Politics of Jesus
One of the most important things I read while in Bible College was John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus. That was more than 12 years ago, but more than 30 years after the book was written. Yoder’s work is important, especially for Anabaptist and peace church congregations, and the ideas that lay behind the book are event more relevant today than they were in the ‘70’s. I say they are more relevant now because, in my observations, the church is now more political than ever, but there is little evidence that the politics are those of Jesus. Consider what a political community might look like that is similar to those communities of faith represented in the New Testament.
At risk of oversimplifying, but in fact properly narrowing my focus to Yoder’s central theme, the politics of Jesus and the early church are those of the cross. While we rightly equate the cross with the willingness of Jesus to sacrifice his life behalf of, according to John’s first epistle, the whole world; Yoder indicates that most Christians fail to understand what is meant by Jesus’ call for us to carry our own cross. Yoder states clearly that the burden of the cross which Jesus asks us to carry is not illness or death in our family, or some handicap, or even sacrificing our own desires in favor of our husbands and family. Yoder writes that the burden of the cross is evidence, not only in the willingness of Jesus to go forward toward execution, but the very emptying of self-interests that are indicate in the life lived by Jesus. While the cross represents the extent that Jesus went to serve God and creation, the lengths that we are to sacrifice our privilege in response to God’s grace and Jesus’ faithfulness to our salvation is fully represented in the life of Jesus, with death being the possible, though perhaps unlikely, outcome.
Our contemporary politics of the church tend to charge us with false feelings of persecution, unquenched thirst for legislative power, and the recognition of constitutional law over biblical ethics as a means of interpreting God’s will and forcing religiously favorable outcomes onto the populace. However, there is no indication that the cross is represented in any of this politicking. There is no evidence of sacrifice of privilege, power, or stability, which is exactly what the politics of Jesus entails.
For instance, discussion of the Flint water crisis, LGBTQ issues, and taxation tend to be just the sort of discussions that focus on preferred political outcomes that have little to do with the church, or, the faithfulness of the church as a witness to the rest of the world. When we consider the New Testament as a model of what concerns matter to the early church, marriage was not an overwhelming concern – Jesus was coming back! There is hardly any healthy rendering of marriage relationships in the Bible as a whole that make sense in today’s culture. The only biblically assumed aspect of marriage that is familiar with us today is that they were always between a man and one or more women.
Taxation is an issue that is clearly mentioned in the Scripture, and tax revolts are not an accepted means of being in relationship with government. While taxes were due Caesar and the Temple, Jesus was not a proponent of paying them, but recognized that if you use or rely on government programs, the economy of the empire, or are supporting the temple as the House of God, you should pay your taxes. Jesus, however, lived a life that pointed to a community of faith that lived on the margins of such systems. In fact, a crisis like that of the one in Flint is just such an example of how the politics of Jesus must be the church’s response to brokenness, and not the politics of today’s church congregations that look to government entities to blame and assist with recovery at the same time.
The politics of Jesus did not call upon the people to demand Rome or the Jerusalem aristocracy take care of those who were suffering. Jesus called upon people of means and privilege to put down what they were doing and leave everything behind in order to usher in the Kingdom of God so that those on the margins could move to the center of God’s Light and grace. The disciples left good jobs – jobs where they controlled the capital, to become homeless and serve those on the margins. Jesus did not exert or seek leadership as the King of the Jews by claiming the throne or a place at the Temple – he healed those and forgave sins outside of the established religious apparatus. He gave them time, he gave them himself, and he called disciples away from their living and families to serve. Believe it or not – that is biblical politics.
I believe it is political because gospel servanthood, the burden of the believer’s cross, automatically represents a politics of a people who have received grace, and therefore, have made a decision to trust outcomes to God while humbly serving those who are being overlooked or marginalized by the powers and principalities of both, the cosmos and the world. Our politics as Christians are the politics that rely on God to provide as we carry on the embodiment of the gospel message; feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting the prisoner. Jesus’ good news is preached to the poor, and if the disciples are an indicator, this preaching was done by folks that already had jobs, money, and food to their benefit. There was no more hired class of priests, and there was no hired class of social workers. There was only the church, and the church can be the body of Christ only when it lives out the gospel record of Christ’s sacrifice on behalf of those who were suffering.
The politics of Jesus call the church to establish a new way of reflecting God and Jesus, one that does not rely on the ballot box, but rather relies on outreach that helps build alternative communities of faith and stability in places like Flint. God has not forgotten Flint, but maybe the church has. It is time for the church to reacquaint itself with Jesus, and only then, can we be in relationship with Flint, and serve a people that have been shat upon by the powers and principalities of this world.
