As a follower of Jesus, I don’t much care who the ruling party is. Prime ministers and premiers come and go, but Jesus is still Lord—which means that no matter who rules on earth, I am still called to love God by loving my neighbour as if their needs were my own. I’m still called to love my enemies, welcome the stranger, heal the sick, free the captive, forgive debts, care for those considered “least,” bring good news to the poor, and warn the rich and powerful of the woes that will befall them. This is politics according to Jesus.
But politics according to Jesus does intersect with the politics of the world. When Jesus proclaimed the “kingdom of God,” he was claiming an alternative vision to the kingdoms of the world. When he brought “good news to the poor,” he was declaring a very different “good news” than that claimed by the Roman Empire. And all that Jesus-y stuff I listed in the previous paragraph? That’s the stuff that our politics—the ordering of society, collectively making decisions—is concerned with.
Health care. Immigration. Economic wellbeing. Creating a just society. Politics according to Jesus intersects with all these things and more.
So, while I don’t much care who the ruling party is, I do care about all these things. When a ruling party—or, in an election, a possible ruling party—makes policies or promises that ultimately work against these things (however much they appear like short-term fixes), I cannot support them, and at times I must even speak against them.
Which is why I cannot in good conscience, as a follower of Jesus, support parties on the conservative side of the spectrum in Canada, at least as they are currently operating.
Conservative politics has changed in Canada. I remember when conservative parties in Canada assumed universal health care as a fundamental, necessary good. I remember when they promoted more open immigration. I remember when they taxed wealthy corporations at higher rates than even liberal governments do now in order to provide the social services Canadians need.
I remember when conservatives spoke of the common good at least as often as they spoke of individual liberties.
And this, to me, is the tragedy of conservative politics in Canada: it has lost its moral compass, while still claiming the moral high ground. It claims the high ground of personal ethics and public safety, but the ground it stands on is a fundamentally selfish position. It looks out for its own needs and the needs of those who are “like me.” It does not seek to love its neighbour as if the needs of the neighbour—or stranger, or poor, or sick, or “least”—were as their own.
Liberal or progressive politics in Canada is not free of critique, to be sure. Small l-liberal parties in Canada can tend to follow social trends too easily and too quickly. They can tend toward empty talk, speaking about the kinds of things noted above but doing little to actually move on them. Nevertheless, a principled, motivated liberal or progressive party in Canada is more likely to move Canadian society toward the kinds of things Jesus was concerned about than any of the more conservative parties in Canada, at least as things currently stand.
As I vote, and otherwise act as a citizen of Canada, I do so as a follower of Jesus. And so the question I ask myself is not, “Which candidate/party will make my life better?” It’s “Which candidate/party most closely aligns with these expressions of the reign of God?”
Loving neighbours, loving enemies, welcoming strangers, freeing captives, forgiving debts, healing the sick, caring for those considered “least,” bringing good news for the poor, warning woes on the rich and powerful—these are what it means to claim Jesus as Lord, these are what the reign of God is about, these are the politics of Jesus.
*To be clear, these views are my own and I am neither endorsing nor opposing any particular party or candidate.
God. God is depicted in a myriad of different ways in Scripture. These are all metaphors: God is in some sense comparable to a “Father,” for instance, or a “Mother,” or a “Lord,” or a “Rock,” just to name a few. Even “God” is a metaphor: God is analogous to the “gods” of other nations and religions, comparable to what we typically think of when we think of a “deity.” Some biblical descriptions, however, take a different tack: God is YHWH, “I Am Who I Am,” for instance, or God is “the one in whom we live and move and have our being,” or “God is love.” When I speak of “God,” I’m thinking more along those lines: God is “the ground and source of all being, personhood, and love.” I don’t imagine that God is merely “a being,” a distinct being within the universe, like us only bigger and stronger and immortal and invisible.
heaven. The Bible doesn’t speak of “heaven” as “our eternal home.” The New Testament understanding of life after death is simply being “with the Lord” or “with Christ.” In the end this includes living in transformed bodies in a renewed earthly creation (“resurrection” to a “new heavens and new earth”). In the Bible “heaven” means either 1) “the skies,” 2) “God’s dwelling,” or 3) a roundabout way of saying “God” (e.g. “kingdom of heaven” = “kingdom of God”). I don’t use the word “heaven” very often myself because of how it is misunderstood, but when I do it’s along the lines of 2) above: “the ‘place’ where God is most ‘fully present.’” Usually I use the word to speak of the biblical hope of “heaven” come down to earth, God’s presence being fully realized among us within a renewed creation.
sin. We tend to think of “sin” as “personal moral failure”: we’ve crossed a boundary established by God, and these boundaries are mostly related to our private lives or individual relationships. This way of thinking about sin isn’t wrong, it’s just incomplete, and if this is the only way we think about sin then it can be unhelpful and unhealthy. I think a better (and more holistically biblical) way of thinking about sin is as “all the ways we harm others, ourselves, and the natural world through our settled thoughts, our words, our actions, and our inaction.” This “harm” can be thought of as “preventing or hindering flourishing life.” With regard to people this can most practically be understood as keeping them from having their most basic needs met: needs for clean air and water, nutritious food, basic health, security and freedom, meaningful relationships, love and respect. This sin is more than just “personal moral failure,” then—it also includes collective sins such as systemic injustice, as well as actions that harm the natural world.
salvation. In Scripture the language of “salvation” is most often about “rescue” or “deliverance” from some real-life peril, but it also can include ideas of “healing” and “restoration,” whether physically or relationally, individually or collectively. Then there’s all the related biblical words like “redemption,” “reconciliation,” and so on, which are really variations on the “restoration” idea. When I speak of “salvation” or being “saved” or God as “Saviour,” I mean something along the lines of “God delivering us from all the ways we harm others, ourselves, and the natural world, and bringing about a full and flourishing life for all creation.” I don’t mean “God rescuing us from future eternal torture so that we can live a disembodied existence somewhere else forever with God.”
kingdom of God. In much popular thinking the “kingdom of God” or “kingdom of heaven” is equivalent to “heaven,” which is thought of as “our eternal home” (see “heaven” above). But for early Jews, including Jesus and the authors of the New Testament, “kingdom of God” was a way of referring to “God ruling over God’s people and all the peoples of the earth.” When I use the phrase “kingdom of God,” I’m trying to capture Jesus’ particular understanding of this earthly rule of God, something along the lines of “God’s vision of a world of justice, peace, and flourishing life, which becomes a reality when people live according to God’s way of love.”
Jesus Christ. “Christ” is not Jesus’ second name; “Christ” is a title. And it’s not a title of divinity; it’s a human title. “Christ,” or “Messiah,” was most commonly a way of referring to the human kings in the line of ancient Israel’s King David. Eventually it came to refer to the ultimate Messiah, “the king from David’s dynasty who brings about God’s kingdom on earth.” The phrase “Jesus Christ,” then is a mini-creed: “Jesus is the one who makes real God’s vision of justice, peace, and life on earth.”
Son of God. This phrase has a dual meaning in the New Testament. Some writings, Mark’s Gospel, for example, use “Son of God” in one of its Old Testament senses, as a way of referring to the kings in the line of David. In this sense the phrase is equivalent to “Christ” or “Messiah,” and has no overtones of divinity. Other writings, most notably John’s Gospel, use “Son of God” with a clear implication of divinity. I believe both to be true of Jesus, and how I use this phrase tends to depend on which New Testament books I’m talking about: Jesus is “the one who makes real God’s vision of justice, peace, and life on earth,” and Jesus is “the one who uniquely embodies God, showing us most clearly and completely who God is and how God works in the world.”
Jesus is Lord. This doesn’t mean “Jesus controls everything that happens.” Nor does it merely mean “Jesus is the boss of me.” “Lord” in the ancient world had connotations of “master,” yes, but it was also a common way of speaking of human rulers—kings, emperors, and the like. With none of these was the idea that they controlled a person’s life circumstances; it was that they commanded their obedience or allegiance. To say that “Jesus is Lord,” then, means that “Jesus is greater than all human rulers and any powers-that-be in this world, and so he holds our ultimate allegiance in all things.”
gospel. The New Testament word “gospel” means “good news.” The “gospel” is not merely that “God sent Jesus to die for our sins so that we can be forgiven and go to heaven when we die.” It’s the “good news that God has acted in Jesus—through his life, teachings, death, and resurrection—to make right everything that has gone wrong in the world.” In other words, it’s a way of summing up pretty much everything I’ve described above.
faith. We tend to think of “faith” either as “believing certain things to be true,” or “trusting in someone to do something.” The New Testament language of “faith” includes those ideas, but also others: “faith” (pistis) can mean everything from “belief” to “trust” to “faithfulness” to “fidelity” to “allegiance.” When I use the word “faith” I can mean any or all of those, following the New Testament usage. All of those are the response God desires from us: “believing what God says to be true, trusting in God through all things, being faithful to God and following God’s way of love.”
love. Some people hear “love” and think “affection,” a surge of warmth and fondness toward others. Others hear “love” and think “tolerance,” acknowledging and accepting others and their actions with a kind of benign smilingness. Some, perhaps conditioned by Christianity, hear “love” and think “self-sacrifice.” Others, of course, hear “love” and think “romance” or even “sex”: physical, emotional, even erotic intimacy. None of these are bad, but on their own they are incomplete. In the New Testament, love is consistently portrayed as loving the way Jesus loved. It is more along the lines, then, of “freely giving ourselves for others so that they might experience flourishing life together with us, even if we feel they don’t deserve it, even when it hurts us to do so.” This love, I’m convinced, is at the heart of who God is, what Jesus taught and lived out unto death, and how God’s “salvation,” the “kingdom of God,” comes about.
Here’s how I used to understand these verses. I used to think they are telling us what we need to do to be saved from God’s eternal punishment for our sin. We need to confess with our mouth and believe with our whole heart: we need to confess our own personal sin and confess Jesus as our own personal Saviour, and we need to believe in our hearts that Jesus died on the cross for our sins.
That’s the point of the resurrection. The powers of this world have assessed Jesus and vilified him; but God has assessed Jesus and vindicated him. The resurrection is God’s loud shout of “Amen!” to everything about Jesus: his teachings, his way of life, his self-giving suffering, his selfless death.
Michael Pahl 