"Woe to You" | Liz Harlan-Ferlo | February 16, 2025

As many of you know, I taught high school students for most of my previous career. As I was getting ready to return to work from my second maternity leave, I set up a call with the young woman who had been my long-term sub.

I heard that one of my classes, in particular—a group of 10th graders—was a problem. I hadn't met all the members of this particular configuration of students, but I could guess which class she was talking about. It didn't help that the class met every day in a room colloquially known as "the pit"—a bunker-like basement room with cinder block walls and a single window up near the ceiling that let in very little light.

This teacher was new to teaching in private school, where students had their own laptop computers and a strong sense of entitlement. Much of the work was done through collaborative documents. She found these students disrespectful and rude. I suspect they found her condescending and an oversharer. The mistrust was mutual.

There was one story in particular that she said highlighted my challenge to come. There was a day when she realized that no one—not one student—had done the reading that she had assigned, and she was pretty mad. I remember days like that. She abandoned her plans for the day and told them to sit and do the work right then.

Of course, there was one student who had completed the work and had a question. So, beckoned forward, she meekly brought her laptop—silver lid half-bent in deference—to the front of the room where the teacher sat. She opened the homework document, and as they began to look at it together, an insistent dialogue box appeared and reappeared in the upper right corner. The sub caught her own name—then some strongly worded language.

Slowly, it became clear that the class was running a group chat to compare notes on their grievances.

They were a terrible group of students, she wanted me to know, and I should watch out for them.

While I was a little more amused than maybe I should have been, I agreed that she had been treated terribly. It is no small thing to get up in front of teenagers every morning, hour after hour, knowing the attention—if you receive any at all—is ready to eviscerate every aspect of your looks and clothing choices, your curriculum structure, your bad jokes, or your grading expectations.

And teenagers have the sharpest, sharpest noses to smell hypocrisy.

No one is safe.

So, extra good luck to you, then, if you are supposed to teach theology.

In my 10 years as a chaplain, besides creating and officiating at weekly chapel services, I was one of the staff members responsible for attention to the equity of the school's policies and systems, and I attended to our success at making sure all members of the community felt like they belonged. You may recognize this work now as "woke" or DEI.

According to those currently in the White House, DEI work is a stain on the nation.

The argument is that such programs are an offense to meritocracy. This assumes, of course, that pure meritocracy can exist.

Early in my DEI work as a chaplain, students and I hung a poster—a map of the cafeteria—beside the door of the cafeteria, and we invited people to label where they sat and who sat where.

Now, anytime you put up a blank piece of paper on the wall and invite participation, you are risking people pushing past their integrity—especially teenagers.

But what happened was that people took the map at its word and labeled it.

What caused some concern was a collection on the map around a set of tables where most of the African American heritage kids sat. Needless to say, that population in the school was small, and for the most part, they had claimed that space for themselves—both in the building and on the paper map.

Quiet pressure began that we should take the map down.

That week, as he exited the lunchroom, an administrator passed me by. He glanced at the map and shook his head.

"You're causing trouble, Liz," he said, his cheerful voice showing a knife's edge as he headed down the stairs.

I blurted, "The trouble was already here."

The trouble is already here.

By the time we get to today's reading, Jesus has caused some serious first-century trouble in his community.

He did that whole thing—reading the scroll at Nazareth and saying the scripture had now been fulfilled—and was basically run out of his hometown.

In between calling his apostles to drop their work immediately and come with him, he is openly, publicly healing outcasts and—most importantly—ignoring the law of the Sabbath, one of the laws that really held the community together.

So, you might imagine that by this time, his reputation had spread.

The text says:

Jesus came down with the twelve apostles and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and be healed of their diseases, and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out of him and healed all of them.

Jesus doesn't discriminate at this event. He has newly gathered his disciples, but he doesn't give his teaching just to them—he speaks to everyone that comes forward.

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.

Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.

You're probably familiar with this text.

The first part of it is quoted often—it almost feels like a cozy text to us now, strangely.

This first part has been so weaponized against the people to whom it speaks—as in, "Your suffering doesn't matter now because in heaven, God is going to take care of you."

Christians have taken these verses to remove accountability and responsibility for themselves in all kinds of moments.

But what Jesus is actually doing is naming the outsiders—the people who are not in the room.

And the premise of doing that—the premise of even asking that question, "Who is not in the room?"—rests on a foundation of accountability.

We must acknowledge that our spaces, our systems, our cultural choices were built to exclude. That—either consciously or not—we construct communities that welcome some and exclude others.

This is human weakness, and Jesus understands it. Otherwise, he wouldn't have to say these things to begin with.

So, what if we understand Jesus's teaching not just as "God will take care of those people, and we just have to sit back and pray," but as a calling to us?

As Black theologian James Cone says:

"Suffering is not the means for heavenly entrance."

The world Jesus imagines here—the world of the Magnificat—is the world that Jesus is calling his disciples to create.

This, too, is the healing that he has to offer—not just miracles, but the healing of hope.

And it comes through a righteous anger.