From time to time I have seen a quote by liberal personality John Fugelsang surface on social media. It’s about Jesus, and it goes like this:
“Jesus was a radical nonviolent revolutionary who hung around with lepers hookers and crooks; wasn’t American and never spoke English; was anti-wealth anti-death penalty anti-public prayer; but was never anti-gay, never mentioned abortion or birth control, never called the poor lazy, never justified torture, never fought for tax cuts for the wealthiest Nazarenes, never asked a leper for a copay; and was a long-haired brown-skinned homeless community-organizing anti-slut-shaming Middle Eastern Jew.”
And the thing is, everything in this quote is technically accurate. But something about it left a bad taste in my mouth.
So I decided to write a similarly-styled paragraph about Jesus. It goes like this:
Jesus was a rural born, pro-Israel, native speaker who went to dinner parties with rich people, and religious authorities, told off-color jokes about foreigners, and said poverty was incurable. He advocated rigorous religious observance and personal responsibility, and said that anyone who had lustful thoughts or got remarried was an adulterer but never mentioned gender-affirming care or feminism, and never advocated for government intervention in business or social issues. He was a staunchly moral, anti-big city religious leader who confronted the cultural elite and mocked the intellectuals of his day.
Everything in that paragraph is also technically accurate.
And this is what we do to Jesus so often: We interpret him in a way that fits our currently held beliefs.
Was Jesus conservative or liberal? Was he a socialist? Was he a capitalist? I find both claims that Jesus was a socialist or a capitalist particularly frustrating because neither of these economic philosophies existed in his time and to say he was either is as anachronistic as calling him a Republican or a Democrat or a Tory or a Whig or a Catholic or a Protestant.
Even in Jesus’ own time, there are multiple stories of people trying to categorize him. It’s interesting to note that their desire to do so is always for their own benefit, and often for the purpose of more easily dismissing him instead of honestly engaging with his teachings. Of course, he was standing right in front of them and presenting a very specific challenge to the way they understood the world. We are in a different situation.
When I was a teenager the band Nirvana was extremely popular. But they were also very controversial. Their frontman and main songwriter Kurt Cobain used his platform and popularity to actively confront traditional attitudes about gender and sexuality. He spoke forcefully. He wasn’t always bothered by nuance. He wanted to see radical change. And his music reflected that. Nirvana was one of those bands that some parents thought of as dangerous. What would listening to it do to their children? Of course he’s been dead for over 30 years now. And I often hear his songs playing as background music on the grocery store speakers as I’m walking down the breakfast aisle.
Now that he’s gone we can make his music what we want it to be. We can make him what we want him to be. We don’t have to be challenged if we don’t want to be.
So it is with Jesus. According to Christians like me, he’s not dead. But he’s also not standing right in front of me the way he was standing in front of the religious leaders in Jerusalem some two thousand years ago. And as a Christian I don’t want to categorize him so that I can dismiss arrest or kill him. I think I want to categorize him so that I can validate the beliefs and opinions I already have.
I’m not sure that’s any better.
It is possible to throw up your hands and say I am opting out of this conversation altogether: People seem to be able to make Jesus whatever they want him to be and maybe we don’t have to connect Jesus to politics at all!
The problem we come back to time and again as Christians is that we say Jesus is Lord not just of part of our lives but of our whole life, which is to say there is no part of my life as a Christian that is meant to be unaffected by my discipleship to Jesus. Even if Christianity has been repeatedly co-opted by powerful people and used to reinforce unhealthy status quos, the truth is that seeking to live a Christian life is meant to be a radical act: Something that leaves no stone in your heart unturned.
Further, while it is true that Jesus stated no specific preference for or allegiance to any of the defined political parties of his time, it is simultaneously true that he did speak at length about matters of how social structures function, the values and priorities of communities, and how we order our common life. His life and teachings consistently had social implications. Jesus’ understanding of salvation was not simply spiritual, internal, personal, or individualistic: Salvation always had a social element to it. Community could not and cannot be divorced from Jesus’ ministry.
And for all of our partisan posturing and ideological polemics about politics, it’s worth admitting that, at its base level, politics is fundamentally about how we order our communities. How could any Christian think Jesus has no place in that? That he is agnostic or ambivalent about our shared life?
We cannot afford to think Jesus is ambivalent. We also cannot afford to spend our time trying to co-opt him into our agenda and pretend it is his.
But mostly, we have no business pretending that Jesus’ teachings are idealistic, unreachable, abstract, or utopian. Jesus taught about the magnificent love of God on a practical level to be experienced in daily life in personal and corporate ways. To take discipleship to Jesus seriously is to believe that love is practical, that it can shape and transform our reality. And that means part of believing in Jesus is allowing him to change what we believe about politics, economics, and society. That is a bigger challenge than we want to acknowledge.
