Having spent much time recently thinking and writing about my politics and also about my faith, I have been considering how the two intersect and how they inform each other. This is especially so as I find that my Christian faith has influenced my move to the left politically, which contrasts sharply with those on the right of politics in the USA, and increasingly in the UK who claim that their platforms are driven by their faith.
In examining this contradiction, I have reflected that I often speak about Jesus’s radical inclusive love, and I have been thinking about what that powerful message of love and inclusion means politically as well as theologically in a modern-day context as well as back during Jesus’s own lifetime.
A few weeks ago, I tried to put into words my political philosophy. I wrote about freedom, inclusion and solidarity: my belief that every human being is of equal worth and should have the freedom and opportunity to live a life of dignity, security, meaning and love.
I argued that freedom cannot simply mean being left alone. Someone who is hungry is not truly free. Someone who cannot afford a home is not truly free. Someone denied healthcare, education or basic economic security does not possess meaningful freedom simply because the state has graciously agreed not to interfere with them.
I also wrote that well-regulated markets can be extraordinarily effective servants of human flourishing, but they should never become our masters.
It occurs to me now that I could have found considerably older authority for that particular proposition.
Jesus said:
“You cannot serve God and wealth.”
(Matthew 6:24)
It is one of those sayings whose familiarity perhaps prevents us from hearing just how radical it is.
Jesus does not say that we should strike a sensible balance between God and wealth. He does not tell us that acquiring wealth is fine provided we remember to give a little to charity. He presents us with a choice of masters.
And the more closely I read the Gospels, the harder I find it to escape the conclusion that the radical inclusive love of Jesus, which has become so central to my understanding of Christianity, has profound economic and political consequences.
Good news to the poor
Luke gives us something close to a manifesto at the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry.
Jesus goes to the synagogue in Nazareth, takes the scroll of Isaiah, and reads that the Spirit has anointed him:
“to bring good news to the poor”
(Luke 4:18)
He speaks of release for captives, freedom for the oppressed and “the year of the Lord’s favour”.
That final phrase matters.
It evokes the biblical tradition of Jubilee, set out in Leviticus: a society periodically reset through release from bondage, restoration and the return of land. Jubilee prevents economic misfortune becoming permanent and inherited. It interrupts the endless accumulation of property and power into fewer and fewer hands.
And Jesus says, astonishingly:
“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
(Luke 4:21)
This is not a marginal theme which somebody has subsequently imposed upon Christianity. Jesus chooses it to announce what his ministry is about.
Good news to the poor.
Freedom for the oppressed.
Release.
Restoration.
That is the Kingdom of God breaking into the world.
Turning the world upside down
Indeed, Luke has told us this before Jesus is even born.
Mary’s Magnificat is sometimes rendered so beautifully in church music that I wonder whether we notice quite how politically explosive the words are.
God has brought down the powerful and lifted up the lowly. God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.
This is not simply a promise that rich people will become more generous.
It is reversal.
And that reversal continues throughout Luke.
We are perhaps most familiar with Matthew’s:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
Luke is considerably less comfortable:
“Blessed are you who are poor.”
(Luke 6:20)
And then, just in case we are tempted to spiritualise what Jesus means:
“But woe to you who are rich.”
(Luke 6:24)
Those words ought to make those of us who live comfortable lives squirm a little.
They certainly make me squirm.
I do not think Christianity is supposed to make us comfortable.
Radical love notices inequality
This connects with something I have written repeatedly about inclusion.
I believe profoundly in a Jesus whose love crosses boundaries: between Jew and Samaritan; respectable and disreputable; men, women, and trans/non-binary or intersex (eunuchs); those considered righteous and those dismissed as sinners; those safely inside the religious establishment and those pushed beyond its edges.
That is why I find the continuing exclusion of LGBTQ+ people by parts of the Church so impossible to reconcile with the Gospel.
But if I believe Jesus’s inclusive love requires me to notice who is excluded because of sexuality, gender, race, disability or status, intellectual honesty requires me to notice economic exclusion too.
Jesus certainly does.
Consider the story of Lazarus and the rich man.
The rich man lives splendidly. Lazarus lies starving at his gate.
What is fascinating is what Jesus does not tell us.
We are not told that the rich man stole his fortune. We are not told that he cheated Lazarus. We are not told that he was personally cruel to him.
His sin appears to consist in being able to live in luxury while another human being lay destitute outside his door.
He could see poverty and live comfortably with it.
That is unsettling.
Because if we are looking for a Gospel which tells us that extreme wealth is perfectly compatible with extreme poverty provided the wealthy acquired their money lawfully and occasionally make charitable donations, Jesus stubbornly refuses to provide it.
Bigger barns
He is even more explicit in the parable of the rich fool.
A wealthy man has a wonderfully successful harvest. He has more produce than he can store.
His response is entirely rational according to the logic of accumulation: demolish the barns and build bigger ones.
Then he can relax. His future is secure.
By many of the standards of our own society, this man is a success story.
Jesus calls him a fool.
The problem is not that he has produced abundance. The problem is what he thinks abundance is for.
Everything is expressed in the language of “I” and “my”. My crops. My barns. My grain. My goods.
There is no “we”.
No community.
No neighbour.
No common good.
His mistake is believing that possessing more than he needs while others have less than they need represents security.
And perhaps that is where Jesus most directly challenges modern economic individualism.
The question ceases to be simply, “What am I entitled to keep?”
It becomes:
“What do we owe one another?”
The rich young man
Then there is the rich man who asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life.
Jesus looks at him and loves him.
That detail matters enormously to me.
This is not hatred of wealthy people. Jesus does not divide humanity into virtuous poor people and wicked rich people.
He looks at this particular wealthy man and loves him.
And because he loves him, he challenges him.
“sell what you own, and give the money to the poor”
(Mark 10:21)
The man goes away grieving because he has many possessions.
Jesus then observes how difficult it is for those with wealth to enter the Kingdom of God.
Again, we have become remarkably accomplished at making this passage mean considerably less than it says.
But Jesus’s challenge is not to become slightly more generous.
It is to relinquish the hold that possessions have upon us.
Radical love does not mean avoiding difficult truths in case they make people uncomfortable. Sometimes love says: this thing you possess has begun to possess you. Let it go.
Zacchaeus and the economics of repentance
Zacchaeus provides the fascinating counterpart.
He is a tax collector, part of an exploitative economic system and therefore precisely the sort of person respectable religious society despises.
Jesus includes him.
Of course he does.
But inclusion is not the end of the story.
Encountering Jesus changes Zacchaeus’s relationship with wealth and power. He pledges half his possessions to the poor and fourfold restitution to anyone he has defrauded.
And Jesus says:
“Today salvation has come to this house.”
(Luke 19:9)
I find that extraordinary.
Repentance has an economic consequence.
Zacchaeus does not merely apologise for participating in an unjust system. He puts things right.
He redistributes.
He makes restitution.
And Jesus calls that salvation.
There is something here for our contemporary conversations about justice. Reconciliation which does nothing to repair the consequences of injustice is incomplete. Saying sorry matters. Changing the material circumstances created by wrongdoing matters too.
Who gets a seat at the table?
This economic radicalism intersects constantly with Jesus’s radical inclusion.
Meals matter enormously in the Gospels because tables tell us who belongs.
Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners. He allows the supposedly disreputable into his company. He refuses to organise human worth according to the hierarchies of respectable society.
And in Luke 14, Jesus explicitly challenges the system of reciprocal hospitality through which status and patronage operated.
Do not simply invite your friends, relatives and wealthy neighbours, he says, people who can return the favour.
Invite those who cannot repay you.
The poor.
The disabled.
Those without social capital.
The Kingdom table is not a networking dinner.
It is a table where the normal calculations of status, usefulness and reciprocity have broken down.
That seems to me profoundly connected with inclusion.
You belong not because you are useful. Not because you can pay. Not because you are respectable. Not because you can return the invitation. You belong because you are human and beloved of God.
That is radical inclusive love.
And it is political.
“It is not so among you”
Jesus is equally radical about power.
He looks at the political world around him and observes that rulers “lord it over” others.
Then comes the devastating instruction:
“But it is not so among you.”
(Mark 10:43)
Leadership in the Kingdom is service.
Power is not given so that the powerful can aggrandise themselves. Authority exists for others.
John’s Gospel makes the same point through an extraordinary physical act: Jesus kneels and washes his disciples’ feet.
Master becomes servant.
Hierarchy is inverted.
The first become last.
The marginalised move towards the centre.
Once again, love turns out not to be remotely sentimental. Love rearranges power.
Jesus in the Temple
We see this particularly dramatically when Jesus enters Jerusalem.
I have preached before about Palm Sunday as protest: Jesus entering the city in a deliberate parody of imperial triumph, not on a warhorse but a donkey.
And what does this peaceful revolutionary do next?
He goes to the Temple.
The overturning of the tables is often presented as though Jesus simply objected to people doing business somewhere holy.
But the Temple was not merely a religious building. It was an institution of enormous religious, political and economic power.
Jesus’s protest therefore strikes at a system in which faith, money and power have become entangled.
And shortly afterwards Mark gives us the widow who puts her last two coins into the treasury.
I grew up hearing this story as a charming lesson about generosity: look how wonderful this poor widow is, giving everything she has.
But read it in context.
Immediately before she appears, Jesus condemns religious leaders who:
“devour widows’ houses”
(Mark 12:40)
Then a widow appears and the religious system takes everything she has.
Perhaps Jesus is not principally praising the system’s most generous donor.
Perhaps he is condemning a system which leaves a widow with nothing.
That is a considerably more disturbing reading.
It is also, I suspect, much closer to Jesus.
Whatever you did to them
And then we come to Matthew 25.
The hungry.
The thirsty.
The stranger.
The naked.
The sick.
The prisoner.
These are not peripheral figures in Jesus’s account of the judgement of the nations.
They are where Christ tells us to look for him.
“just as you did it to one of the least of these … you did it to me”
(Matthew 25:40)
Christianity therefore cannot permit us to regard poverty and exclusion as somebody else’s problem.
Christ identifies himself with the person society overlooks.
That insight lies at the heart of liberation theology and its “preferential option for the poor”. It does not mean that God loves wealthy people less. It means that love behaves differently in the presence of inequality.
If one child at a table has plenty and another has no food, treating them identically is not justice.
Love attends first to the one who is hungry.
And the first Christians got the message
After Jesus’s death and resurrection, Acts describes the earliest Christian community attempting to put these principles into practice.
They hold possessions in common. Property is sold. Resources are distributed according to need.
And Acts gives us this remarkable description:
“There was not a needy person among them.”
(Acts 4:34)
There is the objective.
Nobody in need.
We can argue endlessly about whether Jesus was a socialist, and I suspect Jesus would be singularly unimpressed by our determination to fit him into one of our modern ideological boxes.
Socialism as a developed political philosophy belongs to a world very different from first-century Palestine.
Jesus did not write a manifesto for nationalisation.
But neither did he preach laissez-faire capitalism.
What he did was much more unsettling.
He asked what wealth is for.
He asked whom power serves.
He asked who gets invited to the table.
He warned repeatedly about riches.
He told people to give possessions away.
He proclaimed good news to the poor and freedom to the oppressed.
He attacked religious hypocrisy when it exploited the vulnerable.
He challenged hierarchies of status and power.
He identified himself with the hungry, the stranger, the sick and the prisoner.
And he taught that the two greatest commandments are love of God and love of our neighbour.
Love requires justice
That brings me back to where I began.
I have spent years talking about the radical inclusive love of Jesus, particularly in relation to people whom churches have marginalised or excluded.
I still believe that passionately.
But perhaps I have sometimes allowed my understanding of inclusion to become narrower than Jesus’s.
The Gospel challenges me to understand that LGBTQ+ inclusion, racial justice, disability justice, economic justice, the treatment of migrants and refugees, poverty, homelessness and the distribution of power are not separate compartments of Christian ethics.
They meet in the same question:
What does it mean genuinely to love our neighbour?
Because love which feeds somebody but has no interest in why they are hungry is incomplete.
Love which welcomes a homeless person but is indifferent to whether they can ever afford a home is incomplete.
Love which deplores poverty but accepts unlimited accumulation of wealth without asking questions is incomplete.
Love which welcomes minorities while allowing politicians to scapegoat them for economic insecurity is incomplete.
And a Church which preaches love while preserving systems of exclusion has misunderstood the very love it proclaims.
This is where my faith and my politics increasingly meet.
My politics tells me that freedom, inclusion and solidarity belong together.
My faith tells me why.
Freedom, because Jesus liberates rather than controls.
Inclusion, because Jesus repeatedly brings those pushed to the margins into the centre.
Solidarity, because in Christ there ultimately is no “them”. The hungry person, the stranger, the prisoner, the excluded person is our neighbour. More startlingly still, Jesus tells us that in encountering them, we encounter him.
Perhaps Jesus was not a socialist in any meaningful historical sense.
But his message is far more economically and politically radical than much modern Christianity has allowed itself to remember.
And perhaps that is because the comfortable version of Jesus is much easier to live with.
A Jesus who asks us to be personally kind is reassuring.
A Jesus who asks what our bank balance has to do with our neighbour’s poverty is more troublesome.
A Jesus who blesses the poor, warns the rich, challenges the powerful, overturns tables, welcomes the excluded and insists that nobody should be left in need is positively dangerous.
But that is the Jesus I find in the Gospels.
His is a love without boundaries, but not a love without consequences.
It is a love which welcomes.
A love which liberates.
A love which shares.
A love which serves.
A love which challenges.
A love which sometimes overturns tables.
And, ultimately, a love which demands not merely that we become kinder people, but that together we build a kinder and more just world.
That is radical love.
And if we actually took it seriously, it might still turn the world upside down.
Biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition (NRSVA).
C. E. Lord OBE 