An inter-Mennonite newspaper, putting the Mennonite world together every week since 1923

EDITORIAL

| HOME | SUBSCRIBE | LINKS |

Imagine Jesus running for president. Stephen Heffner did. He created a Web site, jesusin2008.com, to get people thinking about what kind of candidate Jesus would be.

Heffner invites site visitors to suggest what positions Jesus would take on today’s issues. By debating Jesus’ political platform, Heffner says, participants will “provide a model for what a truly sincere, forthright and courageous presidential candidate might look like.”

Envisioning Jesus as a presidential candidate poses a novel way to consider the relationship of faith and politics. It helps us ask: How should the teachings of one who said his kingdom is not of this world guide our choice of earthly authorities?

Or, more generally, what are the politics of Jesus?

The Mennonite theologian who made that phrase famous took a broad view of politics. John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus isn’t about gaining and exercising power in government. Politics includes all aspects of how a group, society or nation functions.

It is in this sense that Jesus — and every Christian — is political, even if we choose not to vote. Yoder argued that Jesus’ teachings are “not only relevant but also normative for a contemporary Christian social ethic.” Jesus’ followers can powerfully influence the world by the way they live. And that is a political act.

Only the church, and not the government, can fully embrace Jesus’ political ethic, says Jim Wallis, founder of the Sojourners progressive evangelical movement.

“The ethics of Jesus will not be adopted by a nation, but they will be adopted by the followers of Jesus to shape the nation,” Wallis said, commenting on Heffner’s Web site in a Religion News Service report. “The Sermon on the Mount would not be a political platform.”

And Jesus surely would not be a presidential candidate — no more so than he would have claimed Caesar’s throne. Jesus overturned all expectations of a political or military Messiah. He dismissed Satan’s temptation to claim power to rule the world (Luke 4:5-8).

Unlike a politician, he rejected the safe and the popular, instead preaching love of enemy and freedom for the oppressed.

“Far too often we miss the profound political implications of Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God,” writes Mennonite ethicist Ronald J. Sider in his new book, The Scandal of Evangelical Politics. “He declared that in his person and work he was actually inaugurating the climactic moment in history when God would fulfill his promises to Israel, restore his chosen people and use them to transform the nations.”

The power to transform nations sounds like the ultimate political prize. And so it is. But it lies beyond the reach of any party or president. Candidates may promise historic change, but most of their hearers know the real limits.

The only political leader with the power to transform everything is the one whose nation — the kingdom of God — crosses all boundaries humans draw. He preached the power of change from the bottom up, like yeast in the dough or a mustard seed in the ground.

Reshaping society is a political task for the citizens of God’s nation, the church. Jesus already is our president, and his campaign for change requires our vote every day. — Paul Schrag