Christians should protest injustice in every form

We are being reminded that Nelson Mandela was a man of protest. It was protest fueled by his horror of injustice that led him to live one of the truly great lives of the 20th century. He himself was a privileged man. He was educated and a successful lawyer. His call for justice was not for himself, but for the millions of his black brothers and sisters who were held in economic and political bondage. He spent many years in jail because of his protest.

The very same description fits Martin Luther King Jr. King was highly educated. He was college and seminary educated and had earned his doctorate degree at a prestigious university. A black Baptist minister with those credentials could have been an elite American minister recognized for his preaching skills and never uttered a word of protest. He protested injustice and became the protest leader that changed America. He paid the price with assassination.

Jesus of Nazareth was the great protestor of his time. Roman soldiers killed him by hanging him on a cross. The protests of Mandela and King were very public and well documented by eager reporters. They had the advantage of radio, television, newspapers, magazines and books. Jesus carried on his protest work with the illiterate poor of a backwater section of Palestine called Galilee. In Jesus’ culture, women were the carriers of the oral traditions of their clans. The recorders of his stories and sayings were illiterate women who listened, remembered and retold the stories (parables) and sayings (aphorisms).

Jesus did all of his teaching in Aramaic, the common language of his area. Literate Greek men finally wrote down his parables and aphorisms two generations later.

The Apostle Paul was the first writing Christian leader. He began writing 15 to 20 years after the death of Jesus. However, he never mentions any of Jesus’ parables or aphorisms. He did not understand Jesus as a man of protest, but as a theological messiah who was sent to the cross by God as a sacrifice for sin. For Paul, the cross was an altar of sacrifice rather than a Roman tool of execution.

The earliest written recorders of the Jesus tradition were collectors of the parables, aphorisms and other stories about Jesus. They wrote in Greek two and three generations after the death of Jesus. They wrote in a very different political and religious context. Their Jesus also was a theological Jesus. Their Jesus was a man with a miraculous birth. They gave theological meanings to his teachings and concluded their stories of Jesus with reports of his resurrection from the dead.

For 2,000 years, with few exceptions, Christian churches have pursued the theological Jesus and have said little about his ministry of protest.

With the help of persistent Bible scholarship, we are now able to consider the unadorned parables of Jesus and place them in the economic, religious and political context in which the stories were told. When the teachings of Jesus are liberated from the theologies of Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, a very different Jesus appears on our screen.

Jesus was a master teacher. His primary tools were the stories that he told. The stories that he told were discussion starters. They were vivid and often carried a high level of exaggeration. They were colorful. Typically, they were stories without a stated conclusion. They were memorable.

Whenever a parable of Jesus is read, the reader rightfully asks who might have been in his listening audiences. They were rural, illiterate Jews who lived in Galilee in incredible poverty. Under the cruelties of Roman rule, they were expendables. The unadorned parables of Jesus cover a broad range of topics. They cover worker/employer relationships, wage rates, the wealth gap between the rich of the poor, the obscene living style of the rich, the utter poverty of working people, the arrogance of religious leaders, social segregation of the rich from the poor, and the absurdity of ritual practices demanded by the ruling hierarchy that controlled the Jerusalem temple.

Today most every Christian minister, who is a seminary graduate, will or should know these glaring facts about the life and teachings of Jesus. Yet people in the pews are ignorant of the things that the minister knows and accepts as fact of the Jesus story. A typical minister hides safely behind moral niceties and comforting clichés.

If American ministers took the Jesus messages seriously, they would be preaching about the urgent need to increase the minimum wage to a livable wage, they would be leading a fight to empty our prisons, they would be walking picket lines for immigration reform so that immigrants would again be welcomed rather than despised, they would join the call for equal rights for all minorities, including gay and lesbian Americans. They would work for an education system that is free and open to all, and they would urge their congregants to recruit and motivate people to vote for candidates who are committed to the common good rather than special interests.

Jesus was a protestor against the social, economic and religious inequities of his day. He showed us a better way. Every disciple/follower of Jesus should do no less. Christians should be protesting injustice in every form. We should be protesting, knowing there are better ways.

The Rev. Howard Bess is a retired American Baptist minister who lives in Palmer. His email address is hdbss@mtaonline.net.

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