2004-07-11 It Could Not Be In Jesus' Name.doc - Page 3 of 3
In his recent article, “democracy in the balance” which appears in the new issue of
Sojourners magazine, Bill Moyers notes this, “Over the past few years, as the poor got poorer,
the health care crisis worsened, wealth and media became more and more concentrated, and our
political system was bought out from under us, prophetic Christianity lost its voice.”
To this, I would add the words of Langston Hughes: “It could not be in Jesus’ name” –
not in the name of the Jesus we know.
So I would like to suggest that we need to look at Jesus as the plumb line: the things he
taught; the things he did; how he treated people; how he died; how he rose from death.
And if we look to Jesus, here are is what we find: At his home synagogue in Nazareth, he
got up and gave his mission statement: “The Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the
poor.” He told a crowd of 5,000 hungry people that all, not some, would be fed. He challenged
the religious power structure of the day when he healed sick people and fed hungry people on the
Sabbath. He hung out with sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors and treated them as God’s
beloved children. He must have loved to eat and drink, and when Jesus was at the table, there
was room for everyone, and you didn’t need affirmative action to get a seat. He called sinners
not to condemnation but to repentance. He didn’t call them “evil” – he just offered another way,
God’s way. He told stories – outrageous stories like the one about the Good Samaritan – to help
people understand what life in God’s kingdom was really like – to show us there are no more
distinctions that humans have a way of creating – no Jew and Samaritan, no slave or free, no
male or female, no black or white or Hispanic or Asian or “other” or anything, no gay or straight
or bi- or trans-. No anything that makes another child of God different or anything except a child
of God. And, finally, when Jesus died, he didn’t have any enemies. Among his last words before
he died were these: “Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they’re doing.”
This is the Jesus we know and learn about in Scripture – not the Warrior Jesus who has
become such a popular image for much of American Christianity, not the Jesus who is the
guardian of the privileged, not (in the words of Bill Moyers) “a militarist, hedonist, and lobbyist”
but Jesus who is a friend of sinners and champion of the dispossessed, Jesus who calls us to a
better way, Jesus who is moved to compassion for innocent victims – even though he himself
was the most innocent of victims, Jesus who does it all in love. Jesus who is our one, true plumb
line.
May we know him and follow him more and more every day.
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