The Awakening

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4 18 and 19)

So I guess Jesus was woke, even if his people stay sleeping.

Asleep may actually be a generous word to describe God’s peoplе. It is more likely that willfully ignorant or actively opprеssive more fit us in this moment.

And that’s a problem. Its a problem because justice isn’t a side project for Jesus. It isn’t a trend or a bandwagon to be jumped on. It isn’t a single action or a single moment. Justice isn’t a four week sermon series, a weekend conference or an onslaught of anti-racist books. Justice is the narrow path, the way that leads to life and life more abundant. But it also led to Jesus’ death.

So we might expect Jesus’ inaugural sermon to be about saving souls, but it isn’t. He shows up talking about overturning systems of classism, ethnocentrism, disease, and evil, all while connecting it to a proclamation of good news. The people in Jesus’ day lived devoutly religious lives that were hyper spiritual and consequently disconnected from the social realities that marginalized people around them. Jesus was trying to reorient people who had traded justice and wholistic faith for vague religiosity.

Our spirituality is no different in the West. We are obsessed with an intangible Jesus that mysteriously subsides in our non-literal hearts, we are focused on individual salvation to go to a place that we know nothing about after we die, and we consequently live unjust lives as though life on earth and the ways we interact with the oppressed in society don’t matter.

The problem is that Jesus didn’t spend his time simply ministering to the invisible world or engaging with spiritual cliches.

He didn’t claim to care about people’s souls or spiritual lives while actively ignoring the conditions and lived experiences that directly impacted the health of their souls. Wholistic health and healing isn’t spiritual, it is wholistic, and western Christianity, in contrast to Jesus, has become a master of isolated soul care while neglecting the body and the mind. The latter two are deemed ‘too political’ because they are connected to racist, classist, patriarchal, ableist, and heteronormative structures that many of us benefit from.

Jesus wasn’t ignorant of the culture he lived in in order to focus on saving souls. He was deeply critical of it and insisted that justice is at the center of the gospel. He knew the oppression happening in his community and invited his disciples to recognize their environment, ask questions about it, and respond to create a different world.

So yeah, Jesus was woke.

To be woke is to know the theoretical ins and outs of our world and recognize that the stories we have been told about are not the whole picture. In a world dominated by stories, knowledge, activity, and cultural norms of cis gendered, heterosexual white men, we must ask the question: “What are the impacts of this narrative both historically and presently?”

Jesus asked questions like this, and he saw oppression and held people and systems responsible. He invited his disciples to unlearn their cultural norms and wake up both to the spiritual and the physical realities around them. He often said the phrase “You have heard it said, but I say to you,” to help his disciples dismantle the cultural messages they had received that were inconsistent with Jesus’ kingdom. And if those guys who spent everyday in the physical presence of God didn’t get it, we ought to be slow in assuming that Jesus doesn’t have some unlearning for us to do in our society. If Jesus invited people in his day to check their privilege (even as occupied people), we are not above the same invitation. I think Jesus might want to wake us up to how our society functions. Being woke means to be aware of the apparatuses of the white cis-hetero-patriarchy, and responding to create equity and elevate human dignity.

And it’s not easy. A phrase like “you have heard it said, but I say to you…” implies that the things that we know, live, practice, and believe deeply may either be untrue or may not be the whole story. And it’s easier to stay as we are.

Getting woke is a revolutionary act of resistance against systems and structures that would strip humans of their inherent value. It is a journey that we take with others to join Jesus in the wholistic healing of the world. It is the real work of the cross of Jesus to see that the world would be restored and renewed, buried with the sin and death of all of it, and resurrected to new life together.