Jesus was an activist! I know….that's not something we are used to hearing and may not like to hear. We like to put Jesus in a box and relegate him to just one or two functions. We want to "manage" Jesus. When Christianity does this, we limit the scope of both Jesus' humanity and Jesus' divinity. We don't get a complete picture of who Jesus was and what he taught by word and deed, or how he interacted with his early first century world. Keeping Jesus in that box also relieves us of the responsibility to work for the common good, just as the unboxed Jesus did.
The gospel writers understood that among other things, Jesus was a political activist. They called Jesus the "Son of God" in juxtaposition to the Caesars, who believed that they descended from divinity. They called Jesus the "Savior of the World" instead of the Caesars, who thought that they were the saviors of the world. They called Jesus the "Prince of Peace" in contrast to the Caesars, who enforced the peace of Rome. The Romans executed their version of peace with an iron fist. When the peace was disturbed, their response was ruthless. Jesus said in John that his peace is not like the world's peace, or that of Rome.
Jesus was also a cultural activist. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus turned the tables on his audience and made the person whom his audience would think least likely, the hero of the story, the good neighbor was a Samaritan. His ethnicity, religion, and culture were different from that of the Jewish people, and the two groups had very little use for one another.
When he healed the Canaanite woman's daughter, he tore down the cultural boundaries between Jews and Gentiles. A Gentile was pretty much any group or ethnicity that was outside of what religious Judaism, at the time, saw as God's chosen people. Jesus touched lepers when healing them, which was a big taboo religiously and culturally. While we are talking about healing…when Jesus healed someone, as miraculous as that was, when they were healed, they were able to return to the community that oddly enough shunned them because of their illness or deformity.
In the world of Jesus' day, who you ate with said something about who you were and how you rated. Jesus ate with religious leaders, tax collectors (some of the most despised people in the empire), and prostitutes. Jesus fed the poor. Poverty was an issue in Jesus' day and maybe worse than in our time. Jesus advocated for the poor, sick, and imprisoned.
Jesus was a religious activist! The most prominent example of this activism is when he cleared the temple of all the commerce taking place around the temple. Religious holidays had become a way for the High Priest to make money off the poor pilgrims. When you came to worship, you had to bring two things: a sacrifice and your temple tax.
If you brought your own sacrifice, it had to be inspected for purity. It would almost always fail, leaving you with the only option of buying something to sacrifice from the temple merchants. The price of these animals was highly inflated, and a large portion of the purchase price went to the High Priest. You could only pay the temple tax with shekels. You would have to find a money changer to exchange your roman currency to shekels. Of course, the exchange rate was astronomical, and you guessed it…..the High Priest got a cut!
The point here is that if we are to be like Jesus, we have to do more than just talk about him, but we have to advocate for justice and equal treatment like the unboxed Jesus did. As James says, “faith without works is dead”.