Jesus was a progressive.
He came with bold, clear vision, not with vague religious nostalgia.
He started a revolutionary underground movement not a top-down theocracy of privilege.
And he didn’t harken back to some mythical glorious time in the past, he said that the Kingdom had now come; a new counterintuitive way of living and of being in the world marked by goodness.
His message for the religious elite of his faith tradition was not a “return to family values”, or the promise of “making Palestine great again”. It was the warning that new wine cannot be held in old, dried-up, brittle wineskins; that something beautiful had come to burst from the rigid, lifeless container that could no longer hold it—the one called religion.
And Jesus was a heretic.
He claimed to be God, but One coming not as a mighty political power as many Israelites were expecting; not as an armed, avenging soldier, but as a humble, suffering servant who would get low to lift others. He came in paradox as the God who would wash feet.
Jesus was scandalous to the religious establishment because he declared that God was not just the God of the temple but of the gutter as well; that the people of the street were as sacred as the priests. Two thousand years before his followers would defend their own bigotry by saying that “all lives matter”—Jesus simply lived in a way that proved they did. He fed and healed and loved them equally. That is why he spent so many of his days among the rabble; touching lepers, dining with prostitutes, lounging with pariahs. It’s why he lived in the margins and on the fringes and why he made the self-righteous squirm and protest and condemn.
He declared us all responsible for our brothers, our neighbors, even our enemies. His followers created interdependent communities where each was accountable to the other. He was a maker of peace, a turner of cheeks, a lover of all; a homeless, dark-skinned Jewish Rabbi, who said that love of wealth would make it almost impossible to really see God or to live well.
Jesus made a despised Samaritan man the unlikely teacher of mercy and the pedigreed priests the ambivalent cowards who crossed the street when passing by suffering.
He preached not about the poor “pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps” but about the well-off giving up everything so that they could be cared for.
There’s little doubt that this Jesus would be kicked out of a Donald Trump rally, targeted by the GOP’s platform, and left to starve on the street by their voters. (Actually, he’d have been detained at the airport or sent back where he came from.)
These times will be remembered as ones where the Christianity of Christ died in the cloistered, opulent American Church and was resurrected in the gutter among the heathens and backsliders. Just as he first came in a form that was blasphemous and scandalous to the bloated religious elite, he is coming again in a way that is not expected but is no less revelatory about the breadth of the love of God.
As the Trump built his cabinet and marked out his early tenure in office, he has raised a clear and unapologetic middle finger to “the least of these”; to those most embraced by Jesus of Nazareth, and ironically he is doing so with the full endorsement and blessing of many of those entrusted to steward the Good News. He is doing it with the Conservative Church rubber stamping all of it by their loud endorsement of him before, and their damning silence now.
And now, two thousand years later, the job of revealing the character of God is once again in the hands of the heretics, sinners, and unlikely mercy-givers.
Sadly, I believe History will show that when the elderly, the sick, and the vulnerable are left without resources by this Administration and at the very end of their ropes, it will be the Progressives, the Muslims, the Jews, the Humanists, and the Atheists—not the Conservative Christians who will care for them as Jesus would have. They will be the ones there in the gutter with the orphans and the widows, with the ignored and forgotten, all responding together in love in a way the followers of Christ were supposed to, but tired of.
In other words, those who have most franchised out the name of Jesus for personal gain, those who have most loudly claimed righteousness will be the furthest from continuing the work he began, and the ones they so willingly and repeatedly condemned to Hell, will have proven to be those most committed to replicating the compassionate heart of Christ without needing to name it Christianity.
Jesus was heretical to the religious folks of his day who had drifted so far from the essence of God that they were oblivious to it when it was in their midst. Goodness and decency had become unrecognizable to them. They were so preoccupied by the shimmering lure of power, and so lulled into the comfort of their privilege that they forgot their call to sacrificial love for the least. History is repeating again in these days.
The Conservatives now, just as the Pharisees of Jesus’ day have left the gutter and moved into the penthouse. In this election, so many Evangelicals on the Right sold their souls to a Presidential candidate for a few pieces of silver. They made their beds with greed and that is where I am afraid they will stay until they decide charity is a political asset useful in retaining their position. To now expect the Evangelical Church to somehow untangle itself from this union with Caesar, would be to imagine that it both could and that it desires to—neither which seems true.
Christlikeness is of little interest to them, because they no longer recognize it or deem it necessary. There is no use in attempting to convince them otherwise because they now have the blind spot that comes with gaining the world in exchange for their souls..
Many Conservatives will tell you that none of the things Jesus did or talked about were meant to be done by the Government but by the Church itself; that compassion and charity are the work not of the State but of the faith community. I’d be okay with that. The only problem is, they have so fully aligned themselves with politics, and so fully merged with the Republican party and now with the Donald Trump that they have become the worst of both entities. The partnership has poisoned each. They have a selectively small government and a small-hearted Church, and neither is very burdened with reaching into the gutters and the margins to care for the vulnerable and the hurting. They have closed their hands.
Yet God is once again moving in the world, coming in ways that look like heresy to the religious, which is exactly the way it was two thousand years ago. It will be a movement of the unlikely, the odd, the profane, and the outsiders who together will recover the sacred lost art of giving a damn. They will open their hands and they will give and heal and help in ways that alter the planet and that look like whatever God is supposed to look like.
One way or another, the love Jesus once preached will again speak loudly in these days—even if the Church stays silent.
Blessed are the heretics…
