I find that some people on the left-wing of Christianity are just as complacent and dogmatic (perhaps unintentionally rather than arrogantly) about ‘what Jesus would have done,’ as fundamentalists on the right-wing of Christianity.
(Yeah, I know the left/right wing spectrum is broken in politics, as well as in religion, but lets run with it provisionally here!)
How does anyone on earth today ‘just know’ what Jesus would have done with regards to wealth distribution/redistribution, poverty, immigration, war, asylum, vegetarianism, climate change, or whatever? It seems to me that ‘what Jesus would have done’ is a bit of a convenient rubber stamp.
Unfortunately, Jesus is not here (or at least not in body anyway!), to tell people what he would have done. Sadly, nobody has a get-out-jail-free card for their conscience; there is no blank cheque for moral reasoning.
Sorry to be ridiculously un-PC (un-postmodernly-correct) here, but I really do give zero fucks about whether or not Jesus did indeed ‘wear sandals and eat organic food’ (just like Kris Kristofferson).
Or whether or not he was (anachronistically or otherwise) a migrant, an asylum seeker, a non-binary gender individual, a religious sceptic, a religious traditionalist, a spiritual reformer, a teetotaler, or an obsessive The Only Way is Essex fanboy.
These are all interesting questions, but not one of them is a knockdown argument that tells people with any real, self-evident certainty about what to do today.
Appealing to ‘but Jesus was this, or Jesus said or did that’ is real spiritual and philosophical cowardice, and is no more of a knockdown argument (from an anti-fundamentalist) than ‘Ephesian 6: 31 says so’ (from a fundamentalist.)
I am not talking about any one person here; this is a pretty common trend, found among many people.
And people need to be a bit more critically-minded and reflective.
If Jesus was a humanitarian interventionist, a Neo-Nazi or a jihadist, would you stick his hand in the fire, just because he told you to?
Hopefully not!
Image attribution:
By I, CrazyLegsKC, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link