“JESUS – RADICAL FOR OUR TIME”

“Jesus & the Wrong Kind of People” Part II

John Dominic Crossan in his book , Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, says that Jesus’ idea of open table fellowship where he ate with sinners and outcasts broke down the usual and helpful stratifications of society. We “know who we are” by those we “eat with” and associate with.

Crossan says, “for those who take their very identity from the eyes of their peers, the idea of eating together without any distinctions, differences, discriminations, or hierarchies is close to the irrational and the absurd,” Then Crossan adds, “And the one who advocates or does it is close to the deviant and the perverted. He has no honor. He has no shame.”

Would Jesus today suggest we do away with all exclusive clubs, social events and dinner parties? Would he suggest we invite prostitutes and pimps, beggars and the homeless to our dinner parties? In our time, would he recommend a radical egalitarianism or equality between classes and races, occupations and educational levels? Don’t we need these distinctions for our “identities?” What do you think? Why?

In his book, Jesus Before Christianity, Albert Nolan says that in Jesus’ time prestige was the dominant value, more important even, than money. Everyone had a place on the social ladder. “Status and prestige were based upon ancestry, wealth, authority, education and virtue….Status was as much part of religion as it was part of social life.”

But Jesus said the poor, the oppressed, the beggars, prostitutes and tax-collectors would go into heaven before the “righteous” or “prestigious”. The poor and the oppressed had nothing to recommend them except their humanity and suffering. The Kingdom of God “will be a society in which there will be no prestige and no status, no division of people into inferior and superior.”

Would this not produce a boring sameness to Church or society? Would not this concept be a discouragement to would-be achievers, go-getters and leaders? Does this not reward the indolent, the non-talented, the unimaginative, those mired in the status quo and afraid to take risks? In other words, does not radical egalitarianism diminish incentive? What do you think? Why?

Jesus seminar scholar, Robert Funk, says in his book, Honest To Jesus, that when the name “Jesus” is mentioned people assume the subject is religion. But as a matter of fact, Jesus was, says Funk, “irreligious, irreverent and impious.” After all he was said to have “profaned the temple, the Sabbath, and breached the purity regulations of his own legacy…” and he spoke of the Kingdom of God in non-religious terms. “For these reasons alone,” says Funk, “his significance deserves to be detached from any exclusive religious context and considered in a broader cultural frame of reference.”

Jesus did offend most of the religious insiders of his time and now Funk proposes he offend the religious insiders of our time by going outside established religion to the wider cultural context. Isn’t this putting Jesus with the “wrong kind of people?” Would not Jesus be more effective and influential by winning the favor of religious insiders and religious institutions? Do you see any evidence of Jesus operating effectively outside established religion today? What do you think? Why?