“So, Do You Really Think Jesus was a Capitalist?”

My friend the late Peter Gomes used to love to describe a famous New Yorker cartoon that showed two upper class parishioners leaving church and shaking the preacher’s hand. In the caption, the wife, in her fur and jewels, says to her well-heeled husband, “It can’t be easy for him not to offend us.”

As someone who is trying to renew a congregation, I completely understand the instinct to water down some of Jesus’ more confrontational teachings. We have done to Jesus exactly what the culture is doing to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We work overtime to domesticate both of these prophets and put them on a pedestal so we can admire them without having to take them seriously.

In his book The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, Rev. Gomes wrote:

If our focus is nearly always on the man for others who in the short term loses but who one of these days will return in triumph to win, then it is no wonder that so much of Christian faith is either obsessed by the past or seduced by the prospects of a glorious future. In the meantime, things continue their bad old way, and we live as realists in a world in which reality is nearly always the worst-case scenario. The last thing the faithful wish for is to be disturbed …. It is not that we are ignorant. We know what gives offense, which is probably why we (the Church) spend so much time talking about sex and Jesus spent so much time talking about money.

It is fascinating that, even in church, we finally have learned to have (generally) civil conversations about premarital sex, divorce, abortion, and homosexuality, but not economics. Capitalism, profitmaking, income inequality, etc. are still areas of life where our better angels dare not trod. Questioning those assumptions today seem unthinkable. Hence the worst critique that people can make of political leaders is to call them “socialists” without ever considering what that word means or what we mean by it. If you ever want to end a dinner early I suggest you ask, “So, do you really think Jesus was a capitalist?”

by Michael Piazza
Center for Progressive Renewal