Today’s Alleluia comes from Second Timothy 1:10, “Our Savior Jesus Christ destroyed death and brought life to light through the Gospel.” Throughout history, Christians have reflected on the Gospel message within the context of the world they lived in. In our contemporary world, marked by war, colonization, and sin, Christians are called to read the signs of the times and understand how Jesus Christ destroys death and brings life to light anew

Often, when encountering readings of Jesus’s miracles, such as today’s miracle of healing a blind man, we focus on the aspects of superhuman healing in Jesus’s actions. And this is important, since it reveals something about how God is divinely present within the world of Jesus, within all of history, and within our world today. However, liberation theology, specially in the work of Jon Sobrino, has invited us for some time now to see Jesus’s miracle narratives as “signs” of the coming of the kingdom. As meaningful moments and actions that are interpreted by the evangelists, Jesus’s miracles give us a hint towards the ‘real deal’: the world is changing! 

This ‘change,’ this sign of the underlying process of transformation of history, of the meaning of life, has been called by liberation theologians (Ignacio Ellacuría, Jon Sobrino, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Ernesto Che Guevara, Leonardo and Clodovis Boff, and Ivone Gebara amongst others) as the ‘option for the poor’; God’s option for the poor! A promise for those “at the side of the road.” However, this notion of the “poor” seems a little condescending for some, specially those in the place of the blind beggar. Thus, we find ourselves within historian and philosopher Enrique Dussel’s change of scenery to that of the ‘victims,’ which signals the ‘dialectic’ aspect of the condition of poverty (and oppression). What does this mean? That there is no poverty without richness. It means that, despite the narratives that claim that there is not enough for everyone, the fact is that there is. The issue is that it’s over-concentrated and accumulated within a small part of the population of the globe. Hence, Dussel’s proposal of a “liberation philosophy” that invites us to think critically of our current world; to think of our current globalization as an exclusion machine producer; a ‘blind beggar’ producer. His invitation is to imitate Jesus and ask those who have been left at the side of the road by our current world order: “What do you want me to do for you?” 

From this notion of the “option for the poor,” which is then transposed to Dussel’s “perspective of the victims,” arrives the decolonial turn. The latter affirms a historical relation between our current world-system, or order, and colonialism; the relation between the conquering of America (Abya Yala) and our current way of life. This coloniality had its beginnings in the European conquering of the Americas, Asia, and Africa, but continues to persist today. While many peoples, communities, and nations have liberated themselves from colonial control, they suffer from global exploitation, the extraction and destruction of their land, and the erasure of their ways of life and ways of thinking by the hand of powerful nations and corporations located in North America, Europe, and China. In our current world, where colonialism has morphed as a new plague that endangers all life on earth, decolonial thinkers not only ask how we got here and what we can do, but also how we must change this world. 

Consequently, a first step to recognize one of decoloniality’s meanings is to see the underlying ideas and ways of life behind our current way of living; colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. Because, as only a few fully acknowledge, the “logic” behind colonialism seems to be the same as those behind racism and patriarchy: the hierarchization of difference. Instead of looking at the differences between humans as that which makes us siblings of one common race, colonialism demands that we start deciding who is superior, who is more advanced, developed, smart, more capable. With the creation of this hierarchy, supported by racism, patriarchy, and colonialism, the rich and privileged of this world (which includes us in the United States!) are given permission to destroy with a clean conscience. 

Decoloniality is therefore a sort of third step, a move from ‘the poor’ and ‘the victims’, to those who Resist! The people who, like the blind beggar, stop the people who hold power over them and ask for their own recognition. Decoloniality is a way of living, thinking, believing, and sensing that sets its ‘center’ at the side of the road and claims their primacy. Like the blind beggar who not only asked for pity but gathered the courage to get up and run to Jesus, the colonized of today are not silent anymore, nor passive receivers of grace, but are claiming their presence in our world and history. By doing so, they are showing us that they too shape history, shape the world. 

In the way of the kingdom there is a promise for a change, an even definitive change of time and space. For decolonial thinking, this wait is not for an individual or an institution, neither is a search for the future, but rather a revival of the past to look at the present with the eyes of solidarity between resisting people. It is a path towards building different social networks where “many worlds fit”. This notion of salvation is not ‘simply’ eschatological, but a collective act of belonging, the promise of globalization without exclusion, of freedom for life.

Jesus stands in the foreground with a large group of people, martyrs and Indigenous peoples of Latin America. In the background on the right are Spanish ships and the colonization of Indigenous peoples. On the left are polluting plants, tall city buildings, and police suppressing the people.

This decolonial art piece by Adolfo Pérez Esquivel shows Jesus walking in resistance to the victims of colonization (imperial colonialism on the right, and dictatorships on the left), with the martyrs of the Latin American Church and Indigenous communities.