Luke 6:12-26
Reading
the Bible From the Margins, by Miguel A. De La
Torre, professor of Theology at the Iliff School of Theology challenges our
traditional interpretations of the Bible and seeks to redefine Christianity
from the margins of society. According to De La Torre, God’s love and salvation
come to us not from the prosperous centre but from the oppressed margins. Jesus
was not born into wealth, but into the filth and poverty of a stable.
The focus, then, of our public theology and
communal praxis is intimately linked through the experience of the poor. The
Beatitudes that Jesus reveals in his sermon are not something to be taken
metaphorically; rather, the literal understanding shows us that those who
linger on the margins, who are oppressed by economic and social systems, who
are reviled and rejected due to their race, their gender, their sexual
orientation – these are the people who are truly blessed before God, and it is
God who is revealed through them.
Jesus’s call to his disciples – to us –
requires us to respond to the poor, to experience God through their eyes. The
Christian faith is a faith of marginality, a faith expressed at the liminality
of our world. It rejects the accumulation of wealth and power. The Beatitudes
are, therefore, a demand to abandon our wealth and power and follow Jesus in
the liberation of God’s people. All people.
- Joshua Zentner-Barrett
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