Jesus Presents his Political Platform

I remember a time near the beginning of my ministry, when I thought I was supposed to take the gospel accounts seriously and practically. It seemed to my young and inexperienced mind that if we were to be followers of Jesus, what he had to say should have some impact on the ways we structured society and on the ways we did “business.” Everyone told me how impractical, immature, and idealistic I was. One person even said, “That was a very interesting sermon, Pastor, but you’ll know better when you grow up!”

I have grown up! And I still believe that the Christian Gospel speaks loudly to present conditions, perhaps even more than to eternal rewards or punishments for individual souls.

For a time, it seemed that the liberal wings of American Christianity held the torch for the value of human social and economic conditions. The “Social Gospel” movement early in the 20th Century, championed by Baptist reformer, Walter Rauschenbusch, is the classic example. In recent years, through the work of people like Jim Wallis at Sojourners, for example, there is now emerging a new convergence of liberal and evangelical Christian positions around the practicality of gospel mandates for modern social and economic structures. I think this is very good news.

We have just completed a presidential election campaign and are about to inaugurate Barack Obama to this high office. The news is filled with economic stimulus plans and ideas to shore up the economic well-being of those segments of society that have been losing ground over the last thirty or so years. If we look to the teachings and living examples of Jesus as reported in the New Testament, we discover that he seemed to be more interested in “quality of life” for everyone than he was in simply improving the “standard of living” for the poor. This is a significant distinction. Standard of living has to do with money and the ability to be a consumer of goods and services. (We’ve even been told that the health of the economy depends on consumption.) Standard of living is not unimportant, particularly when there is a great disparity between rich and poor. The “Achilles heel” of Standard of living, however, as the primary measure of well-being is largely dependent on determining how much better off one is than others in the community. You can’t have winners without losers. From the discipline of psychotherapy I have learned that whenever there are winners and losers, relationships inevitably suffer. (I will make an exception for some competitive games where there is very little at risk.) But when one is competing for one’s very livelihood, there is an enormous amount on the line.

Quality of life is quite a different matter. Quality of life is fundamentally relational and it stands at the heart of Jesus’ life and ministry. I have argued in many ways (in blogs, sermons, etc.) that the establishment of “The Realm of God” was Jesus’ primary objective. Those who were only concerned for their own well-being, either in this world or the next, missed the point and therefore missed out. Loving one’s neighbor (and enemy for that matter), challenging social structures that keep the rich even richer and the poor even poorer, being respectful in marriage, avoiding judgments about others (probably because such judgments create the exact situation of winners and losers mentioned above), and trusting that generosity creates relational wealth, not poverty is how the “Realm of God” on Earth must work.

So I guess that Jesus’ stimulus plan could be summed up in a few words from his Sermon on the Mount as found in Matthew 6:

No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

I still try to take this seriously, no matter how difficult it is to live out in modern culture. But, do you think that Jesus could get elected today on that political platform?

Wayne Gustafson
“Our faith is 2000 years old, our thinking is not.”
The United Church___of Christ