Politics and Religion at the Dinner Table Part I

Was Jesus Apolitical?

Adapted from Overturning Tables by Scott A. Bessenecker. Copyright (c) 2014 by Scott A. Bessenecker. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com

Is it really the place of a religious authority to address political or economic systems? Surely, the Church would not take seriously any economist or politician claiming it was their job to shape Christian theology. Why should Jesus or his followers have any authority to address economic or political theory?

The practice of economics is profoundly spiritual as is the exercise of government. What is “thou shalt not steal” if not an economic policy that embraces some form of private ownership? If one believes that God inspired the Hebrew Scriptures then God was an economist and large sections of the Law are devoted to addressing economic malpractice protecting those at the bottom of the economic food chain.

In the ancient world, the lines between economics, politics and spirituality did not exist. Or if they did exist, they were placed differently than they are for readers in the industrialized, democratic West. Jesus’ political and economic activism is lost upon those who live in societies where the private practice of faith and the public practice of citizenship are kept in strictly separate containers. We do not easily see how Christ’s actions and teachings touched upon larger economic or political structures. In fact, Jesus drew some political revolutionaries as disciples and his execution was a State sanctioned order.

Because Jesus encourages us to “give to Caesar that which is Caesar’s” (Matthew 22:20-21; Mark 12:17; Luke 20:25)—or appears to embrace the permanence of poverty by saying “the poor you will always have with you” (Matthew 26:11; Mark 14:7; John 12:8), we assume he takes a passive approach to political and economic powers. “Leave those areas well enough alone,” our Western ears hear him telling us, “devote yourselves to personal holiness and those larger structural issues will work themselves out.” To us in the West, Jesus appears to be more concerned with private economic practice like almsgiving, than with systemic economic concerns, like minimum wage laws.

But the holistic Hebrew mindset and the radically different private–public and sacred–secular divides in the ancient Near East obscure our vision on this. Everyday existence in Palestine during Jesus’ time would have been a sociopolitical, religio-economic experience, and teasing out what might be relegated to the individual and private and what involves the communal and public, would have been impossible. Religious structures, political structures and economic structures were hopelessly bound together, and Jesus engaged the whole power fabric on a regular basis.

Teachers of the law, Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes: these were not viewed in the sanctified and separate ways that we view spiritual vocations like priest and pastor today. Religious leaders in Jesus’ day were civic leaders and were part of a religio-political ruling class. The Sanhedrin ruled with as much civil authority as they did religious authority. And Roman civic authorities were often part of a religious elite. There was no separation of power between spiritual and civic in Jesus’ day. They simply didn’t separate those areas as we do in the West.

Pontus Pilate, King Herod and the Sanhedrin were all troubled by Jesus’ claim on their all-encompassing power bases, and Jesus’ trial involved all spheres of authority. Luke tells us that John the Baptist was locked up by Herod as a result of his public tirade against Herod. The Baptizer condemned Herod not only “because of Herodias, his brother’s wife” something we often confine to an area of personal holiness, but “because of all the evil things that Herod had done” (Luke 3:19) which no doubt involved Herod’s public policies which favored the rich and damned the poor.

Herod was a builder, like his father, and levied burdensome taxes on those under his realm. In Herod’s territory there was only the very rich and the very poor. Herod himself owned half of the land under his rule, and many were confined to poverty as a result of his policies favoring the aristocratic families who possessed much of the property. So paranoid was Herod of John’s public rallies that first century historian, Josephus, claimed Herod feared John might “raise a rebellion.” Private and public, individual and social, political and religious, economic and spiritual were part of a unified whole.

Secular?

Were the teachers of the law religious teachers or civil lawyers? Yes. Was the Roman emperor viewed as a political leader or a religious deity? Yes. Was the high priesthood a political post or a sacerdotal post? Yes. Was commerce in Jerusalem controlled by the religious elite or by business leaders? Yes. Were the elite families in Judea tied to political, economic or religious power? Yes.

The word secular does not appear until the 1300s. That’s because before the late Middle Ages the secular did not exist. State power was religious, economic and social. Artificial walls had not yet been constructed, and so we cannot so easily discern with our Western spectacles where Jesus confronts political, social or economic powers. But I assure you, Jesus spoke to political and economic powers when he spoke of his “kingdom” or about loving enemies, freeing the oppressed or blessing those who were persecuted for the sake of righteousness.

[Note: Where you see the world “righteousness” in the New Testament, think “justice.” The word had both personal holiness and social justice overtones.]

That we separate faith from politics or economics is a new way to look at the world and is foreign to most of human history. Jesus never addressed religious power without also addressing the social, political and economic power bound together with it.

The sermons and actions of Jesus and John were viewed as threats to the religio-political leaders. We need to read their lives through that holistic lens which did not yet separate private and public, political and religious, personal finance and economic commonwealth.

In the next blog we will look at the economic policies of first century Palestine and what happened when Jesus confronted their version of Wall Street.