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A Hermeneutic of Hunger

Jubilee Baptist Church

Luke 4:14 Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. 15 He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.


16 When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

18 ‘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,

19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’


20 And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21 Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’


The liberation theologian Dorothy Soelle wrote about three different habits of noticing (the fancy word for this is hermeneutics) that people can take when approaching a story. The first is trust: we can approach a story with naivety, believing in a straightforward way what we’re hearing and the reliability of the storyteller. This would be the approach of those who say things like “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” or the approach of those who see, say, the richest man in the world throwing up the Nazi salute and yet believe it when pundits say “Oh he was just giving his heart to the crowd.” The advantage of this is that it’s an effective way of organizing people: it’s easier for people to join a movement for a story they actually believe in than one they condescend to tell.


The second approach is suspicion. This approach looks for the motives behind a story, paying attention to how power uses propaganda and the emotional attachment forged by art to get people to submit. And so a hermeneutic of suspicion turns stories inside outside and upside down to find even residual stains of patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, white supremacy, and bourgeois values to unmask the text for what deep down it really is: a power play. A hermeneutic of suspicion might look at the Bible in terms of the kings who compiled the Old Testament or the church councils that canonized the New and think about how these stories and the way they’re framed might serve the interests of those in power. The advantage of this framework is that it invites people to look beneath the surface and not just passively accept what they’re being told—it opens up a certain feistiness in relation to authority, which is something I would generally encourage.


But Soelle wrote about a third framework, which she calls a hermeneutic of hunger. She was worried about the way that a posture of trust can dupe people, but also the way that posture of suspicion can train people into an objective distance, as though the only way to notice the structures of power is to stand above them—and above everyone underneath power, too. Soelle was interested in a form of noticing that emerged not out of anyone’s superiority to those cute little traditions and superstitions that primitive, unrefined people still hold onto, but from beneath, out of a longing for a better world. Soelle imagined a kind of noticing that emerged out of that hunger, where the workers of the world scrounge every story available to them for kindling that could fuel liberation. This kind of noticing already assumes a certain degree of suspicion, not because every text is really just a power play, but because the person hearing pays attention with the ears of someone intimately familiar with the way that power works. And so a hermeneutic of hunger retains all the resources for dissent that you get from a hermeneutic of suspicion, but it also allows for a “second naivety,” a new kind of earnestness that people can believe in an organize around.


I bring all of this up because I wonder if we see Jesus offering his synagogue that kind of hunger in our story this morning? The story begins with Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returning to Galilee. So Jesus is imbued with a kind of power. This story doesn’t shy away from power or think it’s necessarily a bad thing. But the kind of power matters. This is specifically the “power of the Spirit.” And that Spirit is with Jesus following his time in the desert, where the Ruler of this world tempts him with three different forms of power: economic in the production of bread, political in the offer of dominion over the nations, and religious in the suggestion he leap from the Temple. And throughout that story, the devil is quoting Scripture to justify his temptations.


So Jesus goes back to his home, back to his synagogue, having just passed through this crucible of being tempted with Scripture, and resisting that temptation with Scripture, to read Scripture in the synagogue where he grew up, in this place that is poor and oppressed, that is positioned within an extractive economy, a brutal imperial politics, and a Temple religion that is both a place of worship and a tool of the local authorities.


And these are the Scriptures he reads:


18 ‘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,

19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’


Then he gives the shortest sermon in the history of the world: Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.


Now, this Scripture is actually a medley of verses from the book of Isaiah. So Jesus, or whoever wrote down this story, is working creatively with Scripture to tell us what Jesus’ ministry is really about. So the posture here is not one of just repeating the same old story, telling people the same old familiar things they come to synagogue to hear. And it’s certainly not one that’s using Scripture as propaganda to get the people to stay in line. Right? If the powers of this world tempted Jesus to seize imperial power, to be another Caesar, going right to the top to make change from above, in Jesus own self-description, he uses Scripture to say, “Nope, I’m at home on the bottom, with the oppressed, with the workers, with the poor, with the indebted, with the captives, with those whom this bloodsucking economy has made unwell or doesn’t have room for. Those are my people.


And so right away, naivety, infantile trust in power and authority, are off the table in Jesus’ way of paying attention to stories and to the world around him. Jesus isn’t above a little suspicion, he’s certainly not too superior for some feistiness toward the power and principalities. He is here to subvert the way power functions in the world as it is, he’s here to end extractive relations, he’s here to pick up the people whom the powers of this world seek to discipline because they don’t “fit.” This passage that Jesus quotes from is a Jubilee passage, calling back to the command to free debtors, free slaves, give citizenship to immigrants, restore land to people who had it taken from them. That’s the ministry that Jesus is here to do and so he’s not interested in any of the pieties or allegiances or traditions that would have us compromise with Caesar or the devil.


That’s why in this place, we assert against the powers of this world that the very presence of God is already with workers, is already with people of color, is already with trans and queer people, is already with women, is already with immigrants and asylum seekers and strangers in this land. And so we, as earnest believers in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, should be suspicious of any narrative, any story, any practice that scapegoats any of these neighbors. There should not be anything complicated about Christians saying that ICE is Satanic and treating them as such. The same is true of any structure or person who would deny LGBTQ+ people rights, who would come after labor unions, who would shut down health funding or deny people’s medical claims. There is a longstanding Christian tradition that an unjust law is no law at all, and we should use every tool available to us, from lobbying, to protesting, to bureaucratic subterfuge to keep these satanic powers from enforcing unjust laws. That’s right in line with how Jesus describes himself in this passage.


And yet, at the same time, I think that Jesus goes beyond suspicion, to hunger. Notice that in his very brief sermon, he says to the people, This scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. Jesus doesn’t replace the story with himself. He doesn’t say, the words don’t matter anymore, the stories you tell don’t matter anymore—they were just masks for power after religious authorities returned from exile. No, Jesus wants the people to know that the power of the Spirit, the kind of power he’s come to build—which is very real, in fact so real that imperial power can only imitate and try to domesticate it—that kind of power rests upon the people in their hearing of the story and connecting it to their own situation.


Jesus scrounges their shared stories for resources that will open the people up to liberation, give them a taste of the life they truly deserve as children of God, i.e. creatures in this world. I think suspicion, and deconstruction, are necessary correctives to the fascist religion that’s organized itself in our world in such a powerful way. But I also worry that some forms of suspicion, some forms of deconstruction, are also training habits of alienation—if we become so suspicious of joining a movement that we stay atomized, keeping one another and the hope for a better future at arm’s length, then we continue to play into the hands of power. Because “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism,” because the market has colonized basically every aspect of life, it’s possible to be technically correct in critiquing something, and still be kind of a jerk. Suspicion can become it’s own kind of Calvinism, a liberal total depravity where everything you do or try is wrong, any community or movement you might join is fatally flawed from the jump. I’m afraid that some of our neighbors are so afraid of food poisoning from one table that they won’t let themselves gather around another.


But Jesus knows we’re hungry. He doesn’t ask us to forget the ways we’ve been wounded by other communities, he doesn’t ask us to pretend a lot of American religion isn’t really the worship of evil. But he wants us to know there is still sustenance in these stories. He wants us to risk getting caught up in the power of the Spirit. He wants us to join each other in the movements of that Spirit in freeing captives, paying off debts, tripping up fascists, and holding each other when we’re hurting.


Friends, we live in grim times, scary times, times when suspicion is warranted. But that means we need each other more than ever. We need Jesus’ Spirit to sustain us more than ever. We need to join our unions, meet with those colleagues to see how we can keep sharing information when the official channels are shuttered, go to the next meeting to learn how to disrupt ICE, we need to figure out who at the DMV will get the right documents for our trans members and neighbors without asking questions. Jesus comes as a liberator, but he does so as someone who invites us to get caught up in liberation, to join our neighbors, to build the power of the Spirit, to scrounge and scrap in earnest hunger for a better world. Amen.



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