Jesus: not as right as you
think
The
problem
On May 1 this year I
found myself on the other side of a protest line to this guy from my
church. He was a stockbroker trying to
get to the stock exchange and I was an anti-globalisation protester peacefully
raising awareness of third world poverty and first world greed. His colleague pushed through our chain,
knocking back my brother, and the two of them went through. He nodded and said hello to me and I said
hello back.
Some Christians might
say this incident shows that politics has got nothing to do with their faith, a
mere matter of ‘personal’ choice. I
would not. I would say that the message
of Jesus Christ has big political implications.
But let’s backtrack a
bit. American fundamentalists and their
Australian cousins have given many people the impression that Christianity is
tied to conservatism - Bible bashing, bringing back John Howard’s imaginary
Australia of the 1950s and making the rich richer and the poor poorer in the
meantime. Most Western Australians’
contact with ‘Christianity’ is
(a)
bumper stickers on Mercedes that say things like ‘Miracles Happen’.
(b)
a Bible Bashing friend from school or uni who tells you that you have to ‘ask
Jesus into your heart’
(c)
liberal media figures like Bishop Shelby Spong (a recent visitor to WA)who
think the Christ-thing is out of fashion and it’s time for Christianity to ‘get
with the times’.
Well, to different
degrees, I think they’re all wrong. I
don’t fit into any of these stereotypes and I don’t believe Jesus does either.
What I
believe
Christianity (when
faithful to Jesus) is much more than the individual and Jesus; much more than a
guarantee you’re ‘going to heaven’ when you die; much more than not getting
drunk, not having sex outside marriage and not having fun. Nope - none of these reductions, please:
Jesus was saying something a lot bigger.
Jesus was born out of
marriage into a working class family.
At the age of around thirty, he announced, quoting an Old Testament
prophet:
The Spirit of the Lord
is upon me,
because he has chosen me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to
proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovery of sight to
the blind;
to set free the
oppressed
and announce the year of
the Lord’s favour. (Luke 4:18-19)
These are strong
words! His ‘platform’, if you like,
stated that he wanted to make the unimportant
people important. He wanted to turn on its head the
understanding that what counted was wealth and power.
You may have heard of
the Jubilee 2000 movement which aims to cancel third world debt. It takes its name from the Old Testament
where the Israelites were instructed to return all property to its original
owners and cancel all debts every fiftieth year. In The Politics of Jesus
(Michigan: Eerdmans, 1973), J.H. Yoder argues that the last line of Jesus’
platform- ‘the year of the Lord’s favour’ - refers to a new jubilee that goes
beyond the original one to the announment of a kingdom where no-one is in debt,
in any way, a kingdom where everything is put better. And kingdoms are about politics.
Jesus’ life and death
seem true to his platform. He taught
radical things - the way to live right with God and with each other. He said ‘You cannot serve both God and
Money’ (Mt 6:24b); that God’s kingdom belongs to the poor in spirit, the
mourners, the meek, the peace makers, the persecuted (Mt 5:3-10). He raised up a community of disciples to
show the world this new way of life. He
travelled with them, healing the sick, telling people about the new kingdom and
making friends with prostitutes and the despised, corrupt tax collectors who
had sold out to the Romans. It wasn’t
that he approved of what they were doing; it was that these people, the
powerless and/or the hated, are the ones that are ready to listen to God.
The government were so
threatened by his words and deeds that eventually they secretly arrested
him. They bribed the ‘jury’ and
executed him with the punishment of shame - the cross - because he claimed to
be the king of the Jews. Yoder writes
of Jesus’ radical subordination - that victory came through the ultimate
defeat, death. He writes that Jesus’
politics is one where you refuse violence and greed even (and especially) when
it means not getting your own way. When
the soldiers came to arrest Jesus, the gospel of Matthew records:
Suddenly one of those with Jesus put his hand on
his sword, drew it, and struck the slave of the high priest, cutting off his
ear. Then Jesus said to him, “Put your
sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the
sword. Do you think that I cannot
appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of
angels?...” (Mt 26:21-23a)
Jesus could have taken the option of violent
revolution; the fact that he didn’t does not mean he was apolitical - it means
his politics was very different to normal politics.
The community he raised
up became the church, living out his new way of life and telling others about
it. This new way of life is not just
‘morals’ - it’s politics too. It means an end to greed. It means caring for the poor, the sick and
the marginalised. It means a community
that is centred on God, a community of people who love others as much as they
love themselves. It means a
transformation of injust structures in two ways - through the just structures
being lived out at the level of the restored community and through the
influence of the restored community on the fallen structures of the world.
In the light of this,
what most people encounter of ‘Christianity’ is too often a distortion or a
pale reflection of who Jesus Christ was.
On the conservative side, too many Christians have become captive to our
society’s consumerism and individualism; on the liberal side, to our society’s
pluralism. Compromises are made - for
example, for some Christians instead of Christ’s restored way of life
challenging how much money they earn and how they spend it, they do their
earning and spending in line with Australia’s greed and then fit their faith
around it, usually reducing Christianity to a ‘conservative morality’ (which
may be part of the story but it’s certainly not the full story).
What’s the point of this article? This: I want you to understand Jesus Christ better from now on. He’s not patriarchal, conservative, irrelevant or stupid. My hero was a pacifist who was preaching such a radical message of the way we should live economically, morally, politically and spiritually that the government put him to death; he was a political and religious criminal who changed the whole course of history. I’d like to think he was standing on my side of the protest line back on May 1.
- Nathan Hobby