Where Liberation Is Already Happening: Luke 6 and Queer Lives
In Luke 6, Jesus reveals a radically liberatory vision of the Kingdom of God that queer people can recognize as a direct challenge to religious systems that prioritize rules, purity, and social order over human dignity and survival.
By healing on the Sabbath and defending his disciples’ hunger, (“Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry?”) Jesus places the actual embodied needs of the real people around him higher than the religious law. Starting in verse 20, his blessings fall not on the powerful or respectable, but on the poor, the hungry, and those who weep. For many LGBTQ+ people who have sat in church pews wondering if God still loves us after experiencing rejection or violence from Christians, these words resonate. We have wept. We have been thrown out of our homes by our families. We have been poor and hungry.
In verse 24, Jesus says, “But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.” Jesus warns that those who benefit from comfort, status, and public approval can become so insulated by power that they lose the ability to recognize the suffering happening around them. He exposes the danger when religion is more concerned with protecting its own authority and respectability than with standing beside the poor, the excluded, and those whose dignity is being denied.
This concept feels painfully close to home in a world where LGBTQ+ people are turned into talking points and scapegoats, singled out as “the problem with society,” even as so many people struggle to simply survive in a system that fails to provide living wages or access to basic healthcare. Politicians blame queer and trans people for the unraveling of society while working class families struggle to afford rent, people ration medication, and loneliness and despair hollow communities out from the inside. It is easier to pinpoint blame on a vulnerable minority than it is to confront the systems leaving millions exhausted and afraid.
In the middle of Luke 6, Jesus speaks of loving enemies. “To you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.” But these words are not a command to quietly accept injustice or remain passive in the face of oppression. They are a refusal to let violence have the final say in what kind of people we become.
What Luke 6 is doing so forcefully is what liberation theology spells out directly: God is not encountered in abstract ideas separated from history, but in the concrete realities of hunger, exclusion, violence, and survival. We cannot look for God only in what is comfortable, respectable, or socially approved, because Jesus himself keeps pointing us elsewhere. He points us to the people the world treats as disposable, the ones left searching through what others have thrown away, the ones told in a thousand subtle and direct ways that their lives matter less because of the color of their skin or the amount of money in their wallet or because of who they love.
It is in that discarded place that the Gospel insists we will find the face of Christ looking back at us. And in our present moment, LGBTQ+ people are not outside that reality. We are made to bear suspicion, blame, and erasure in ways that mark us as precisely the kind of people that Jesus refuses to overlook.
The healing on the Sabbath, then, is not only a debate about religious law, but a revelation of what liberation theology calls “praxis.” Founder Gustavo Gutiérrez defined it as “critical reflection on Christian praxis in light of the Word of God.” This is a “faith doing justice” approach, combining theological reflection with direct action to combat poverty and oppression. It emphasizes a “preferential option for the poor,” (which is also an integral part of Catholic Social Teaching), viewing theology not just as academic study, but as an ongoing cycle of action, reflection, and renewed action in solidarity with the marginalized.
In this chapter of Luke, Jesus does not place human needs alongside religious laws as one concern among many, he interrupts that rigidity in real time on the Sabbath, when his disciples are picking grain because they are hungry and when he heals a man with a withered hand in front of religious authorities who are waiting to accuse him. In both moments, he refuses the idea that adhering to a rule or ritual is more important than restoring a person’s body or meeting a person’s hunger. Instead, he openly says that the Sabbath itself must be understood through the question of life: “to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it.” This is the same reversal Jesus announces in the blessings and woes that follow, where those who are poor, grieving, and excluded are called blessed, and those who are comfortable within existing systems of power are warned that their security is not evidence of God’s favor.
This is exactly why liberation theologians insist that theology begins where lives are actually being impacted, like the hungry disciples in the grainfields. When entire groups are pushed outside the boundaries of social recognition, Jesus calls them “blessed.” For LGBTQ+ people, this is a radical insistence that our embodied lives are already within the scope of God’s concern.
Gutiérrez’s insight that salvation history is not separate from human history becomes visible in Jesus’ own actions here, which are not symbolic gestures but signs that God’s salvation is already unfolding within material reality. For queer people who have often been told that our lives are incompatible with holiness, this is a profound reversal. It suggests that there is no part of embodied life, whether it be identity, desire, relationship, or community, that exists outside the reach of God’s liberating presence.
This is also why liberation theology (and again, Catholic Social Teaching) speaks so strongly about solidarity. As Pope Francis said, solidarity is not an abstract feeling but a practice of standing with those who are suffering and building new forms of communal life together. In Luke 6, Jesus enacts this solidarity. LGBTQ+ communities often mirror this kind of solidarity in their own survival: forming chosen families, creating networks of care, and sustaining one another in the absence of institutional support. These practices are not peripheral to theology; they are direct examples of lived faith.
Finally, liberation theology helps clarify what it means when Jesus speaks of blessing and woe. Those who are comfortable can become blind to suffering not because they are uniquely evil, but because systems of privilege insulate them from the consequences of injustice. Luke 6 interrupts that comfort.
God is not neutral in the face of suffering, but actively aligned with those who are excluded, grieving, and pushed aside. For LGBTQ+ people, this alignment means that our lives are not problems to be solved, but places where God’s preferential presence is already being revealed. In that sense, liberation theology gives language to what Jesus is already doing: proclaiming that salvation is not an escape from history, but the transformation of it through justice, solidarity, and love.
Maxwell Kuzma is a writer, advocate, and podcast host exploring what it means to be transgender, Catholic, and committed to justice. A columnist for the National Catholic Reporter and board member of DignityUSA, he centers LGBTQ voices in the Church and reimagines Catholic theology through a liberatory lens. He has been interviewed by press such as the New York Times and BBC on queer and trans Catholic identity, church reform, and LGBTQ inclusion. Subscribe to his newsletter for weekly podcast episodes and written reflections at maxwellkuzma.substack.com/
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