Not since Y2K have we had a year whose mere mention conjures up so much anxious uncertainty. The Heritage Foundation ensured that with their infamous Project 2025 that launched a full-blown blitzkrieg on the federal government.
There’s another way of seeing the year, though, one that could prompt an alternative Project 2025 sure to cause Heritage’s foundations to shake.
Liturgically speaking, we are in Year C, the third year in a Lectionary journey through the synoptic Gospels. We’re trekking through Luke. Had Joseph McCarthy known what was in this third Gospel, he would have hauled its readers before the House Un-American Activities Committee with proof of communist leanings.
Stan Dotson
Friends at the MLK Center in Marianao, Cuba, have helped me see the synoptics in a new light. A centerpiece of the center’s work is facilitating a popular (“of the people”) reading of the Bible, a methodology that emerged from base communities in Latin America. In popular education, alfabetización — literacy training — involves more than learning the alphabet and stringing letters into words. Before approaching a text, people learn to read their lives, and they bring that reading to whatever written text they encounter.
Popular educators present a text in the context of a particular grassroots struggle and ask what might have been the struggles facing those base communities of Matthew, Mark and Luke. Although we call these Gospels “synoptic” (seeing together), each of the three communities also had their particular optics.
The repetitive “kingdom of heaven” imagery in Matthew clues us in on the struggle of his base community: a defiant rejection of allegiance to both empire and faith-based nationalism. Matthew’s optics are political in nature. Mark’s lens is a militant one, with a base community forged in the fires of the Jewish-Roman war and its aftermath, struggling to cope with the post-traumatic disorder of that disastrous war. They were confronting the “strong man” that personified the destructive forces undergirding violence.
Then comes Luke, with the lens of revolutionary economics.
Then comes Luke, with the lens of revolutionary economics.
In the late first century world of Rome and its imperial outposts, the gap between rich and poor was vast, with wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and poverty expanding into ever-widening circles. Reading their lives in this reality, Luke’s community gained new optics through which to see the Jesus story. Their context drew them toward prophetic literature, particularly Isaiah.
One of the clearest clues of this community’s prophetic perspective is where they position Jesus for his core preaching: on a plain, recalling Isaiah’s utopian vision of valleys lifted up and mountains laid low.
In Hebrew Scriptures, “mountains” serve as literary devices in two contrasting ways. Exodus portrays the mountain as residence of a supreme God governing the universe. By contrast, Isaiah sees the mountain as a metaphor of concentrated power, something to be laid low. Given the survival struggle of Luke’s base community, it made sense for them to situate Jesus on the plain.
There is great consistency in Luke’s revolutionary message. He challenged structures of wealth and poverty throughout his writing, from the Magnificat to the emergence of the church in Acts. This kind of seismic social shifting gained the believers the reputation of “turning the world upside down.”
In Luke’s optics, Jesus has two audiences, the rich and the poor. First, he blesses the poor; in Spanish, they are bienaventurados, “well-adventured.” The struggle to overcome poverty is blessed because the poor have the promise of God’s preferential treatment; to them belongs the reign of God.
Popular education involves the poor internalizing this message, de-colonizing minds shaped by domination and awakening a consciousness that propels them to join God in the blessed revolution.
“Cursing as well as blessing is required for making the rough places of privileges and poverty a plain.”
Jesus brings a different word to his second audience: “Woe unto you who are rich.” Cursing (deconstruction) as well as blessing (construction) is required for making the rough places of privileges and poverty a plain. While Luke’s Jesus calls those in the underdeveloped world to de-colonize, he calls us in the overdeveloped world to “de-imperialize” our minds and structures, stripping away layers of expected benefits that come at the expense of the rest of the world.
It’s not easy to hear that riches are revolting. We’re socialized to believe bounty is a blessing, a motive for thanksgiving. We learn to pray “by God’s hands we all are fed” before bellying up to the all-you-can-eat buffet.
Hearing Jesus’ curse, we’re tempted to go away sorrowful. Or we can see the curse as a blessing in disguise. We can hear the word of woe as “woah”— stop it! Stop participating in a predatory economy and join Jesus on the plain, to walk where God’s people are walking.
2025 is a good time for Year C. Never has there been such a volcanic explosion of power creating such tremendous mountains of wealth, with the poisonous lava of poverty flowing over more and more communities. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has generated resistance, calls for collective action and targeted boycotts — shop here; don’t shop there.
I suspect a serious Year C reading would lead us to a more radical set of actions, challenging our very heritage — a consumer culture dependent on the rest of the world to supply its demands. Luke’s Project 2025 calls into question all sorts of everyday behaviors that elevate us far above our neighbors. De-imperializing the mind also could engender radically different congregational economics. Might the good adventure provoke property divestment and redistribution of wealth to congregations in places like Cuba?
A popular Cuban song, Son de la Loma (“They are from the Hills”) begins, “Mama, I want to know where the singers are coming from.” Mama replies, “They’re from the hills, but they are singing on the plain.” This could be the theme song of first world Christians in Year C. May we mortals who are de la loma join the mighty chorus of bienaventurados singing on the plain.
Stan Dotson previously served as associate pastor at First Baptist Church, Matanzas, Cuba. He and his wife, Kim, now serv e on the pastoral staff at Ebenezer Baptist in Marianao, which is the founding congregation of the Martin Luther King Center in Cuba. They also work to form and support congregational partnerships between churches in the United Staters and churches in the Fraternity of Baptist Churches of Cuba.
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