It’s not yet Sunday morning in Crawford, Texas, but when it is, will the Bush motorcade rush to church past the growing tent city of war protestors, now called Camp Casey?
Cindy Sheehan continues to be vilified by the Rabid Right, who give new meaning to the term “self-righteous.” It naturally suggests a question one would expect the right wing Christians among them to ask, at least on Sundays.
It risks being an obvious question, but though it is often used as a rhetorical device, it may sharpen some moral issues in the shared realm of actions and consequences.
What would Jesus do?
To honor the generally accepted words of Jesus Christ for what they say, one doesn’t have to believe that every word of the Bible as translated and interpreted by a self-appointed elite is sacred truth and a literal description of reality. One doesn’t have to believe that Jesus was more divine than the rest of us to take his teachings seriously as wisdom, as applying an ethic.
But shouldn’t those who invest the Bible and Jesus Christ with even more authority, be expected to take this question even more seriously? What would Jesus do?
Would Jesus vilify the mother of a young soldier who died in war, because that mother questions the justifications made by those who sent her son to die?
What would Jesus do about a war based on lies in the service of greed, that slaughters and maims innocents from both countries?
Would Jesus excuse the torture of innocent captives, or even the torture of captive enemies? Would he vilify those who say such treatment is immoral and destructive, that it violates what few civilized rules we have for our savage conflicts?
Would he defend turning young Americans into barbarous and sadistic oppressors?
Would Jesus vilify those whose conscience is inflamed by the starvation and suffering of fellow humans, as “bleeding heart liberals”? The phrase, after all, refers to the heart of Christ, bleeding for such suffering.
Would Jesus even ignore starvation and genocide as it occurs in Africa right now?
What would Jesus say about a society that wastes enough food and energy to feed and light much of the needy world, but self-righteously refuses to share its abundance?
Would Jesus vote to enrich the few at the expense of the many?
Would he advocate that a few enrich themselves from the suffering of the sick, and cause hardship to many who want only that their children have medical care? What would he do when treatment is even denied, so that some suffer and die because they cannot pay the usurious few?
If the fate of humanity, the health and perhaps the existence of life on earth in the future were threatened by practices that leaders refuse to change because their friends, already wealthy beyond belief, might not reap as much wealth and power, what would Jesus do?
Maybe a pastor somewhere in Crawford has the answers.
Indeed. And would Jesus drive by?
I am no longer a Christian, but a part of my healing from religious fundamentalism led me eventually to some objective historical study of this man called “Jesus”. The results have led me to the conclusion that if that man could see the horrendous way his message of tolerance and love has been perverted by the extreme fundamentalist right, he’d be literally sick at his own soul. That guy wouldn’t have been caught dead in a gas guzzling SUV in the first damn place, much less race it right by by a dead soldiers grieving mother, standing in the hot sun in a ditch, on his way to rake in more gold.
I would argue that nearly every religion began as a way of organizing and controlling people. As such, there very good tenets for organizing the “in-group” and getting them to live peacefully and productively as a community, and very bad parts intended to at least demonize the “other” and at worst calling for genocide against the “other.” This is why religion has been the driving motivation of so many wars. Jesus’ message is a notable exception, calling for a breakdown of the in-group vs out-group paradigm. Unfortunately, that message has been largely lost by continuing to couple the New Testament with the Old Testament. Perhaps this was done as a means of contrasting the new message with the old, but so many still adhere to the old it is as if the new never existed.
Everything Jesus said should supersede anything in the Old Testament. In fact, he even modified the Ten Commandments. In Matthew 19:17-19, Jesus tells a young man, “Keep the commandments,” and when the young man asks, “Which ones?” Jesus replies:
Love thy neighbor as thyself… that pretty much says it all, for me. The Religious Right is the religious wrong. They are not Christian in the least.
If Jesus is coming back, I beleive he is going to refer to this administration as the “missing years”, only this time, it will be mankinds intelligence that was missing.