Today’s gospel reading from John, situated in the text just after Jesus’s friend/betrayer Judas leaves the Passover table, and immediately before Jesus’s arrest, opens a full three-chapter monologue which has come to be known as the “Last Supper Discourse.” The bulk of this discourse is formed by Jesus speaking personally and prophetically to his best friends regarding what will befall them in the immediate future, after the minions of empire and temple have placed Jesus securely in the tomb, and then turned their faces toward the members of his beloved community. Their blood will be shed, their reputations destroyed, their local liberation movement consigned to the dustbin of history. Just like their beloved savior, there will be no place for them in this world anymore. And yet, Jesus assures them, God is doing something else here, something new, and old and eternal, but something familiar too, palpable in every collective struggle toward love and justice we see in the world today; something promised even before any of the prophets were born. Reading the text from our own geography, it’s almost as if you could press your ear to the page and hear the song that first rose from the shacks of the enslaved: “Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on!!” 

In substance, the Last Supper Discourse is a remarkable testament to the blood-curdling human struggle of hope against fear. And while most preachers and homilists naturally tend to focus on today’s most powerful phrase, “I am the way and the truth and the life”, in my opinion, they do so at risk of what the old newspaper publishers used to call “burying the lead.” 

Jesus says to the disciples in John 14:1-12: “In my parent’s house there are many dwelling places. If there were not, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be.” 

I believe this is the center of gravity on which the entire discourse rests. It is a faithful contextualization of the same promises YHWH spoke to both Abraham and Moses (the previous two most important figures in biblical salvation history), precisely because it affirms YHWH’s allegiance to the deepest heart yearnings of the poor throughout that history: the hope for a dwelling place in which liberation, love, and justice might reign eternally through the divine presence. 

In fact, the brilliant and saintly liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez has made the persistent claim, based largely upon the parable of The Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31), that our own salvation, too, hinges on a personal commitment in this life to creating those spaces, those dwelling places for our unacknowledged neighbors. We must order our lives, he teaches, in such a way that we stop stepping over Lazarus. 

In the parable, the chasm that prevents the rich man from reaching his formerly destitute neighbor in the afterlife is literally created by his own rejection of the responsibility to make a dwelling place for Lazarus on earth. And before we go down the road of spiritualizing or psychologizing this responsibility, Gutiérrez reminds us of two things: The first is that the parable is a faithful reflection of the global reality today – that the nations of the north, in a demonic quest for wealth and hegemony, are actively ignoring and trampling the nations of the south as they lay bleeding and starving on the front sidewalk of the global economy; and second, that this also describes the literal reality in our own place now, in our own neighborhoods, our own communities, driven by our capitulation to neoliberalism, predatory capitalism and the national security state.

As a regular spiritual practice during the past few years, I’ve found myself returning to a particular point of meditation, also arising from John’s Gospel (Chapter 1, verses 35-40). Here, Jesus abruptly turns and faces two prospective disciples whom he notices are following him, and asks:

“What are you looking for?” To which they reply,
“Rabbi, where are you staying?”
“Come, and you will see.”
So they went and saw where he was staying, and they stayed with him that day. 

The invitation to us, here and now, is unambiguous. We are called to consider our own geography, our own neighborhood, our own dwelling places, and to formulate the question anew: “Rabbi, where are you staying?”

To name one example of a person in my life who has asked this question and followed its implications, I hold up my friend André, who for several years now has helped with the ministry of hospitality at the Amistad Catholic Worker. When the COVID pandemic descended upon us back in early 2020, the immediate response from the city of New Haven was to close all of the shelters where many of our unhoused neighbors had been taking emergency refuge. After a while, André began to notice that some of those folks had taken to sleeping in the side stairwells outside of city hall, which was being tolerated for a time by the police. He decided to meet them, and to begin a dialogue which was later expanded to include myself and other friends at the Catholic Worker. 

What grew from these encounters was a collective relationship of mutual trust, which bore fruit that spring when six of those unhoused friends took the courageous step of setting up a new tent city, on a parcel of unused, publicly owned land. With support and solidarity from Amistad, they chose to do this in a semi-public way, claiming legal protection by the expressed authorization found in the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights. The encampment soon became a village, and it consistently housed as many as thirty to forty people during the course of the next three years. 

Tragically and traumatically, just four weeks ago, the mayor ordered the village bulldozed, and the community was scattered. However, at the Amistad Catholic Worker we had become so inspired by the seeds that were sown there, that we established an encampment in our own backyard almost a year ago. To date, five of the neighbors who were evicted from the destroyed tent village have now taken up residence here, and we are contemplating plans to occupy some adjacent city-owned space to accommodate more. As a community, we have made a public pledge: every time the police scatter our unhoused and unacknowledged neighbors, we will gather them back together again.

Image description: An image of a sculpture of a person sleeping on a park bench. The sculpture is a bronze-gray color. The person has cloth draped over their face and upper body, and wears a robe. On their bare feet, which show underneath the robe, you can see the stigmata.

Learn more about Timothy Schmalz and this sculpture.