Jesus, the Liberator – the view from the Gospels

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Naming Jesus “the Liberator” is practically synonymous with naming him “Saviour,” “Redeemer,” and “Deliverer.” Incidentally, the Catechism of the Catholic Church in referring to Christ’s work, uses the terms “redemption,” “salvation,” and “liberation” in that order of frequency. The apparent tension in Jesus’ preaching about the  kingdom of God yet-to-come and the kingdom already-here is like the two sides of a same coin. One implies the other. The eschatological work of Christ and His Spirit necessarily leads all people towards an authentic social and political progress here and now. The liberating work of the crucified and risen Jesus encompasses not only the age to come, but also the present human life on earth.

O’Collins (1998) gathered from the Gospels some instances of Jesus’ social activism towards the realisation of the kingdom here and now:

5 1. Jesus’ concern with human progress in the social area:

• rejection of divorce by either partner (Mark 10:2-12);

• command to love one’s enemies (Luke 6:27-28);

• foundation for men and women of a new egalitarian family based on obedience to the divine will (Mark 3:34-35).

2. Jesus touching the political life of people, both nationally and internationally:

• extending the divine mercy to tax-collectors, who collaborated with Roman and Jewish leaders (Luke 18:9-14; 19:9-10);

• speaking out against hatred of foreigners in the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37);

• prophetically electing the Twelve as a symbol of his desire to reform Israel (Mark 3:13-19).

3. Jesus leading the way in delivering people from bondage with a religious revolution with obvious social and political implications:

• his table fellowship with impure outcasts (Mark 2:13-17; Matthew 11:19; Luke 15:1; 19:7);

• his attitude in welcoming women as disciples (Luke 8:1-3).

Quoting J.P. Meier, O’Collins states that through the beatitudes, Jesus is promising to do in his kingdom “what Israel’s human kings often failed to do: defend widows and orphans, secure the rights of the oppressed, an in general see justice done.” He also expresses his view that in Jesus’ sermon in the synagogue in Nazareth, Luke was expressing “what Jesus’ proclamation aimed at: a new religious and social order that would bring liberation for those oppressed by various forms of evil.”

O’Collins further states that “Mark and then Luke and Matthew, when remembering and interpreting Jesus for their communities of faith, acknowledged, or at least implied, that the offer of divine salvation he made through his words and deeds also enjoyed massive social and political repercussions. The new attitudes towards and relationships with others that he encouraged must deeply shape human beings in their progress towards a new society, both here and hereafter.”8 O’Collins, however, points out that the “modern dream of emancipation, through which free and intelligent human beings would everywhere become active subjects of civilised progress rather than remain passive objects of oppression, has collapsed. Along with the rational liberalism encouraged by the Enlightenment, Marxism now counts among the ‘gods who have failed.’”

Therefore, more than ever, we Christians are called to fully live “the ‘Gospel values’ (Redemptoris Missio, 20) as in hope we all journey together towards the final kingdom. In a special, but not exclusive way, Christ’s liberating work continues through the Church, the sacrament of salvation for all human the humiliation of his death.” Scheffler points out that Jesus’ stern command to his disciples not to tell anyone about his Messiahship (Mark 8:3) has been used by many commentators “to try to make Jesus out as a completely a-political figure,” a view that Scheffler strongly disagrees with.

For him, “Jesus’ Messiahship does have political implications, but the difference is that it entails far more than what is contained in national and political expectations. The Lucan Jesus, in particular, is definitely not portrayed as obtaining earthly political power for his own benefit, but as being directed against political power which results in all kinds of suffering amongst people (cf Luke 22:25-27). Jesus’ Messiahship challenged the relevant interest groups of his time to such an extent that they in fact crucified him as a political criminal … He is indeed the Messiah, but for him it does not mean immediate glory and honour, but actually implies that he must suffer, be rejected and die (Luke 9:18-21).”

For Scheffler, Jesus “saves people from all forms of suffering … his redemption activities … (are) probably the basic characteristic of Jesus as he is portrayed by Luke.”15 3. Jesus, the Liberator – the view from Liberation Theology We hope that by now it has become clear that the title Liberator attributed to Jesus has a strong practical connotation, with clear Scriptural roots.

However, it must be pointed out that this title has come to such a prominence in the life and doctrine of the Church only in the last century. It happened through the advent of a new way of doing theology that started in the late 1960’s in Latin America and eventually spread to the whole Catholic world. Liberation Theology seized the title and brought it to the prominence that it nowadays enjoys. Broader Gospel reflections, like the ones made by O’Collins and Scheffler and referred to in the previous section, were motivated by the appearance of liberation theology. Obvious as those reflections might appear for us today, we believe that that they might not have come to fruition, at least not in the pungent and comprehensive ways that they have been phrased, if liberation theology had not arisen.

Yet, it is our thought that the reflection on Jesus the Liberator from the perspective of the Gospels should programmatically precede the reflection from the perspective of liberation theology, even though they are chronologically and historically reversed. With that said, we would like now to turn our attention to liberation theology. But, again, we will make another chronological reversal. By all accounts, this new theological way was born in the continent that has the largest proportion of Christians, and particularly Catholics, in the world: Latin America. And liberation theology in Latin America arose within a particular context: the huge economical, social and political inequalities that plagued that continent in the second half of the twentieth century, and that still do, to a large extent, today.

However, we would like in this section to digress about liberation theology in the broader context of the whole Catholic world. We will leave the analysis of some specific aspects of the Latin American theology of liberation for the next section. beings. Christ’s community serves the kingdom by its preaching, by sharing new life in him, and by its ‘commitment to justice and peace, education and the care of the sick, and aid to the poor and children’ (ibid.)”. “Christian believers should seek to alleviate and eliminate miseryWe will start with a quote from Robert Brown, which to a certain extent explains our decision to talk about Jesus the Liberator before talking about liberation theology: “liberation theologians have … (forced) … us (Western Christians) back to the person and the story (of Jesus Christ), before the theologies developed, and (challenged) us to look with new eyes at material we thought we understood.

In a very important sense, there is nothing ‘new’ here. We have heard all these things before, though they have usually been surrounded by many other things that make the figure of Jesus more palatable to us. Liberation theologians, in other words, are not making up new stories about Jesus; they are simply recalling some of the old stories that have gotten buried in the course of 2000 years.” Peter Phan believes that “future historians of Christian Theology will no doubt judge liberation theology to be the most influential movement of the twentieth century, possibly even since the Reformation.” One can say that the contemporary understanding of Jesus Christ, the Liberator “has targeted various arenas of oppression – gender (white feminist, womanist, and mujerista theology), sexual orientation (gay and lesbian theology), race (Black theology), class (Latin American theology), culture (African theology), and religion (Asian theology), again just to cite a representative few.”18 We would also add political oppression (Middle Eastern theology) to the list.

These references lead us to talk about several liberation theologies. Though some theologies have been predominantly associated with a geographic context, they are not constrained to specific parts of the world. Actually “they are each widespread in all parts of the globe and are often intimately interlocked with each other and mutually reinforcing, so that any genuine liberation theology anywhere must fight against all forms of oppression, be they sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, racism, classism, cultural and religious discrimination, all at once, siding in effective solidarity with victims of all forms of oppression.”

Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Dominican priest from Peru, is one of the precursors of liberation theology. From that perspective he redefines theology as “a critical reflection on the Church’s presence and activity in the world, in the light of revelation. … Theology is reflection, a critical attitude. First comes the commitment to charity, to service. Theology comes ‘later.’ It is second. The Church’s pastoral action is not arrived at as a conclusion from theological premises. Theology does not lead to pastoral activity, but is rather a reflection on it. … Theology, therefore, as a critical reflection on the Church’s presence and action in the world, in the light of faith, not only complements the other two functions of theology (wisdom and rational knowledge) but even presupposes them.”21through working for a world situation in which individuals will be freed from all oppression. The bishops at Vatican II reflected on the manifold nature of this degradation: ‘Never before today have human beings been so keenly aware of freedom, yet at the same time, new forms of social and psychological slavery make their appearance’ (Gaudium et Spes, 4)” The work of Christ, the Liberator, is the core thread between the kingdom here and now and the kingdom yet to come.

Again, from O’Collins, “faith in Christ’s liberating work inescapably implies an obligation to strive for progress towards peace in our world. That earthly life continues to be so brutal for so many is intolerable. Their faith in Jesus our Liberator should impel Christians to take up the cause of those who suffer economic injustice, cultural backwardness or any other form of human misery. Jesus’ account of judgement sets our hope for the coming kingdom in just such a context of responsibility for the alleviation of physical and mental suffering. ‘I was hungry and you gave me food’ (Matt 25:35). The sequence is not: ‘I was hungry and you preached patience to me.’ There is a hard particularity about the duty imposed by the hope for the coming kingdom. … Social and political action proves the truth of our belief in the climax of Christ’s liberating work: the complete redemption to come for human beings and their world.” E. Scheffler, a South African theologian, also extracts from the Gospel of Luke an image of Jesus as the savior or liberator for various kinds of human sufferings: political, economical, social, psychological, physical, and spiritual. According to him, “Jesus himself also suffered on these different levels of life and is also ultimately exalted after his death.

Returning, though, to the original issue of the preferential option for the poor, Michael Cook speculates, after Alfred T. Hennelly, “that ‘the real, though unexpressed, major thesis of The Liberation of Theology is that the entire millennium and a half of Constantinian Christianity has involved a gradual and massive ideologisation of the gospel in favour of powerful and privileged interests in western society.’” As a result, states Cook, the “implication for theological method of this relationship between faith and ideology is that one must continuously engage the concrete situation in order to discover what God is revealing here and now.” To counter this presumed ideologisation, liberation theologians adopted a key, albeit controversial, element of their method: the hermeneutical cycle, or hermeneutics of suspicion, as some critics refer to it. Juan Luis Segundo, a Uruguayan Jesuit, has written extensively on it. Essentially, according to Segundo, it involves four steps: “Firstly there is our way of experiencing reality, which leads us to ideological suspicion. Secondly there is application of our ideological suspicion to the whole ideological superstructure in general and to theology in particular. Thirdly there comes a new way of experiencing theological reality that leads us to exegetical suspicion, that is, to the suspicion that the prevailing interpretation of the Bible has not taken important pieces of data into account. Fourthly we have our new hermeneutics, that is, our new way of interpreting the fountainhead of our faith (i.e., Scripture) with the new elements at our disposal.”