How Jesus Cuts It

Posted on October 25, 2013 by
2
images

A few weeks ago I posted this Tweet: “If you’re truly conservative in a biblical sense, on some issues you’ll appear liberal in a political sense.”

Well, that upset some people. One guy Tweeted, “That is absolutely wrong & selfish! Easy solution 4 lazy Christians to think government should do their job!” He added, “NAME THOSE ISSUES PLEASE. Abortion? Gay marriage? Gays in military? Or r u depending on government 4 charity?”

Hmmm.

What makes Jesus so remarkable is how he cuts it. How he turns things upside down or sideways, revealing (literally) truth we otherwise miss; can’t see.

These are some of the added dimension of the cross.

This is so different from current conversations in the United States. Here, everything is Left or Right. If you’re Left you’re not Right, and vice versa.

Usually that means either Republican or Democrat, with of course the (even more) extreme wings at both ends. Right now (in contrast to some past periods), no safe ground in the middle.

But Jesus cuts it differently. His grid, the Bible’s grid, is not Left/Right, but the incisive discerning truth of the kingdom of God.

Politics cuts it Left/Right. Jesus cuts it Up/Down. The kingdom of justice, righteousness, and true wisdom versus the foolishness, injustice, and darkness of the present age. The Upside Down Kingdom turns today’s political grid ninety degrees, giving us a totally different take on things.

Thus (as I Tweeted), if you’re truly conservative in a biblical sense, on some issues you may appear liberal in a political sense.

My point here is a very simple one, yet so often lost amid political and economic discussions, and discussions on social and moral issues.

Jesus cuts it differently: According to the wisdom of God’s reign—the mystery of godliness, not the mystery of iniquity.

Lord help us to see things (all things) through the lens of Scripture; the lens of the kingdom of God.
That will puzzle the world.

I once heard former Ohio Congressman Tony Hall give his testimony. He was a Democrat, and quite conservative on moral issues. (The only Democrat in Ohio to get favorable ratings from a very conservative religious political group.)

Tony Hall was the conscience of the House of Representatives on global poverty and hunger issues. He once went on a hunger strike to protest Congressional cuts in food aid. (See http://www.nihp.org/2011/03/15/former-congressman-tony-hall-starts-hunger-strike-to-stop-attacks-on-food-spending/.)

Tony was converted to Jesus Christ and his kingdom while he was a Congressman. After he gave his testimony, I asked him where he got his passion for the poor, and for issues of hunger.

“From reading the Bible,” he said.

OK!

That’s how Jesus cuts it. That’s how the Bible cuts it.

Not Left/Right, but according to the measuring line of the kingdom of God.

Left/Right is the wisdom of the world. Biblical Christians are those who walk and think according to the wisdom of the reality and promise of God’s reign.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spikenard Sunday/Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut

by Columbia Lutherans on Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 11:55am • THE SERMON “I am enchanted by the Sermon on the Mount. Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have received so far. Perhaps we will get another idea that good by and by-and then we will have two good ideas. What might that second good idea be? I don’t know. How could I know? I will make a wild guess that it will come from music somehow. I have often wondered what music is and why we love it so. It may be that music is that second good idea’s being born. “I choose as my text the first eight verses of John twelve, which deal not with Palm Sunday but with the night before-with Palm Sunday Eve, with what we might call ‘Spikenard Saturday.’ I hope that will be close enough to Palm Sunday to leave you more or less satisfied. I asked an Episcopalian priest the other day what I should say to you about PalmSunday itself. She told me to say that it was a brilliant satire on pomp and circumst...
Read more

The Parable of the Talents – A View from the Other Side

May 18, 2010 http://godspace-msa.com/2010/05/18/the-parable-of-the-talents-a-view-from-the-other-side/ As promised here is the second article on economics as presented in the Parable of the Talents .  It presents a very compelling and challenging view of this parable that I think has a lot to say in our present economic situation . This articles is from “Towering Trees and Talented Slaves”, commentary of Ched Myers and Eric DeBode, originally published in  The Other Side Online, © 1999 The Other Side, May-June 1999, Vol. 35, No. 3. The complete article was originally published atwww.theotherside.org/archive/may-jun99/myers.html. The article is no longer available at that site and apparently has all but disappeared from the Internet. The Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30   Even more problematic than our sentimentalizing of kingdom parables is the way we misread Jesus’ parables about the world, reading them as if they were kingdom parables—with disastr...
Read more

How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform

Image
  It's bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it - with a big assist from Congress and the White House. By Matt Taibbi May 10, 2012   President Barack Obama signs the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act alongside members of Congress in 2010. ROD LAMKEY JR/AFP/Getty Images Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he'd dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. "These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history," the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. "In history ." Th...
Read more