What would Jesus do?

Here at the LHG we both strongly agree and vehemently disagree with Gary Wills' take on Jesus and politics. We agree because Wills is right when he says that the Jesus of the Gospels "is dark, scary and demanding" - far more demanding than any secular politics can ever grasp. The ethics that Jesus taught - turn the other cheek, love your enemies, if asked for your coat give your cloak too - is just too radical to ever become an institutional politics. So to try to make his ethics a political program is to water down the message and thus betray the messenger.

Wills, however, skirts over a key problem. Why was Jesus so radical in his ethics? Most New Testament scholars believe Jesus was so radical for the simple reason that he thought that the end of the world as we know it was right around the corner. The Kingdom of God was at hand and thus our usual worldly concerns should no longer be of concern - none of our usual standards of behavior apply when God is about to build the Kingdom upon the ashes of the old.

So, there really is no easy way to put this: Jesus was wrong. God did not step in - the end of the world did not come. It's the fact that Jesus was wrong that makes Wills' answer simplistic. The Christian needs to draw connections between Jesus' ethic and contemporary politics because s/he can no longer assume the end of the world is near. The Christian must live, and live politically, here and now.

What Wills says should not be done, must be done. Otherwise Christianity has failed to learn the lesson from Jesus' mistake.