Jesusnomics

On the heels of the rejoicing and celebrations that a mass murderer has been brought to justice, some Christians are immediately coming out with statements that being happy over someone’s death isn’t a very Jesus thing to do.

Predictably leading the charge is Brian MacLaren who had this to say:

I can only say that this image does not reflect well on my country, especially in contrast to the images that have been so strong here in recent days … revelers celebrating a wedding.

Joyfully celebrating the killing of a killer who joyfully celebrated killing carries an irony that I hope will not be lost on us. Are we learning anything, or simply spinning harder in the cycle of violence?

The Vatican chimed in with this:

Faced with the death of a man, a Christian never rejoices, but reflects on the serious responsibility of each and every one of us before God and before man, and hopes and commits himself so that no event be an opportunity for further growth of hatred, but for peace.

Which leads me to wonder why God put Ps. 58:10-11 in the Bible

“The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. So that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous: verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth.”

I guess all those martyrs who are under altar screaming out for justice in Revelation 6:9-10 really should just shut up and sing Kum ba yah instead .

There is a righteous vengeance. And Jesus is the one who will ultimately execute it upon all the wicked. Rejoicing in justice is a very Jesus thing to do. It is not evil to rejoice that this murderer has been brought to his earthly end.

Barack Obama says he is a Christian and I take him at his Word. But his articulation of that faith seemed more direct than usual this week even for an event where such statements would be appropriate.

On April 19th, The President made some remarks at the Easter Prayer Breakfast where he said in part:

I wanted to host this breakfast for a simple reason -– because as busy as we are, as many tasks as pile up, during this season, we are reminded that there’s something about the resurrection — something about the resurrection of our savior, Jesus Christ, that puts everything else in perspective.

[W]e’re reminded that in that moment, he took on the sins of the world — past, present and future — and he extended to us that unfathomable gift of grace and salvation through his death and resurrection.

In the words of the book Isaiah: “But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.”

This magnificent grace, this expansive grace, this “Amazing Grace” calls me to reflect. And it calls me to pray. It calls me to ask God for forgiveness for the times that I’ve not shown grace to others, those times that I’ve fallen short. It calls me to praise God for the gift of our son — his Son and our Savior.

It’s an unusual moment of clarity for a President who seems loath to visit a church or be seen hobnobbing with members of the clergy.

I gave my own thoughts on the “What Would Jesus Cut” crowd recently but when I read Jeff Jacoby’s response this morning, I couldn’t help but re-post a bit of it here:

Wallis fumed in an interview that Congress should be cutting defense spending instead of health or nutrition programs. “House Republicans want to beat our ploughshares into more swords,” he said. “These priorities that they’re offering are not just wrong or unfair, they’re unbiblical.” Unbiblical! Does Wallis really believe that no one advocating budget cuts he opposes can have serious ethical grounds for doing do? It must be wonderful to be so certain that what Wallis wants is precisely what God wants. Not all of us are as confident that our religious faith translates as readily into a detailed partisan agenda.

A more fundamental problem with the “What Would Jesus Cut?” campaign is its planted axiom that Jesus would want Congress to do anything at all. Yes, we are emphatically commanded by Scripture to help the poor, to comfort the afflicted, and to love the stranger. But those obligations are personal, not political. It requires a considerable leap of both faith and logic to read the Bible as mandating elaborate government assistance programs, to be funded by a vast apparatus of compulsory taxation. I admit that I am no New Testament scholar, but I cannot recall Jesus ever saying that the way to enter Heaven is to dole out money extracted from your neighbors’ pockets.

Wow. That last line especially sums up the real problem with the philosophy behind this movement. It’s all about giving away large sums…of other people’s money. Where is the spiritual value in giving away another person’s possessions via the power of a tax code? I really can’t see how Jesus would be particularly impressed.

Why Do Evangelicals Hate Jesus?

This is the question of sociologist Phil Zuckerman writing over at the Huffington Post. And by “hate Jesus ” he means “hate leftist policies” because Jesus was an anti-war, anti-gun socialist donchaknow.

Jesus unambiguously preached mercy and forgiveness. These are supposed to be cardinal virtues of the Christian faith. And yet Evangelicals are the most supportive of the death penalty, draconian sentencing, punitive punishment over rehabilitation, and the governmental use of torture. Jesus exhorted humans to be loving, peaceful, and non-violent. And yet Evangelicals are the group of Americans most supportive of easy-access weaponry, little-to-no regulation of handgun and semi-automatic gun ownership, not to mention the violent military invasion of various countries around the world. Jesus was very clear that the pursuit of wealth was inimical to the Kingdom of God, that the rich are to be condemned, and that to be a follower of Him means to give one’s money to the poor. And yet Evangelicals are the most supportive of corporate greed and capitalistic excess, and they are the most opposed to institutional help for the nation’s poor — especially poor children. They hate anything that smacks of “socialism,” even though that is essentially what their Savior preached. They despise food stamp programs, subsidies for schools, hospitals, job training — anything that might dare to help out those in need. Even though helping out those in need was exactly what Jesus urged humans to do. In short, Evangelicals are that segment of America which is the most pro-militaristic, pro-gun, and pro-corporate, while simultaneously claiming to be most ardent lovers of the Prince of Peace.

I honestly love this paragraph for the simple fact that it clearly shows how simplistic, over-generalized, caricatured thinking is not confined to those living in red states. In short “Jesus was nice.” Therefore if His followers aren’t “nice” as I define it then they obviously hate Jesus. Simple as that.

Once the leap of “Jesus likes whatever I do” has been crossed then anything can be supported by saying it’s what Jesus would want too. Want onerous taxes for social programs, national defense cuts, or free condoms for gay ninth-grade illegal immigrants? So does Jesus. He’s cool like that.

I would love to see Phil attempt to provide actual chapter and verse support for each of his points about what Jesus taught, complete with exegetical notes on why exactly this supports anti-gun and pro-welfare agendas. However, I fear that would be asking a bit too much. It’s easy to bloviate, far more difficult to parse through the Scriptures and look at what they actually say instead of what we need them to say. After all, that might make someone sound religious and we don’t want that. All we want is a little moral support from Christ come election day.

Both sides of the political aisle are guilty of the fallacy of doing violence to the Scriptures in pursuit of their agendas but it seems that only the Right is routinely called on it.

As I read and listen to some of the more hip and progressive thinkers in Christian circles, I’m hearing an increasing attempt to isolate Jesus in essence from the God of the Old Testament. I’m sure this is not a new school of thought, but it’s one that I see starting to show up any time a conservative attempts to defend things like Just War or Traditional Marriage using the Scripture.

The reasoning behind this alleged dichotomy goes something like this…

Old Testament God was not very nice. He endorsed genocide. He endorsed slavery. He killed a bunch of people for no good reason. He enforced a bunch of really icky rules. He’s racist, sexist, and homophobic. He’s not a good God to have around in our modern, enlightened age.

On the other hand, Jesus was very nice. He never did or said anything violent. He didn’t talk about sex hardly at all except when he was forgiving people who really didn’t need forgiving anyway. He was inclusive, and a social progressive who dispensed free health care and organized communities.

The result is that if we want to be Christ-followers, the best course of action is just to throw out anything in the Bible that smacks of Old Testament God thinking and only focus on Christ’s personal teaching. Oh, and that includes throwing out most of Paul too because he wasn’t nearly as nice as Jesus was. So the Bible is basically the four Gospels and really only the bits of those where Jesus is being nice.

So we start by deciding based on that limited scope who Jesus really was (which always ends up looking surprisingly like our own agendas in a Jesus-shaped container) and then we become the judge of what else in Scripture is consistent with His ethos.

Don’t like guns, war, or professional wrestling? Jesus said love your neighbor so all violence must be bad no matter how much of it was perpetrated with impunity in the Old Testament. Support gay marriage, or rights for illegal immigrants, or state-run welfare, or fill-in-the-blank-with-your-pet-project? Just find Jesus saying something about love or doing something kind and extrapolate that to mean that since your agenda is nice too, it is therefore what Jesus would want.

You can just ignore all the rest of those pesky rules about private property and sexual conduct. Those aren’t nice so Jesus doesn’t want them enforced. Simple as that.

The problem, of course, is that Jesus claimed to be one with his Father. In fact he said that If you had seen Jesus then you have seen the Father. He didn’t repudiate anything that had come before him, in fact he quotes extensively from the same Old Testament that folks now get really queasy about.

In denying that Old Testament God and Christ are one they basically rob Christ of his deity because his claims to deity are all tied back to the understanding of who Old Testament God is. That’s pretty heavy stuff. Heavy enough to land you right into the arms of some pretty serious heresy by the standard of any orthodox Christian movement for the last two thousand years.

The only hope of the progressives would seem to be that maybe someday God will evolve and become the kind of God we really deserve.

Which one is the Jesus Party? Which one invokes the figure of Christ to give them political clout and bend Christian voters to their agenda? Do you have a party firmly in mind? Good. Now let’s consult the interwebs for posts over the last day or so…

Jesus Politics: it’s obviously not just for right-wingers anymore.