic level that Jesus died “for us,” but we can say with absolute certainty that Jesus also died in the way most revolutionaries do. Jesus died for a cause. He wouldn’t have gathered followers before his death if his death was solely for the purpose of making a metaphysical transaction in an otherworldly spiritual realm.
He died for us—all of us, right here, right now.
And we are called to respond by picking up our own crosses.
And we do that by stirring up the same kind of trouble.