Christianity and politics don’t always play well together. Too often one corrupts the other. But, politics, at its root, has to do with the way we live together - which really gets to the heart of Christianity.
What if Jesus were to run for President? What would His platform be? Visit www.JesusIn2008.com, to help you determine Jesus’ stance on modern political issues. Professor Jacques Berlinerblau, author of Thumpin’ It: The Use and Abuse of the Bible in Today’s Presidential Politics, was asked if he would vote for Jesus. He replied: “Perhaps. The Jesus that I’ve constructed in my mind, the Jesus that I like, but that’s my Jesus. When you ask people would you want Jesus to be your president, people would almost always answer yes, but different people have different Jesuses.”
People might say they’d vote for Jesus, but if they truly understood what Jesus was about in the New Testament, would they indeed vote for Him? What was Jesus’ “platform” when He was on earth? Matthew 4:17 tells us, “From that time Jesus began to proclaim, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
Any first-century Jew, hearing someone talking about God’s kingdom would know what they meant: Revolution! The issue of who is king was very important to the Jews. The Romans had conquered Palestine about 60 years before Jesus was born. The Jews hated Rome and Rome’s puppet-ruler, King Herod. They longed for a time to revolt, but violent revolution would bring destruction.
The message of Jesus was: Repent! Don’t continue heading toward destruction, thinking you can end violence with violence. By calling the people to repent (the Hebrew word, shuv, means to turn) Jesus invited them to turn around, change direction, and go toward God’s kingdom of love, peace, healing and forgiveness – for themselves and for the entire world.
The Kingdom of God, Jesus is telling us, is at hand – is within reach. Now is the time to turn around, to change and begin to live in the ways of the Kingdom.
The message is just as urgent for us today as it was then. We can continue on our current path with a future too much like our past: full of fear, pain, regret, disease, violence, and division at every level of society.
Or we can repent and turn toward God’s creative future. This new path isn’t free from conflict, but in God’s Kingdom, conflict leads to forgiveness and reconciliation rather than revenge and destruction.
This year, the catchword of the political arena is “change.” Both ends of the political spectrum have embraced it. The problem is that we cannot look to a Republican or a Democrat or a Libertarian to bring about the changes really needed in our society if we are to survive. If we truly want change, we have to “be the change we want to see in the world.”
That change begins when we give our hearts to Christ. It is the most political act we can do, because it means a revolution – a change of Kings, of Kingdoms, of lives, of futures.