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In Luke’s gospel, we read,
“As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes . . .” (Luke 19:41-44)
This passage has repeatedly been on my heart as we are all watching the systemic failures during the pandemic we’re facing here in the U.S. But before we go any further, I want to remind us of something about the gospels. Most scholars believe the order the canonical gospels were written in is Mark, then Mathew and Luke, and finally John. In each successive gospel, there is a growing tendency toward anti-Semitic references, and that trend climaxes with John.
Today’s gospel passage is part of a group of sayings in which Luke’s Jesus warns of coming devastation in the region of Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. Many scholars believe Luke’s gospel was written after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., and so, as we discussed last week, the author connects Jesus’ economic teachings of distributive justice, the economic elites’ rejection of those teachings, and the Jewish poor people’s revolt in the late 60s. The poor people’s revolt grew into the Roman Jewish war (66-69 C.E.), which resulted in Rome’s violent leveling of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.
Luke’s gospel tries to make sense of such devastation. But again, Christianity has a long, anti-Semitic history of explaining Jerusalem’s destruction as God’s punishment of the city for rejecting Jesus. I don’t believe that.
Yes, the gospel authors connected Jesus’ rejection with what later happened in Judea, Galilee, and Samaria. But they are also making a more organic, intrinsic connection between a society that rejected Jesus’ teachings about redistributing wealth and restructuring the community to prioritize the poor on the one hand and the poor people’s uprising and revolt on the other. The results are not divinely imposed or arbitrary. They are the natural outcome of political, economic, and social causes and effects.
Jesus calls for wealth redistribution, economic distributive justice, and prioritizing those the present system deems “least of these” can offer so much to us during this time. Today, as a result of the pandemic and the systemic responses, we are witnessing a consolidation of wealth rather than a redistribution of it. Jeff Bezos (the owner of Amazon) is on target to becoming the first trillionaire, yet people who need help the most simply aren’t getting it. And those communities our present system has left most vulnerable to COVID-19 are suffering disproportionally while wealthy corporations keep making commercials saying “we’re all in this together.”
All of us are for sure being affected. But not all of us are suffering through this in the same ways. Many are suffering in far greater degrees than others while help seems to keep being funneled elsewhere.
Jesus was warning his society not to ignore the calls for economic distributive justice in a Temple-state system that was supposed to collect surplus from the wealthy and redistribute it to those the poor who needed it most. Will those in our future look back at us today and say, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.”
Next, we’ll consider thoughts from two recent interviews.
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