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Rejecting the Rage Against Justice and Equity

Rejecting the Rage Against Justice and Equity

Last updated on: January 31, 2025 at 11:06 am by Herb Montgomery

Rejecting the Rage Against Justice and Equity 2025-01-31T11:06:31-04:00 Herb Montgomery

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Part 3 of Confronting the Discomfort of Our History and Our Present

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(Read this series from the beginning at Part 1 and Part 2.)

Again, in our story this week, Jesus is touching on parts of his community’s history to which his audience responds with immediate, vitriolic, and even murderous rage.

However we explain that rage, it foreshadows the Roman cross that Jesus will end up on later in the story. Both instances Jesus mentions were stories of Divine punishment on a society for practicing systemic injustice while God favors those outside of their community. Is their rage because these stories challenge a “chosen-people,” exceptionalist, supremacist worldview?

Our story this week reminds me of choices I have to continue to make in my own life. Those of us who benefit from the racism in our nation’s history and in our present economic, political, and legal systems must allow ourselves to be confronted by the discomforting parts of both our history and our present.

Not everyone responded to Jesus with this anger and rage, however. Those on the margins to whom Jesus would extend inclusion and a path toward justice saw Jesus’ teachings as good news, as gospel!

Today we need to pay close attention to responses that answer justice and reparations movements with rage and responses that define these movements as good news. Consider recent passion around the work to remove programs for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), beyond diversity, equity and inclusion in relationship to race. I think of cisgender rage against defining gender in nonbinary ways. I think of the response of some men to gender equity. I think of responses to calls for LGBTQ justice. I think of the rage against social safety nets for elderly people and children: there is more passion to “put prayer in schools” (anyone can already pray in school. Public schools simply cannont privilege one religion over another) than free lunches. I think of the rage certain sectors of our society feel toward calls for economic justice for the poor.

This week’s story reminds me that if at times I feel like throwing the Jesus of the synoptic gospels off a cliff, I’m in the right story! I’m being confronted with the discomforting truth of why we too often respond to calls for justice in our time with the same resistance and rage. What our story whispers to us is that this rage against justice today is the same rage that placed our Jesus in our gospel stories on that Roman cross. And it calls us to reject that rage and instead embrace a future where we live in a world that is a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone.

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About Herb Montgomery

Herb Montgomery, director of Renewed Heart Ministries, is an author and adult religious re-educator helping Christians explore the intersection of their faith with love, compassion, action, and societal justice. You can read more about the author here.

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