The Radical Christ: Reclaiming the Heart of Christianity

He was the great radical of history, the rebel who sang the world a new and perfect song, the revolutionary who told us that all was possible if we forgave and empathized, understood and loved. Yeshua, Jesus, the Christ. Initially welcomed into Jerusalem, days later, he was rejected and disowned, suffering a grotesque execution reserved for slaves and traitors.

It’s the centre of the Christian faith, of course, and something I reflect on all the time. I have to wonder if Donald Trump and his team do the same, especially as this administration is the most ostentatiously and aggressively Christian in living US history. The term needs qualification, of course. These are mainly Christian nationalists (a painful oxymoron), conspiracy theorists obsessed with the end times, Catholics who condemned the late Pope Francis as being dangerously left -winged, single issue zealots, prosperity preachers, and mere charlatans—Trump himself adopted the mantras of the Christian right only when he fi rst ran for President.

So, what would I, as a simple Canadian Anglican priest, say to the man and to those around him if he had the chance? I’d quote the figure they all seem to mention so often, and how he said that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” I’d remind them of the rich young fellow who asked Jesus what he must do to obtain eternal life, and that Jesus replied that he should sell everything and give the money to the poor.

I’d tell of Jesus in the Temple, who found people selling bruised animals for sacrifice and exchanging currency at fraudulent levels, and how he made a whip of cords, drove these exploiters out of the temple, poured their coins onto the ground and overturned their tables.

I’d remind them that when Jesus spoke of war and peace, he used words that in the original Greek are not passive but demanding and insistent. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” No arms trade, no military occupation, no threats to bomb and kill.

I’d speak of community and society, and how the MAGA cult of harsh individualism is antithetical to Gospel values. “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?” said Jesus. “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked aft er me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” In this, he is reiterating and magnifying the calls of the Hebrew scriptures. “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your nativeborn. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.”

I’d ask them what they say to God in that divine conduit of prayer. In those intimate, emotionally naked moments, do they genuinely listen, do they open themselves up, ask for guidance, and question their bombast and abuse? Or do they use religion, rather than faith, as a justification for malice and division? It isn’t the first time this has happened, but some of us had hoped we’d embraced history’s lessons. I’d ask if they wondered how Jesus would have reacted to a hard-working mother being arrested and deported, even though all she wanted was a better life for her children. Ask them if admiring force rather than reason was the message of the beatitudes. Ask whether the Son of God told us to lie. Ask why they were so opposed to women’s choice when Jesus never mentions abortion. Ask why they were so intimidated by society’s fringes when that was precisely where Jesus found his natural home.

Ask them, plead with them, to embrace the truth of the heart set free. And tell them that I’ll pray for them.