They Can’t Have Jesus

This piece began as a sermon I preached on July 30, 2023, days after the death of Sinéad O’Connor. I’ve reshaped it here for readers rather than listeners, but the heart of it is unchanged.

Intense joy causes the sharing of good news, and good news causes intense joy. The two feed each other. We can change our whole atmosphere by charging it with gratitude and the sharing of good news. We create a field of ongoing surprises.

This is the secret of Jesus. Maybe the secret of the cosmos: sharing and enjoying our good stories.

But was Jesus successful? I ask because in your own righteous struggle, it might feel like you have failed. So stay with me while we look at a moment when Jesus himself seemed to feel that way.

Luke tells us that as Jesus approached Jerusalem—the heart of his ancestral community—he saw the city and wept over it:

“If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.”

—Luke 19:41–44

This passage shows how oppressed people can imagine that the state will protect them. The late Cornell professor John Henrik Clarke called it “the contradiction of thinking your oppressor will participate in your liberation.” When Jesus ran into this contradiction, he discovered that people who need liberation may sometimes participate in their own oppression.

It almost looks to me like Jesus was throwing up his hands. Like he was saying, I brought you good news in dark, distressing times, and you rejected it. I tried to help you change your atmosphere.

His frustration was not only with the casually violent imperial powers. It was with how his own oppressed people often found reasons to stay loyal to the economics of Rome—or were contained by fear, knowing, rightly, that they didn’t have the firepower to withstand the state.

It’s not uncommon for people to turn on those they consider losers. Jesus was seen as one of their own precisely because he refused to play a role in the domination system, a system that prioritizes winners. To so many, Jesus was a loser.

Sinéad O’Connor was the winner. But so many of us, it seems, saw her as a loser. She experienced a challenging life filled with personal and professional struggles, including childhood abuse and fights with mental health issues like bipolar disorder and PTSD. Her public controversies, especially when she tore a photograph of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in 1992, caused a lot of backlash, death threats, and a noticeable drop in her commercial success, even though she was famous for her hit song “Nothing Compares 2 U.” The photo she destroyed had belonged to her late mother, who had physically abused her. Sinead saw the church as the institution that enabled the harm done to vulnerable children.

But still I see her as a winner.

The age-old struggle for survival against dismissive power can feel like a losing game. A waste of time. You can feel it in your body. Maybe this is why we talk about the body of Christ. He was one more body among all the bodies that absorbed the sadness of watching the powerless continue to sleep.

Sometimes I feel discouraged
and think my work’s in vain,
but then the Holy Spirit
revives my soul again.

“There Is a Balm in Gilead.” Even the healer needs the hope of being healed.

Before I explain why the good news is Gospel, there’s a problem you and I can work on. It’s the problem with preaching about Jesus. It can be a distraction. A diversion.

Jesus would have preferred that we center his message—the message that was good news to the poor. A message that saved them from insecurity, from futility, from degradation.

Jesus’ message was good news because it was to the poor. It was good news to the poor because it meant brokenhearted people would be healed. Because it meant captives and prisoners would be released. Because it brought on “the acceptable year of the Lord”—what we might call a new day.

And finally, it meant comfort. Comfort for all his people who carried in their bodies the effects of dismissive power.

So let’s remember why we call it Gospel: because it was Good News to the Poor.

When we hear the word Gospel, our minds jump to Christianity. But originally the word was political.

In the Greek world, before Alexander the Great and on into the Roman Empire, the word referred to reports of political or military victories. In the Roman era there was the “gospel” of Caesar Augustus—the Pax Romana, the so-called age of peace.

Long before that, in 490 B.C., Persia invaded Greece. Against all odds, Greece won, and afterward sent heralds carrying the euangelion—the gospel—into every town and village, to tell the people what had happened and declare to them that they were free. Those heralds were the first “evangelists.”

You can apply this to U.S. history. When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1862, to take effect January 1 of the following year, newspapers were among the evangelists carrying the news across the country. And as you well know, some newspapers—especially in Texas—refused to preach the gospel, the good news to the poor.

When Jesus was born, the Gospel of Caesar, the Gospel of Empire, was the government’s way of gaslighting conquered peoples. Jesus emerged in that environment, and he exposed the “gospel” of conquest. He said, in effect: They call it good news, but what they’re telling you is not good news. Stop and pay attention, and you’ll see that what the empire is preaching is not good news.

Good news is for the poor.

Even the suffering of Jesus became good news. The state execution of Jesus became good news. Here’s how: it informs the powerless. It informs their very bodies. It informs their broken hearts. And the message of resurrection from the dead is for bodies that took all they could take.

Maybe you can’t figure out why you feel like giving up. You’re not anemic. You’re sleeping okay. You’re eating well.

Must Jesus bear the cross alone,
and all the world go free?
No, there’s a cross for everyone,
and there’s a cross for me.

These weary bones carry so much trauma—from watching the misbehavior of law enforcement and Congress, corporations and judgy judges, bossy bosses and cussy customers, prevaricating professionals, nasty neighbors, and supercilious, self-important students. And their parents.

Your weary bones also carry a psychic heaviness inflicted by the willfully ignorant, who can be the nicest, most generous people you’ll ever meet.

The message of the suffering and death of Jesus is good news because it tells us we are not losers, no matter what we lost. We are winners. And we will rise.

We are characterized as brutes, sometimes seen as unworthy of life. Some of us live in Guam or American Samoa. We are winners. Some of us live on the Eastside, some in East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. Some of us live on the Avenue, or in Central Appalachia. Some of us live in Colonia, or Lompoc, and some in Hokkaido. Some of us experience intimate partner violence. Some of us have HIV. Some of us are old. Some of us are addicts. Some of us are Queer. Some of us are neurodivergent. Some of us are inmates. Some of us are disabled veterans. Some of us are invisible.

Jesus wants us to realize—to actualize—that we are winners. People who know they are winners no longer turn on each other. They don’t put each other down. They recognize when they’re talking to a winner. They show up for one another.

It’s our only hope. It’s the only way we’re going to make it. We must never give up.

There are times I feel like this world’s darkness is not just insuperable but unsurvivable—when the struggle feels pointless and the world doesn’t understand. Then I remind myself: that’s the point. The world doesn’t understand.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . In Him was life, and the life was the light of the people. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not understand it.”

—John 1

About a decade before I first preached this, Saturday Night Live ran a fake movie trailer called “DJesus Uncrossed”—a spoof of Quentin Tarantino, with Jesus rolling away the stone and coming back not with mercy but with vengeance, action-movie style.

Here’s what I take from that clip: people know who Jesus really is. The joke only works because we know him as the Prince of Peace. A revenge-movie Jesus is funny—or offensive—precisely because everybody, believer or not, knows that’s not him. It seems the people announcing his name in public all the time are often the least convinced.

Fox News was outraged. Sean Hannity blew a gasket (though we never quite know how much of that is performance). SNL was spoofing a director. Fox claimed it was insulting Jesus.

The powers and principalities are always trying to steal Jesus. In a reverse Robin Hood move, they try to take Jesus from the weak and give him to the powerful. They know that if they take Jesus from the powerless, the powerless are left with nothing.

But sorry—they can’t have Jesus. They only have the name of Jesus.

I know there is power in the name of Jesus. At all times, Jesus is the inevitable winner, and so are you. Just nevah give up.

But depending on the intention, preaching about Jesus, singing about Jesus, holidays built around Jesus—all of it can be a deviation. When people divorce the message of Jesus from the name of Jesus, the power is imaginary. Their prayers are illusions. Their gods are Capital and property.

But make no mistake: there is still power in the name of Jesus. This power has ushered you into God’s intended reality.

There is power—to break every chain.

A closing prayer, from the ancestors’ spiritual:

I got a crown up in-a that kingdom—
Ain’t-a that good news!
I got a crown up in-a that kingdom—
Ain’t-a that good news!

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