The future will come. But right now, we are alive. We live in the present. Our material existence does matter. Injustice, oppression, violence, and suffering matter. Love for those who are experiencing these realities demands that they matter.
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(Read this series from the beginning at Part 1 and Part 2.)
I grew up in churches that would put on charity programs, not in the liberation spirit of the Jesus of Mark, Matthew, and Luke but more in the spirit of the Jesus we find in John 6. This kind of charity work was only temporary and only for the purpose of harvesting leads for upcoming evangelistic events. Saving souls was much more important than saving bodies, and that logic was rooted in the thinking we find in John 6. In the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke), we don’t see a Jesus who is only concerned with people’s eternal well-being but one who was also deeply troubled with concern for people’s present, material, concrete well being. The multitudes who ate the loaves and fish still died! But this didn’t stop Jesus from feeling compassion for their hunger and desiring to feed them. The Jesus of the synoptics is different from the Jesus of John. John’s Jesus is all about getting people connected with the Spirit so they can have eternal life, while the synoptic Jesus is deeply concerned with liberating people, especially marginalized people, from lives in which they lacked things essential for well-being like food and warmth.
Stop and contemplate Luke’s Jesus for a moment. Luke’s author could have characterized Jesus’ ministry in so many ways but chose a passage from Isaiah and the Hebrew prophetic justice tradition:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)
The poor, the imprisoned, the disabled, the oppressed—these were who Luke’s gospel was for. The Jesus of Luke doesn’t just offer them eternal life as an opiate that enables them to patiently endure their present experience. He doesn’t tell them that their present experience in the big scheme of things “counted for nothing.” What Luke’s gospel offered these people was proclamation of the “year of the Lord’s favor,” the year of jubilee when all debts were forgiven and wealth was redistributed, emancipation was given to those enslaved, and all those who had been oppressed were liberated.
I understand that the Johannine community was estimating the worth of the eternal life they believed could be found in Jesus. But we don’t need to say our material experience counts for nothing in order to do that. Dualistically dividing our existence into categories of things of the spirit and things of the flesh and then saying the fleshy stuff counts for nothing has produced untold harm throughout Christian history. Our bodies matter. Our present moments matter. Today we can do better.
Today, in the spirit of the Jesus of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, we can say that what we are experiencing right now does matter. Here and now matters. The kind of society we are choosing to form right now matters for all who are alive right now. We are not just passing through! We cannot allow ourselves to become so heavenly minded that we are no earthly good, or to put it in John’s language, so eternity minded that we are not presently any good.
Christianity that is only concerned with the future and not concerned with the present is not only insipid, but also become vulnerable to being coopted by those who use Christianity to harm people today while passing out tickets for eternal life.
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