Jesus Politics

For some reason, a lot of my Christian friends like to say that they are not political. In fact some of them even seem to see avoiding politics as virtuous. After all politics are the things of this world right? Is it not more virtuous to be focused only on heavenly things? Should we not avoid the dirty, messy, worldly things? Shouldn't we be focused on Jesus, not politics?

Maybe...

But the problem with that is when Jesus talks about Heaven he says that it is not just something out there, one day.

For Jesus the Kingdom of Heaven is here and now!

It means good news for the poor, food for the hungry, clothes for the naked, shelter for the homeless, healing for the sick, forgiveness for the sinful and liberation for the captive.

The Kingdom of Heaven is not about escaping the world, it's a better way of engaging it. It's the movement that God started in the world for the purposes of restoring the world to the way God wants it to be.

It's an invitation to participate in what God is doing.

That's why in Matthew 25 Jesus says that the way you treat the "least of these" (the people mentioned above) is the way that you treat him.

If you want to be focused on Jesus you have to focus more on the people that Jesus would focus on.

Because the truth is politics is much bigger than who you vote for on a ballot.

Politics is about how you vote with your time.

Your money.

Your efforts.

Mahatma Gandhi once said, "Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is." I think they do not what politics is either.

We all engage in politics every day, whether we'd like to admit it or not. So we shouldn't try to avoid politics. We should examine our politics and think critically about them. We need to take seriously how we vote with our time, money, efforts, and yes even our ballots. It's time that we aligned our politics with the politics of what God is doing in his kingdom.

We need to engage in Jesus politics.

To do this, I think requires an awareness of what God is doing in the world. And for that a great place to start is in the Bible. Throughout the scriptures we are given glimpses of how God sees creation. We see what God's original intention for the world was and we get to see the world that God is working towards.

In Revelation 7 we see this beautiful prophetic image of a great multitude of people, more than any one could count, worshiping before the very throne of God. The people there are from every tribe, nation, people and language. And in Galatians 3 Paul says that in Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, Slave nor Free, Male nor Female.

So we can see that God is working towards a world where the things that used to divide us (race, gender, ethnicity, social status, wealth, language, sexual orientation, etc...) will no longer do so. Which means for us that we should be participating in the kind of world that God is making by going out of our way to form healthy relationships with all kinds of people. We should have a politic of reconciling our differences so that we can all love and learn from each other.

In Isaiah 2 we are given this prophecy of a day when God will be the judge over all people and "they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks" and "Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore." And Jesus makes it very clear in Mathew 5 that we should love our enemies and not respond to violence with violence but with love.

So we should participate with God in a world where peace on earth is not only the goal that we are striving for but the means by which we achieve it. We should speak out against systems of darkness, like the military-industrial complex, that profit off of violence. We should vote for peace with our time, money, efforts, and ballots; but never should we use violence as a means of accomplishing it. Remember that love wins over violence. (Jesus gave the best example of what this looks like with his ultimate act of peace-making; not by fighting the violence of the Roman Empire with more violence but by sacrificing his very life willingly, thus calling into light the weakness of the violence of the empire while simultaneously overcoming it.)

Revelation 22 speaks of God's beautiful garden-city coming on the earth. This city has trees and fruits and lots of vegetation. And in Isaiah we see this prophecy of wolves, lambs, leopards, goats, calves, lions, yearlings, and human children laying together. Bears and oxen and cows are all living peacefully and children can even play with snakes.

But how can there be a garden if we destroy the environment? And how will all these animals live harmoniously with people if many of them become extinct? Acts 3 tells us that God is in the business of restoring all of creation. Which means for us, participation looks like protecting and restoring creation as well. We should be working towards caring for the planet God put us on, not destroying it. By the way, this also means that we don't steal the resources from those people from all tribes and nations that we mentioned earlier. And in following the golden rule we leave the planet the kind of place that we would want to be left to us.

These are just a few examples of what Jesus politics might look like, but we can think of many more. We just have devote ourselves to exploring and living out the way of Jesus. We do this with the prayer that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven, just as Jesus taught us to pray.

Grace and Peace