Was Jesus a Communist?
Jul 21st, 2007 by greg
As I was reading the Gospel for today, I thought of a comment I saw recently saying that Jesus was a Communist. This reading reminded me how different he really was.
The Pharisees went out and took counsel against Jesus
to put him to death.When Jesus realized this, he withdrew from that place.
Many people followed him, and he cured them all,
but he warned them not to make him known.
This was to fulfill what had been spoken through Isaiah the prophet:Behold, my servant whom I have chosen,
my beloved in whom I delight;
I shall place my Spirit upon him,
and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles.
He will not contend or cry out,
nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets.
A bruised reed he will not break,
a smoldering wick he will not quench,
until he brings justice to victory.
And in his name the Gentiles will hope.
Jesus, like the Communists, recognized that the poor were mistreated by those who had plenty. You could also say that in a way, Jesus agreed with the Communists that there needed a redistribution of wealth, but that’s where the similarities end.
Communism blamed religion for the problem of the poor, but Jesus guided people to God, and taught his followers that they should be merciful to the poor because God was merciful to them. Communism advocated a violent overthrow of the old order so that its influence could be eradicated. As today’s Gospel indicates, Jesus worked in a quiet and gentle way. Although he sometimes had large crowds listening to him, he was not trying to raise a large following, and he never incited them to take action against the establishment.
The war that Jesus fights is in the human heart, and his weapons are spiritual. The army that Jesus is building is the Church. He started small, with just a foundation of twelve men, but it has grown to fill the whole Earth.
People today don’t realize how much the Gospel has changed the world. Most people in Jesus day did not care about the poor. Most of the religions and philosophies of that time taught that the poor deserved what they got. The Jewish faith was different, but even there, the practice of many Jews was not living up to the teaching of their Scriptures, as Jesus often pointed out.
It was the Church that made caring for the poor a priority. It was the Church that took in orphans and build hospitals in a day when there was no health insurance or socialized medicine. Tending to the sick was a ministry of love, not a big business.
The solution to poverty today is not government programs, but the gentle work of Christ, changing people’s hearts one at a time, and bringing them together in one family of love.
You are completely ignorant.
Hello Greg and All,
Jesus is a communist. I’d like to create a network of those who agree.
Would you be so kind as to read the linked post and perhaps leave your impressions.
It would be beneficial for those who agree that Jesus is a communist (not a Marxist) to network together.
God bless,
Tom Usher
Although I asked the question of Jesus being a Communist, and pointed out some similarities, it is not accurate to say that he actually is a Communist, primarily because Communism is a political and economic ideology, and Jesus did not come to setup a political or economic system. Jesus came to solve a spiritual problem, the alienation of humanity from God. The restoration of our relationship with God has moral implications, the core of which is self-sacrificial love, which usually involves some sharing of what we have. The sharing should flow from the love, which flows from a relationship with God. Imposing sharing through a political system bypasses the more important aspects of relationship.
Hello Again Greg,
Thank you for your reply. Did you read my post to which I linked in my comment above?
http://www.realliberalchristianchurch.org/wordpress/?p=2380
Please note I didn’t say Jesus is a Communist (capitalized) as in the one-party, totalitarian dictatorship of the proletariat (industrial workers) that turned out to be a dictatorship under the party bosses and particularly Stalin and Mao and their like.
The communism of the disciples of Jesus has nothing to do with the Communist Party(s) that came up under Marxist ideology.
As for Jesus not coming to set up a political or economic system, that is semantically incomplete. Politics is the government of the polis (city). In the revelation of Jesus Christ, it represents the Shining City on the Hill, Jerusalem, the City of Peace, Heaven, Zion, etc. Likewise, economics at its heart or root concerns how the house is run, again meaning government. The Kingdom of Heaven and God is government by unselfishness and love and sharing all things as one spirit. This is exactly consistent with what Jesus said to his followers as related in John. They did live it out with Jesus and continued to do so as stated in Acts.
We are to pray the Lord’s Prayer in which we say that God’s Kingdom is to come to the Earth. That means that his government is to come to the Earth. We are to be governed as he wants us to behave, to be. It means that true Christian love includes sharing all with none saying anything is his or hers that is not also the property of God and all other Christians or the entire Church’s.
We all serve each other as the lesser. That’s the spirit is it not?
God bless,
Tom Usher
Yes, Tom, I read your article. In it, you provide a different definition of Communism than everyone else uses, but I think that is misleading. I could say that Jesus was a Fascist, not the kind of Fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, but a Fascism of my own definition, but that would also be misleading because not everyone who saw my first statement would read and understand my redefinition.
Otherwise, I agree with most of what you say. Jesus did bring a kingdom, which is a government, but it is the government of God expressed through the Church. I don’t know how that is supposed to work out ultimately; the various efforts to bring about Christendom in the past have had their problems. I think that when Jesus says that the Kingdom is within us, that he means that it begins with individual conversion of the heart, which leads to action, as I said before. The key to the kingdom is evangelism and discipleship, not political power or economic policy. However, some Christians are called to position of government responsibility, or have significant economic influence, and they must exercise that according to the Gospel.
Peace be with you,
Greg
Hello Greg,
Misleading connotes leading astray. I know that’s not what I’m doing at all.
The fact that the currently prevailing usage is that which has been dictated by those falling on the political spectrum of the Communist Party to the laissez-faire capitalists is no reason not to set the meaning straight again. Afterall, the currently prevailing usage of love is far from Jesus’s meaning. The other connotations of love are loaded with hypocrisy when they are divorced from his meaning.
When I say Jesus is love, I don’t need to first explain that he is not the love of money for instance.
People who are against the voluntary giving and sharing economy Jesus teaches that will come to this world to save it have deliberately twisted the meaning of communism.
Isaiah rightly said that the meanings of words would be put back.
Not everyone who sees Jesus’s words understands his full context. That’s no reason at all to avoid using them. How can one flesh them out without first using them as intended and leaving it to others to inquire? From the start, I invited you to see the context. I do that with everyone.
Your idea that I should confine myself to current usage would preclude the message of Jesus Christ. His parables are loaded with terms that are not understood by those who follow your advice here to me.
You wrote, “The key to the kingdom is evangelism and discipleship, not political power or economic policy.” The kingdom, however, is both political and economic when those terms are used in the full context of the message of Jesus. The kingdom is to come to the Earth and they are to conflate as the combination of the New Heaven and New Earth. That’s what Jesus teaches. It’s there. You’ve read it. It’s for the here and now. It’s what we pray for in The Lord’s Prayer.
God bless,
Tom Usher
Good luck, then, Tom. I’m not interested in trying to redeem the word, Communism, however; it has too much negative baggage. The word “love”, is different; it is a word Jesus actually used. I’m all for redeeming that word.
I also hold to Catholic eschatalogical teaching that says the New Heavens and New Earth will not come until Jesus personally returns. When I pray the Lord’s prayer, I ask for the coming of the kingdom in two senses. The first is a progressive sense, which happens every day, but is incomplete. The second is an ultimate sense, which will happen with the return of Christ and the final judgment. Many Christian social movements have gone astray confusing those senses.
Well Greg,
I pray in both of those senses also. However, I know Jesus will not rebuke anyone who didn’t hold back from working to bring forth a voluntary giving-and-sharing-all political economy for the sake of the many.
I will carry on debating the laissez-faire capitalists who take delight in claiming Jesus was not and is not a communist, by which they mean not a communalist, baggage or no. I will also therefore continue using the pre-Marxist connotation of the word communist so that the debate will become plain and clear. It is a matter of selfishness versus unselfishness (perhaps you use the term selflessness), what that means, where Jesus stands, and where the capitalists stand. It is they who are misleading, not I.
Of course, when Jesus said “one,” he meant what encompasses communism.
I wish you well. Perhaps our paths may cross again.
Peace,
Tom