Was Jesus Woke?

Why we should stop twisting Christ into political balloon animals

Credit: Damascus Dropbear

Editor’s Note:  Have a question about why people keep insisting that someone  just  “said the quiet part out loud,” as if they’ve uncorked a brilliant new formulation, when one out of every two tweeters is forever humping that cliché? Don’t ask Matt – he doesn’t understand it either. But send all other perplexing questions to askmattlabash@gmail.com

Hey Matt,
Given your influence within the religious community, I thought that you might riff on this question: was Jesus woke?
Gregory W.

Well first, thanks for recognizing my influence in the religious community.  I try to use it for good, such as campaigning for medium and large communion cups, since, in the Protestant tradition, the tiny plastic shot glasses full of Welch’s grape juice aren’t nearly enough to move those dry communion crackers down the gullet. I’ve almost needed Heimlich’ed several times.

Second, I don’t purport to speak for Jesus. But since he hasn’t done an on-the-record interview in roughly 2,000 years, I’ll take the question.  And by the way, thanks for trying to start a religious war. Because we don’t have enough faith-based tension in this world already.  So I do think I speak for Jesus when I say, “Nice going, Greg.”

In my conservative youth, when I still had Ronald Reagan and Alex P. Keaton stars in my eyes, most of my impressions of Jesus were formed by what I assumed were the godly men of my boyhood. Which came not in the form of politicians, but of Southern Baptist preachers.  No, that doesn’t mean that I thought J.C. wore white loafers and oversized belt buckles and test-pattern sports jackets while attending First Baptist of Nazareth. Or that he went to Luby’s Cafeteria after the service, gorging on chicken fried steak with lime Jell-O salad for dessert. I‘m guessing Jesus probably favored the Mediterranean diet.  Mostly oily fish and plenty of red wine – the latter of which my Baptist friends, sadly, frowned upon – despite its anti-inflammatory properties. 

And while most ministers of my acquaintance motored around in large eight-cylinder jobs, Jesus walked a lot, as even Kanye recognized  in those not-so-long-ago days when he still worshiped the Son of Man instead of Hitler. Jesus could’ve easily been an age-defying blue-zoner, if they hadn’t crucified him at age 33. (He asked for the cup to pass, but it was out of his hands – God’s will. And thank God he listened. Because without that, we’d look really overdressed in our Easter Sunday outfits.)

I should state outright that I’m humble enough to recognize that Jesus means different things to different people. To some, like me, he’s the Son of God, the Redeemer, the Bread of Life, the Fountain of Living Waters, or, if you prefer his professional wrestling name, the Lion of Judah. To semi-reverential nonbelievers, he’s often considered an interesting historical figure who had a lot of great hype men on the payroll (the Gospel writers, Paul, etc.). To tchotchke collectors, he makes for inspirational sports figurines.  To overstimulated nominal Christ subscribers who have made angry politics their new religion, he is now a past-his-prime soy boy, with all that soft turn-the-other-cheek business. If you’re an atheist reader – and I have plenty of those  - maybe he’s just the guy whose name you exclaim when you slam your finger in a car door.

I’m not here to inflict my beliefs on you. Life is a choose-your-own-adventure enterprise, so you’re free to pick your deity of choice. Maybe yours is Elon Musk, or Ibram X. Kendi, or Donald Trump, or Michelle Obama.  In which case, I hope you enjoy your stay……in Hell. (I’m not speaking of the Lake of Fire edition – there are hells of our own making, too.)

But just as a quasi-spiritual exercise, I thought it might be interesting to chew on this woke question a bit. For the one thing J.C. has become to nearly everybody – believer and nonbeliever alike – is a balloon animal, twisted into whatever shape we want him to be. We spend so much time making words come out of his mouth that have never actually been attributed to him, I thought it might be interesting to reacquaint myself with what he actually (allegedly) said. So I just spent an afternoon reading all the red letters – red letters in many Bible translations indicating the words Christ actually spoke. Or at least all the red letters I could muster. There are in the neighborhood of 31,000 of those words, so I stuck to the Book of Matthew, King James Version (since I like the music of it).  

I was forced to memorize large swaths of that book as a schoolboy.  Yet I suppose if I wasn’t so biased by my upbringing, I could’ve admitted that the Jesus of the Bible and of popular interpretation was sort of a hippie, as we used to say back then.  The peace’n’love.  The long hair. The mandals. He wouldn’t have looked out-of-the-norm at Woodstock, even if I suspect he’d have just come for the music, and would’ve skipped all the LSD. He didn’t have a real job.  He dabbled in the family business – carpentry - but then basically became a drifter with purpose…..hanging out with all manner of sordid types. He had abiding affection for the outcasts and the lowly of his time: prostitutes, tax collectors, fishermen.  (While his disciples were drop-netters, most serious theologians concur that Jesus today would be a fly fisherman.)  

When the Pharisees – the moral scolds of their day – frowned upon all the riffraff Jesus kept company with, he responded: “They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick……for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

That little vignette might serve as the perfect Rorschach for the was-Jesus-a-wokester question.  Wokesters could fairly claim that Jesus was anti-establishment, a rebel who comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. Social justice!  The rest of us could say the wokesters have it ass-backwards, since they now are The Establishment scolds, much like the Pharisees  - the only people Christ ever showed true contempt for.  Half of his circle would’ve been cancelled, and unlike now, they couldn’t have gotten a book deal at Regnery or gone on Newsmax TV to whine about it.

The wokesters can point to the Beatitudes:  Jesus said blessed were the poor in spirit, and those who were persecuted for righteousness’ sake, and those who mourn (salty liberal tears!).  The anti-wokesters could charge cherry-picking, because Jesus also said blessed were the peacemakers and the merciful and the meek. Have you ever met a merciful or meek wokester?

We could similarly chase our tails around all day, interpreting and misinterpreting the red letters, trying to tailor them to our narrow political interests, beating our Bibles into swords with which to gut our ideological enemies. In doing so, both wokesters and anti-wokesters might think Jesus was throwing shade on the other guy when ticking through his greatest condemnatory hits, since Jesus was hardly a soft-spoken ASMRtist:

Woe unto the world because of offences ……..Ye blind guides which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel….Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones……And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another……..Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.

Of course, trying to fit our rivals with scriptural cement shoes before disappearing them in the Sea of Galilee all falls apart when you get to Christ’s truly toughest words:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same? ……..For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if you forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

And how often, pray tell, Jesus – since you seem to have something of a Messiah complex – should we have to forgive these filthy wokester hippies or these oppressive fundy finger sniffers?  Peter asked Christ that question. Or rather, that was my paraphrase. The actual question was: “How oft should my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Till seven times?”

Sorry St. Pete, but we don’t get off that easy.  Jesus responded:  “I say not unto thee, Until seven times, but, Until seventy times seven.”  Forgive me for hitting my phone calculator – I’m a writer, not a mathematician – but that’s 490 times.  A shit-ton of forgiveness, if you’ll forgive me from straying from the text, and for swearing. (That’s three down – you only have to forgive me 487 more times.)

The point, Jesus seemed to be saying, is that we are to retire our grievances against one another, no matter how many times they rear their heads.  Even though, one suspects, if we followed what he outlined in Matthew 22 as the two greatest commandments, there would be no cause for grievance in the first place:  “’’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’  This is the greatest and first commandment.   And……‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

Sounds pretty simple, and yet there’s nothing easy about it. Though it is easy to fall asleep when someone asks you whether Jesus was woke.  Why do even believers inflict their sensibilities of the day on a God they believe stands outside of time?  Why cut your God down to size, making him less of a deity than a debate partner? Jesus-as-switchblade, something you can whip out of your pocket and stick your enemy with. Who wants a God that fits in their pocket?

Besides , whether Jesus was woke or wasn’t,  if we loved our neighbors as much as we loved ourselves, labeling concerns would no longer be of any.

Bonus Tracks:  Speaking of labels, I’ve always liked the song “Jesus Was a Cross Maker,” by the vastly underappreciated seventies songwriter, Judee Sill.  She died of a drug overdose at the age of 35 in 1979, so obscure by the time it happened that no obituary was written. Though a secular artist, her songs were steeped in religious imagery, possibly due to her becoming a church organist in reform school during her stint as a wayward youth, in which she and a male companion robbed gas stations and liquor stores.  

At a show, she once described her inspiration for the song. Not only had she tripped across some fringe theological claim that Jesus, in his carpentry work, made crosses, but at the same time, “I was having a real unhappy romance with this guy who was a bandit and a heartbreaker {the singer-songwriter J.D. Souther}.  So one morning I woke up and realized that ‘he’s a bandit and a heartbreaker’ rhymes with ‘Jesus is a crossmaker.’ And I knew that even that wretched bastard was not beyond redemption.”

If you’re Sill-curious - and I suggest you should be – here’s her wonderful original.

But I’d be derelict in my curator duties if I didn’t flag you to this haunting version of the same from the Swedish singer, Frida Hyvönen, which almost sounds like a different song.