A lot of the locals thought he was an unsavory character. He was
probably born a bastard, whose father almost chose to disown and abandon him;
his family feared the law and fled the country at one point. He was accused of
undermining the law, he followed a cult leader who was later arrested, and his
friends were arrested often. He associated most of the time with the poor, and
was often homeless. Throughout his life there is no sign he had any interest in
women; his only known public display of affection is when a man kissed him late
in his life.
He loved the poor. He spent a lot of his time helping the sick and
the insane, worrying about children and those who had lost loved ones, and
feeding the hungry. He did it all for free: he said he didn’t want credit or
money for helping others and he told his friends to help others the same way
too. He despised the rich, once launching an armed attack on bankers, and
disliked people who ordered the labor of others while making no exertion
themselves. He called for selling off possessions rather than piling up a lot
of personal stuff, donating to the poor, spending liberally rather than seeking
austerity, and paying taxes.
He spoke out for meekness, mercy, peace, reconciliation and
forgiveness, even for enemies and people who were cruel. He stood up for people
who were being persecuted (like gays today). He opposed those who were vengeful
or judgmental. He loathed organized religion, warning about dishonest religious
people and predicting the collapse of the major local religious institution. He
resisted the idea of teaching or interpreting religious language literally, and
heavily stressed speaking in non-literal illustrations instead. Religious
conservatives plotted to kill him and hired someone to betray him for money.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the world’s first Democrat. Jesus
of Nazareth. And he’s not some centrist DLC kind of liberal, either. He’s out
there on the fringe with Tom Harkin and Dennis Kucinich.
I say this because religious conservatives often cherry-pick
quotes from the Bible in their effort to tell the rest of us what’s God’s will
is. Well, two can play at that game. You don’t even need to cherry-pick the
Gospels to create a picture of Jesus who is really, really liberal. The notion
that he would go tramping the countryside, claiming that God hates gays and
abortion and evolution and stem-cell research and HPV vaccinations and sex
education and scary books like conservatives do, is absurd. A Republican he was
not.
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