Transforming Our Collective Troubles
As someone who grew up in church, it is easy for me to miss the transgressive nature of the gospel. Recently engaging the work of authors like Cole Arthur Riley, James Baldwin, and James Cone has reminded me of the scandalous nature of the gospel.
Cone writes, “The gospel of Jesus is not a rational concept to be explained in a theory of salvation, but a story about God’s presence in Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed, which led to his death on the cross. What is redemptive is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair.”[1]
Jesus incited a countercultural movement by both challenging the logic of the dominant culture and by telling a different story. A common saying of Jesus through the gospels is, “You’ve heard it said…but I say to you.” The gospel message insists it doesn’t have to be this way.
The dominant message was to love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but Jesus said to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:43–44).
The dominant political system built power through exclusion and subjugation of religious and ethnic minorities, but Jesus said the hungry and the excluded are blessed, for theirs is the kingdom of God (Luke 6:20–23).
The dominant economic system built wealth through exploitation of the poor, elevated the wealthy, and upheld reward-and-punishment thinking, but Jesus challenged the logic of transnationalism and economies of meritocracy with parables like the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1–16). As an alternative to the dominant logics above, Jesus invites us beyond counting and conditionals and into the “kingdom of God.”
In a moment when our dominant religious, political, and economic systems are failing to treat people and the environment with love and dignity, we need a movement that seeks to realize a different kind of social order—one like what Jesus calls “the kingdom of God.”
Like Jesus fed the hungry and healed the sick, we need to meet the immediate needs of those most directly affected by injustice.
Like Jesus discipled the twelve, we need individuals and groups to support individuals in seeing themselves and the world clearly so they can become who they are meant to be.
Like Jesus flipped the tables in the temple, we need to name and interrupt the injustices of our current social order.
Like the communities in Acts, we need structures where we can embody our deepest values as alternative models.
A Simone Weil says, “We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.”[2] Our moment is filled with troubles, and yet the faith of the cross, as Cone wrote, is one that “snatches…hope out of despair.” My prayer for the movement—that is both here and not yet here—is that we would have the grace to transform our collective troubles.
[1] James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Orbis, 2013), 150.
[2] Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Arthur Francis Wills (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), 82.
Dawson Allen is CAC’s movement partnerships manager. He came to CAC after working in the Immigrant Rights Movement and he volunteers with New Conversation Initiative.
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