Solidarity Not Judgment
Father Richard Rohr understands the heart of Christianity as God’s loving solidarity with all people and with reality itself:
Through Jesus Christ, God’s own broad, deep, and all-inclusive worldview is made available to us. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the point of the Christian life is to stand in radical solidarity with everyone and everything else. This is the full, final, and intended effect of the Incarnation—symbolized by the cross, which is God’s great act of solidarity instead of judgment. This is how we are to imitate Jesus, the good Jewish man who saw and called forth the divine in Gentiles like the Syrophoenician woman and the Roman centurions who followed him; in Jewish tax collectors who collaborated with the Empire; in zealots who opposed it; in sinners of all stripes; in eunuchs, pagan astrologers, and all those “outside the law.” Jesus had no trouble whatsoever with otherness.
If we are ready to reclaim the true meaning of “catholic,” which is “universal,” we must concentrate on including—as Jesus clearly did—instead of excluding—which he never did. The only thing Jesus excluded was exclusion itself. [1]
Transgender priest Shannon Kearns provides an example of God’s inclusive solidarity with eunuchs, sexual minorities in the time of the prophet Isaiah:
In Isaiah 56:3b–5 … the prophet says, “And don’t let the eunuch say, ‘I’m just a dry tree.’ The Lord says: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, choose what I desire, and remain loyal to my covenant. In my temple and courts, I will give them a monument and a name better than sons and daughters. I will give to them an enduring name that won’t be removed.”
It’s a word of comfort and hope. A word of healing…. Eunuchs are told they will be given an enduring legacy. This piece about being given an “enduring name” rings loudly for many transgender and nonbinary people, especially the ones who have claimed new names…. This also rings loudly for the many people who have felt excluded and cut off from entry into religious spaces because of their gender diversity.…
The message of the eunuchs is that the boxes don’t work. They aren’t fit to live in. They will likely kill us if we stay there. The freedom to move between spaces and worlds, the freedom to claim all of who we are, the freedom to be is what we are called to. The message of the eunuchs also calls us to look around and ask: Who is being excluded? Who is not welcome? Who is there no space for? That list of people and those names that come to your mind? The message in Isaiah 56 and from the story of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 says, “There is space for them in the kingdom of God, too.”… They don’t need to change to be worthy; they are made worthy by wanting to be included.
Anyone who desires the water is welcome.
Solidarity Works Shoulder to Shoulder
Author Renny Golden writes about the biblical meaning of solidarity and her involvement in the sanctuary movement of the 1980s, which provided hospitality for Central American refugees fleeing violence.
Solidarity as a word does not appear in the Bible. As a practice of faith, however, it captures the essence of the [Jewish and Christian traditions]. The Bible is a multithousand-year story of Israelites trying to maintain solidarity with their God and with the poor….
When God first called Moses to lead the people from bondage, he balks and gives excuses [Exodus 3:13, 4:1,10]. But God promises, “I will be with you.” That is the basis of the relationship of solidarity. It is not paternalism or pity; it is working shoulder to shoulder in the act of liberation.…
The birth of Jesus, the incarnation of God into the world, is the paradigmatic act of solidarity. God so loved the world that God took human form. It was total identification with the human condition, total solidarity with human history. God embodied love in a stable in the midst of the most imperialistic empire in the world, and from the very beginning Jesus had to flee the excesses of [imperial] power. From the beginning Jesus was a threat to the established order and so had to flee the death squads of the Roman government [Matthew 2:13–14]. Jesus began life not as one of the elite but as a refugee, homeless, living on the run. Thus, the love of God for the world meant very specifically solidarity with the persecuted, the fugitive, the outcast.
Scholar Robert Chao Romero describes the solidarity of Jesus’ ministry, which embodies good news for the poor and excluded:
God became flesh and launched his movimiento [movement] among those who were despised and rejected by both their Roman colonizers and the elite of their own people. Jesus didn’t go to the big city and seek recruits among the religious, political, and economic elite.… He started in what today would be East LA, the Artesia Community Guild, or Spanish Harlem. To change the system, Jesus had to start with those who were excluded from the system.…
Although the good news of Jesus is for the whole human family, it goes first to the poor and all who are marginalized. Like a loving father [or mother], God loves all [God’s] children equally, but shows special concern for those of his [or her] children who suffer most.…
Riling under the double burden of Roman colonialism and economic and spiritual oppression by the elites of their own people, [the underclass of Jesus’ day] needed first to hear the announcement of God’s liberation. Though they were seen as weaker in the eyes of the Pharisees, Sadducees, and ruling elite, Jesus considered them indispensable; though they were thought to be less honorable, Jesus gave them greater honor. Jesus gave greater honor to those who lacked it (1 Corinthians 12:22–25). He went first to those “outside the gate” of institutional power and authority. [2]
[50] What Cannot Be Loved
But how can we love a man or a woman who…is mean, unlovely, carping, uncertain, self-righteous, self-seeking, and self-admiring?—who can even sneer, the most inhuman of human faults, far worse in its essence than mere murder? These things cannot be loved. The best man hates them most; the worst man cannot love them. But are these the man?…Lies there not within the man and the woman a divine element of brotherhood, of sisterhood, a something lovely and lovable—slowly fading, it may be—dying away under the fierce heat of vile passions, or the yet more fearful cold of sepulchral selfishness, but there?…It is the very presence of this fading humanity that makes it possible for us to hate. If it were an animal only, and not a man or a woman, that did us hurt, we should not hate: we should only kill.
Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (pp. 27-28). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
