Reflection on Hebrews 13:12-16

The suffering of Jesus outside the gate implies a new place of salvation wherein the center of religious activity was moved to the periphery. Salvation lies outside the gates of ideological, political, and socio-economic walls that surround our religious compounds and shape the structure of Christendom. The death of Jesus outside the gate implies also a fuller understanding of mission. Since Jesus died outside the gate, mission has become the crossing of the walls and gates of secured and comfortable compounds, the continuous movement toward him to bear the abuse he endured for the world. Mission is crossing frontiers, geographic, political, social, economical, which lie beyond the center of power. –Orlando Costas, Christ Outside the Gates

A friend of mine spent Holy Week in Rome, attending services at St. Peter’s and visiting other famous churches in that “holy city.” I know the thrill of walking into such magnificent structures and breathing in the rich history they represent; a history that revolves around their central role in religious activity. One such church is called “St. Paul’s Outside the Walls.” It is so named because St. Paul is buried there, not far from where he was executed, and both the place of execution and the church are outside of the walls of Rome as it existed in Paul’s day. So Paul, too, ended up like Jesus, tortured and executed outside the gate, outside the walls of the city, thrown out with the trash.
And this is what I am called to focus on first in relation to the reading from Hebrews 13:12-16 and the quotation from Costas: it is not St. Peter’s in Rome or St. Paul’s Outside the Walls that is the center of religious activity. Instead, if we are disciples of Jesus then the center of religious activity is Manna House and the intersection of Jefferson and Claybrook; the center of religious activity is not the Vatican or Jerusalem, but wherever people are being marginalized, oppressed, exploited, pushed aside, kept down, and we as disciples of Jesus are responding with hospitality and resistance, compassion and struggle for justice. Our salvation, our being made whole through the love of God, comes not through famous churches, but through our loving relations with people who are infamous, our standing with and for people who are rejected, neglected, despised.
Second, I want to focus not only on Jesus being executed outside the gates, outside the city walls (and Paul too), but on how Jesus’ life and death and resurrection opens to us a way to break down those walls. I was led in my reflection to Ephesians 2:14-19, another place in Scripture where Jesus is spoke of in relation to a wall. Paul writes that Jesus takes down “the dividing wall of hostility,” that is the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles, through the cross, that is, through Jesus’ life of self-giving love and resistance to the powers that led to his execution and that was overturned by the resurrection.
Here is the path we are called to with “fear and trembling”—we too, like Jesus and with Paul are called outside the walls to the cross in order to take down the walls. The walls cannot be taken down by remaining safely inside of them, where our privilege is protected, where our way of life is secured, where the usual order of business is maintained. The walls can only be taken down by having our lives defined by God’s loving, life-giving, liberating power and that means by having our lives defined by loving relationships with others, especially those outside the walls, instead of by walls and by those who make and maintain walls.
Once identification, solidarity, with persons already outside the walls is made, we start to share in the denigration and rejection they so brutally experience. Our hearts are broken not only by the barbs of little insults from family and friends or others who do not understand why we even want to be with “those people,” but also from knowing deeply how the lives of those with whom we seek to serve and be in solidarity are broken by violence, addiction, mental illness, loss of family, police harassment, and more.
But this is Jesus’ way that takes him and us outside the walls and takes down the walls: he left the pearly gated community of heaven, and entered fully into identification with those outside the gates. He did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a slave, being made in human likeness. And in this state, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross! (Philippians 2:6-11). How to overcome walls built by hatred and exclusion? Those walls are overcome only by lives that intentionally go outside the walls to be with, to serve and to struggle with those outside the walls.
I think, finally, of Paul’s words in Romans 12:21, “Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good.” If we are to overcome walls we must love as God loves, we must overcome evil as God overcomes evil, not by violence, not by more control and domination, but through love. We must go to those abandoned places of empire, like Jefferson and Claybrook, and faithfully remain in loving relationship with everyone who shows up: homeless, poor, prostitutes, persons who are mentally ill, addicts and dealers, other people coming to volunteer, and even the police. And in doing this faithfully offer welcome through hospitality and faithfully offer resistance to anything that denigrates and despises human dignity. In those two practices the cross will come, and in those two practices are the seeds of resurrection.