Good News for Some, Bad News for Others
by Leo Diaz
I was having lunch the other day when I overheard a conversation between two businessmen waiting for their table. One of them was hardselling the other on a new mapping system that a competitor was using. He seemed convinced that it would make their jobs easier somehow. He used words like “streamline” and "alignment", emphasizing how much it would free up to focus on the work that “brings in actual dollars.” Even after they sat down, I could still hear him passionately make his case.
This got me thinking how everyone has something they think is good news. Something they believe will make their lives better. Something they must share with others. A “gospel”, if you will.
The thing is, some gospels are only good news for some people, and bad news for others.
Take for instance the idea behind “Make America Great Again”. During the last three elections, this felt like good news to half the country. But for millions of others, these four words were a dog whistle, reminding people of a time when life wasn’t so great. Dangerous even.
And this raises an important question. What happens when good news for some, means bad news for others? The question becomes even more complicated when we consider the most well known “good news” in human history, the Gospel of Jesus.
A Liberating Gospel
In 1968, at a conference in Medellin, Colombia, Catholic clergy agreed to frame a biblical response to the systematic violence and economic oppression affecting Latin America at the time. The way they saw it was, the Gospels they inherited from European colonizers and American missionaries were one-dimensional. It addressed our spiritual condition, the saving of the soul and personal holiness with an eye on the afterlife, but it didn’t confront the everyday suffering of the poor and the human systems that exploited them. This “good news” gave them hope for an afterlife, but it was bad news for them in this life.
So together they decided to formally align themselves with the marginalized and declared their public defense of the poor. They agreed that for the Gospel to be truly good news for all, and not just those at the center of religious and political power, it must demand a “preferential option for the poor.” In other words, the Jesus of the Gospels stands with the poor in their suffering and that the Church in Latin America was called to do the same.
This became the birthplace of the liberation theology movement that spread throughout Latin America in the late 60s and 70s through a network of hundreds of thousands of small house churches made up of poor and working class people. Twice a week these groups would gather to pray for their lands, study the bible through the lens of “la lucha”, their struggles, and peacefully mobilize within the communities most in need to bring about systemic reform. This was finally good news for the poor.
The Gospel According to Jesus
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
In Luke 4:18-19, Jesus stands up in the synagogue of his hometown and repurposes the words of Isaias into the most unusual message. Unlike the messiah-types that came before him spreading gospels of militaristic liberation, Jesus was declaring that his good news begins at the bottom, among the poor and oppressed, right here, right now, rising to the top, liberating and reshaping all of the up.
And here’s the thing, history has shown us that there will always be opposition to a Gospel that’s good news for the powerless. If left to the American empire, the poor will remain poor, the suffering will remain suffering. But as God’s beloved community, our calling is to make Jesus’ words in Luke 4 break free from our heads and come to life through our bodies, out into the lowly places.
Discussion Questions:
What are some ways you can embody the holistic Gospel in our American empire?
Can you think of something that was good news for some but was actually bad news for others?
If the holistic Gospel of Jesus is liberating from the bottom up, what does that look like for those at the top?