The vast majority of
people throughout history has been poor, disabled, or oppressed in some way
(i.e., “on the bottom”) and would have experienced history in terms of a need
for change. The people who wrote the books and controlled the social
institutions, however, have almost always been the comfortable people on the
top. Much of history has been recorded from the side of the winners, except for
the unique revelation of the Bible, which is an alternative history from the
bottom: from the side of the enslaved, the dominated, the oppressed, and the
poor, culminating in the scapegoat figure of Jesus himself.
We see in the Gospels that it’s those on the bottom
who tend to follow Jesus: the lame, the poor, the blind, the prostitutes, the
drunkards, the tax collectors, the sinners, the outsiders, and the foreigners.
It is demonstrably those on the inside and the top who crucify him: elders,
chief priests, teachers of the Law, scribes, and Roman occupiers. Shouldn’t
that tell us something really important about perspective? Every viewpoint
is a view from a point, and we need to critique our own perspective if we
are to see and follow the truth all the way through.
Western Christians fail to appreciate liberation
theology because of seventeen hundred years of interpreting the Scriptures from
the perspective of the empowered clergy class, rather than from the perspective
of the marginalized, who first received the Gospel message with such
excitement. Once Christianity became the established religion of the Roman
Empire (after AD 313), we largely stopped reading the Bible from the side of
the poor and the oppressed. This is why our present Pope Francis is such a monumental
breakthrough, holding together both prophet and priest, both bottom and top. He
is sure to suffer much for attempting to do what Jesus did.
For the first 300 years after Jesus’ death,
Christians were the oppressed minority; we were rebels hiding in catacombs. But
by the year 400, Christians had changed places. We moved from the catacombs to
the basilicas. That is when we started reading the Bible not as subversive
literature but as establishment literature. Once we were in a position of power
and privilege, we couldn’t read or understand many Scriptures (for example, the
Sermon on the Mount) because we had to maintain our empire, and in this
direction the Scriptures give us little support or consolation
But when Scripture is read through the eyes of
vulnerability—what we call the “preferential option for the poor” or the bias
from the bottom—it will always be liberating and transformative. Scripture will
not be used to oppress or impress. The question is no longer “How can I
maintain the status quo?” (which just happens to benefit me), but “How can we
all grow and change together?” Now we have no top to protect, and the so-called
“bottom” becomes the place of education, real change, and transformation.
The bottom, or what Jesus calls “the poor in Spirit”
(Matthew 5:3) in his opening address, is where we have no privilege to prove or
protect but much to seek and become. Dorothy Day said, “The only way to live in
any true security is to live so close to the bottom that when you fall you do
not have far to drop, you do not have much to lose.” [1] From that place, we
can be used as instruments of transformation and liberation for the rest of the
world.
References:
[1] Dorothy Day, Loaves
and Fishes: The Inspiring Story of the Catholic Worker Movement (Orbis
Books: 1997), 86.
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