
2025 Commencement Address
Jonathan Lee Walton | May 17, 2025
Jonathan Lee Walton
Princeton Theological Seminary
Commencement 2025
Charge to the Graduates
Princeton University Chapel
May 17, 2025
The greatest among you shall be your servant.
Can Anything Good Come from the Seminary?
Class of 2025, you did it!
You showed up to class. You pulled the all-nighters. You parsed the verbs, translated the Hebrew, and wrestled with theologians who wrote as if clarity were a sin. You did it!
You crafted sermons and led chapel prayers. You served in congregations and hospitals and prayed with the imprisoned. You held together the creative tension between the academy and the church, as well as critical inquiry and faithful devotion. You did it!
But let us be clear: you did not do it alone. A larger cloud of witnesses carried you.
A grandmother’s prayers.
A partner’s patience.
A church’s offerings.
A spouse’s reassurance. A professor’s late-night feedback.
People who did not always understand what you were doing but walked alongside you, offering love, care, tenderness, and affection. So, to every partner, parent, pew member, undergraduate professor, and peanut butter and jelly sandwich-making friend, we say thank you!
To be sure, just because your loved ones sustained us on this glorious journey through Princeton Seminary does not necessarily mean that they understood WHAT you were doing. And, most likely, even fewer understood WHY you were doing it.
“What is this Seminary thing all about?” You have all fielded such questions from the first moment you considered theological education. The question takes different forms. For some, it’s—“Princeton Seminary, huh? A Master of Divinity? So what are you planning to do with that?”
I’m pretty sure when you informed a parent or mentor that you were considering Seminary, you may have heard, “So what happened to law school? I thought you were interested in medical school?? You can still do that afterward, right?”
Some of you might even be dreading post-commencement dinner. You know the question is coming—a question you have been answering all semester, “So what’s next?”
Class of 2025–it is fine. Do not be afraid or get frustrated. Such questions are often based on people’s impressive perception of you! And loved ones are trying to align their perception of you as extraordinary with their perception of a world that too often confuses success with salary and purpose with prestige.
Every society has clearly defined markers of status and significance. Every culture hands us a script of presumed excellence—what the Greeks called aretē or virtue. Such scripts are true in our world. They were true in Jesus’s world.i And in Jesus’s world, as in ours, those markers were clear: power, visibility, reputation, control.
Yet, Jesus turns it all upside down. “The greatest among you shall be your servant.”
Jesus said this not to emperors or the imperial elites. He was not speaking to Caesar’s advisors or Herod’s cabinet. Jesus was talking to the overlooked and overwhelmed.
To those living under occupation.
To those mocked for their faith and monitored for their movements.
To people whose culture was caricatured, whose bodies were brutalized, whose very existence was considered expendable.
Women whose names were never recorded in synagogue scrolls.
Tax collectors who scraped by in the shadows of the underground economy.
The sick. The enslaved. The discarded and disavowed.
Jesus knew what it felt like to be conscripted to the cultural margins. Recall he was from Nazareth—an unremarkable, agrarian village—a provincial place full of people without prestige or pedigree. Jesus’s roots made people ask, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?”
Yet from that place, Jesus declared that greatness is not about platform or profile. It’s not about your résumé or your reach. It’s not measured by how many people follow you—but by how many people you are willing to follow in their pain, struggle, joy, and hope.
And that, dear graduates, is why theological education matters.
Not because it gives you a title.
Not because it confers prestige.
Not because it makes for a good cocktail conversation.
Theological education matters because it cultivates alternative imaginations.
You have spent your years here earning a degree, yes, but also reorienting your moral compass. You have engaged ancient wisdom and sacred texts. You’ve read from Augustine and Aquinas to Katie Cannon and Dolores Huerta. You have debated John Calvin and James Cone. You have pored over ethics, aesthetics, and eschatology. You have pondered such questions as, “What is right?” “What is good?” and “What is fitting?”
You have studied competing visions of eudaimonia—the good life—to help a weary world rediscover what it means to be whole. To be well. To be human.
I know that you are clear-eyed and sober. You are leaving this campus and entering a world that may not reward your sacrifice with the salaries of Wharton or the prestige of Harvard Medical School. There may be no signing bonuses for pastoral care. No venture capital for public theology. There is no corner office for those who bear crosses instead of wielding swords.
Nevertheless—make no mistake—this world needs you. The world needs your alternative imagination. In a culture captivated by brand enhancement, image maintenance, and algorithmic approval, the world needs your understanding of love, service, and sacrifice.
Our prevailing cultural scripts and presumed markers of significance have taken a toll on our society. We live in an anxious age—an age marked by isolation, volatility, and cultural vertigo.ii The ground beneath our feet feels unsteady. The rules keep changing. The goals feel just out of reach. And in such a world dominated by commerce and consumption, by hyper-competition on a shrinking playing field—what has happened to us?iii
Too often, we turn on one another. We make potential allies our adversaries. We confuse patriotism with prejudice. We tolerate cruelty and reward deception. And in insecure moments like these, people crave security—but settle for the spectacle of strongmen. People long for purpose—but fall prey to propaganda. We forget, as Voltaire warned us, that those who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities.iv
This is why your calling matters. You, dear graduates, are the ones the world may not expect but the world desperately needs! You are the ones called not to climb the ladder but to extend the table. To offer a model of greatness that kneels, listens, and lifts. To offer an alternative way of living to a culture that privileges individual autonomy over social accountability.
This is the problem with our hyper-individualized culture of so-called meritocracy. The prevailing view is about how hard I can work; what I can accomplish; what I can achieve; how I can “expand my brand.” Well, the results are in. Such a culture has cultivated a kind of moral loneliness. What writer Derek Thompson describes as the anti-social century.v We have disaffiliated from faith communities. We have disengaged from civic life. We have dismantled institutional networks, thus making us even more susceptible to forces that seek to divide and dominate.
This is a dangerous approach to life because when we retreat into ourselves, we forget how to belong to one another. We stop seeing people as neighbors and start seeing them as threats. We call people out before we ever try to call them in. And this is the danger of a faith that becomes just another consumer product—tailored, isolated, and emptied of obligation.vi
These are the reasons why institutions like Princeton Seminary, our local churches, our universities, our public libraries, and our community theatres are so vital. They organize us toward causes, shared purposes, and common aims greater than the individual self. Institutions matter.
I understand that dismissing and denigrating institutions has become a popular and preferred sport. Institutions are easy targets—readily dismissed as outdated, corrupt, and unnecessary. But as any historian of authoritarianism will tell you: when institutions are discredited, truth becomes easier to manipulate, memory easier to erase, and difference easier to demonize. As historian Timothy Snyder writes in On Tyranny,
“Do not speak of ‘our institutions’ unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning.”vii
So let me put it plainly:
If you care about democracy—defend a library.
If you care about decency—join a church.
If you care about education—invest in a school.
Choose an institution you believe in. And take its side.
Because despite what popular pundits and cynical memes may say, institutions are not just bureaucracies or buildings. Institutions are vessels of memory. They are communities of accountability.
They are platforms for protest and imagination.
No, they are not perfect. They never have been. But neither are we.
And yet, grace calls us not to give up on each other—but to grow with one another. Institutions are the skeletal structure of a community.
This is why Princeton Seminary matters. This is why theological education matters. At Princeton Seminary, students have learned that it is not enough to feed those who are hungry. We must also interrogate why some zip codes have devolved into unsustainable food deserts. It is not enough to pray for the sick. We also need ministers of the gospel who understand social determinants of health like education, poverty, housing, and affiliation. And it is not enough to welcome the stranger. We must learn to identify culturally encoded bigotries and biases that render some people strange in the first place.
This is your charge, Class of 2025. So go forth, graduates.
Go forth as servant-leaders.
Go forth as institution-builders.
Go forth as agents of grace. And go forth as architects of hope.
And may the world be changed not because you climbed a social ladder—but because you built bridges of connection, service, and sacrifice.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation : How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. New York: Penguin Press,, 2024.
Rogers-Vaughn, Bruce. Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age. New Approaches to Religion and Power. New York, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Sandel, Michael J. The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.
Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny : Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. First edition. ed. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017.
Thompson, Derek. “The Anti-Social Century.” The Atlantic, January 8, 2025. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/american-loneliness-personality-politics/681091/.
Voltaire, Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet, and Jacques Joseph Marie Decroix. Œuvres Completes De Voltaire. 70 vols. Kehl: Impr. de la Société littéraire-typographique, 1785.
Walton, Jonathan L. A Lens of Love : Reading the Bible in Its World for Our World. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018.