Christianity, Social Justice and Me (Part II)

If you are like me, you were raised to believe that there is nothing political about the teachings of Jesus, that he was a totally apolitical figure with no interest in social justice, that his main concern was in no way about making the world more just. Instead, they would have us believe, his concern was simply shepherding folks “over yonder” – that is, ushering people through the Pearly Gates into heaven. Growing up, again and again I heard folks intone, some naively, some self-righteously, “I’m not into politics, I’m a Christian” and “I don’t put my trust in politicians. I trust in Jesus.” There was even a hymn we sang: “You can have the whole world. Just give me Jesus.”  Today we still see this perception of Jesus in the preachments of hyper-“spiritual” Christians, whose Bibles seem not to include “on Earth as in heaven,” and in the blind, selfish, materialistic inanities of the “prosperity” anti-Gospel preachers. It is almost as if the purveyors of this view insist that believers should hand over responsibility for their own welfare to others, no matter how careless or evil those others might be! Yet, examples abound of the pervasive political, social justice dimension of Jesus’ Gospel teachings.

For instance, the first public pronouncement of Jesus’ ministry (Luke 4:18-19), in which he announced his mission to the world, has the distinct ring of a social justice manifesto full of political and economic implications:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor [economic].
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives [political]
 and recovery of sight to the blind,
 to let the oppressed go free [political],
 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor [economic] (i.e., the Jubilee land restoration)

Seldom understood is that in Jesus’ declaration that the greatest social commandment is “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31), he was actually highlighting the depth and the breadth of his political sentiments. Fully understood, this commandment demands that the same rights, opportunities, and access to the good things in life be sought for and accorded to others in the same way that we seek them for ourselves. In essence, it is a commandment to strive for the common good. That is why “Love your neighbor as yourself” is to be understood as a foundational statement of egalitarian social justice, a foundational declaration that everyone should be accorded the same panoply of rights in society. But it doesn’t end there. The great Jewish scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel explains that biblical Israel “[did] not distinguish between right and duty.” This means that the right to be treated with justice cannot be separated from the duty to treat others the same.

That Jesus’ ministry was animated by his embrace of the duty to struggle for justice in society is reflected in many of his parables. These include the parable of the unforgiving servant, which dramatically decries economic exploitation (Matthew 18:23-35), as does the parable of the workers in the vineyard, in which the subsistence of desperate landless workers is totally subject to the whims of a rich landowner (Matthew 20:1-16;); the parable of the rich fool and his futile, selfish accumulation of wealth (Luke 12: 13-21); and the parable of the dishonest manager, which presents in bold relief how economic dishonesty is casually treated as normative (Luke 16:1-13). Jesus’ so-called cleansing of the Temple, really a planned disruption of Temple commerce, is a dramatic rebuke to the legitimacy of the Temple politico-economic apparatus (Mark 11:15-19). The narrative of the widow’s offering (Mark 12:41-44) highlights the injustice of the wealth gap between the poor and the rich in Israelite society, standing as a stinging rebuke to a status quo that ignores the scripture’s command to care for the welfare of the most vulnerable classes in Israelite society. Even Jesus’ model prayer (Matthew 6:10) offers, as its first concern, ending the reign of the political order that subjugated his people: “Your kingdom come, your will be done...” (I engage each of these passages at length in my The Politics of Jesus).

In metaphors, parables and direct assertions Jesus issued sharp denunciations of inequitable treatment and the traditions and structural barriers that stood in the way of people’s material wellbeing. In fact, the Gospels portray relief for the impoverished masses in Israel as his primary concern. We know this because he spoke about poverty and the impoverished more often and more passionately than any subject except God. His concern was so great that he spoke of the poor even in the sublime heights of the Beatitudes: “Blessed are you who are poor people” (Luke 6:20).

Moreover, in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, he declared that the way people will be judged is whether they try to do justice in the world by assuaging the very real material privations of the abject needy and the plight of those held in bondage. Those who ignore such suffering, he said, “will go away into eternal punishment” (see Matthew 25:41-46). Not to be overlooked is his equitable treatment of women. Jesus transgressed longstanding social norms to speak and interact with women without the intercession of men, as in John 4:1-26 and Luke 8:1-3, for instance. And particularly significant, in my opinion, is the ultimate concern Jesus evinced for the most vulnerable and powerless in society by pointedly reprimanding his disciples for treating clamoring children as less worthy of full consideration than adults who approached him (Matthew 19:13-15). I believe that it is safe to concluded that a clear-eyed reading of these passages and others in the gospels suggests that what “social justice” meant to Jesus was a striving for and achieving a more equitable distribution of access to wealth, opportunities to thrive, material resources, honor, respect, security, and authority and power as the bases of a more just humane, world.

Now, because some of the social justice pronouncements of Jesus about riches are so uncompromising, such as, “Woe to you who are rich” (Luke 6:24), they are usually ignored or dismissed as quaint and unrealistic. But when viewed in the context of his peasant setting in life, in which great accumulations of wealth were almost always the result of exploitation or injustice, what might appear as quaint or unrealistic, in actuality offers important ethical guidance. We will explore the significance of Jesus’s pronouncements regarding poverty and wealth for both personal conduct and for political economies in a future post.

Ase` and shalom.