kathryn tanner
Illustration by Lauren Wright Pittman
SEVERAL OF THIS month’s lectionary readings deal with the tensions of navigating wrongdoing, judgment, vengeance, and forgiveness. They call readers to forgive — and forgive again: not just once, twice, or seven times, but at least 77 times and counting (see Matthew 18:22).
These texts have been used throughout history to trap people in positions of disempowerment, abuse, and enslavement. Consider, for example, how victims of intimate partner violence have been pressured to forgive and return to their abusers, who then proceed to hurt them again. Or how entire marginalized communities are expected to “get over it,” whether that is the colonization of Turtle Island, enslavement, or generations of misogynist, queer- and transphobic policies, laws, and violence. In light of the rampant misuse of these texts, we’re right to be wary of biblical interpretations for how to handle conflict that reinforce domination. The texts tend not to deal directly with inherent interpersonal and structural power dynamics. We must do that work ourselves. Any of us preaching the lectionary this month must also be careful.
Attending to the power dynamics of these passages doesn’t mean we dismiss them as useless. Rather, such attention helps us discern how these texts invite and bear witness to God’s presence in processes of interpersonal, intergenerational, and even international healing. They call us to attend to what our own pain has to teach us and to seek hope through community life. And they promise that throughout our attending, God will abide — waiting patiently to see us through.
PASSAGES FROM THE book of Hebrews show up in the lectionary every Sunday this month. In Ernst Käsemann's landmark book The Wandering People of God, written in the context of 1930s Germany, this pastor and theologian characterizes the community described in the Epistle to the Hebrews as a people who wander in the wilderness of this world. “The basic posture of the bearer of [God’s] revelation should, in fact, be described as a wandering,” Käsemann writes; “the attitude of faith can only be described as wandering.” He locates the identity of the church in the biblical stories of Israel in the wilderness—the church as a people estranged from imperial power.
“I of course had in mind that radical Confessing Church which resisted the [Nazi] tyranny in Germany,” Käsemann wrote decades later, reflecting on his book as anti-fascist ecclesiology—a biblical theology for a German antifa church movement. When a society coheres around a nationalist identity that designates segments of the population as “other” and therefore a threat to patriotic unity, “the church must appear as a band of deserters.” To desert such nationalistic ideologies is to wander in search for Jesus because, according to Hebrews, he appears at the edge of society, outside the civic union, beyond the border—Jesus as the one who suffers “outside the city gate,” on the other side of the wall (Hebrews 13:12).
The last chapter of Hebrews invites the faithful to solidarity with Jesus, which involves a commitment to excluded people, to scapegoated populations: “Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured” (Hebrews 13:13).