Jesus, revolutionary of the poor
Stuart Masters welcomes a new book by Mark Bredin
In his most recent book, Jesus, Revolutionary of the Poor: Matthew’s Subversive Messiah, Quaker prison chaplain and Bible scholar Mark Bredin presents Friends and the wider Christian church with the uncompromising message of Matthew’s Gospel.
Jesus, Revolutionary of the Poor reveals a God who identifies with the poor, the weak and the sick, and calls his followers to reject greed and selfishness in favour of unconditional generosity and service. The ‘non-poor’ (those who have more than what’s required to meet essential needs) are called to serve and share with those who have little or nothing.
Across the centuries, people have found ways to avoid the radical social and political implications of Jesus’ life and teachings. Some have suggested that, since Jesus announced the imminent coming of the kingdom of God, his commandments were only designed to apply for an interim period. Others have argued that his precepts were context-specific, relating only to the simple rural life of his time and place.
Frequently, his teachings have been so spiritualised and personalised that all social and political considerations have become obscured. Finally, the details of Jesus’ life and ministry have often been sidelined by those who focus on his death, understood as an atoning sacrifice for sin.
Mark Bredin develops his argument by approaching the interpretation of the Gospel of Matthew from the perspectives of ecology, liberation, Torah, peace, and the kingdom of God.
The ecological perspective
Mark Bredin offers a creation-centred reading of Matthew’s Gospel. He argues that God’s creation is good and ordered in such a way as to enable all creatures to enjoy its abundance. Hence, scarcity and poverty are the products of human sin:
Creation is ordered according to God’s designs to be an expression of His goodness. Where there is poverty, creation is not an expression of His goodness but reveals, rather, human beings in rebellion against God’s intention.
Such a dysfunctional relationship with God and the rest of creation has made the world a ‘hell on earth’ for so many people and other living creatures:
Our failure to behold the goodness of God as generous and abundant leads to an understanding of goodness as mean, competitive, and self-empowering. Creation is not seen as abundant and overflowing with God’s love, but a place of scarcity wherein each struggle to survive.
Right relationship with God and others requires ecological and social justice.
The liberation perspective
Mark Bredin draws deeply on the insights of liberation theology, which asserts that God is a liberator with a preferential option for the poor and oppressed:
Matthew favours those who are on the wrong side of injustice. God’s preference for them has nothing to do with piety. Matthew’s God does not respond only to the poor who cry to Him, He hears the cry of all who cry out in pain and hopelessness from oppression.
Mark Bredin argues that the cross of Christ, far from being a legal transaction relating to human sin, was the direct consequence of Jesus’ solidarity with the poor and oppressed and his unrelenting resistance to worldly systems of domination and injustice.
It is Jesus’ identification and solidarity with the poor that leads to His suffering and death. When Jesus teaches about bearing the cross it is a political and revolutionary act that challenges the forces of domination and exclusion to see the horror of what such exclusionary politics result in.
Following the way of Jesus inevitably provokes conflict because it challenges the powers that be.
The Jewish perspective
Mark Bredin helpfully roots Jesus’ teachings firmly within His Jewish context. He notes that a crucial aspect of Torah is the liberating principles of Sabbath and Jubilee, which address the bondage of slavery and debt:
Torah is designed to guide people in relationships to be loving, selfless, merciful, peaceable, and righteous. To disobey Torah leads to God’s wrath as humans live contrary to the way their Creator intended for them.
This perspective enables us to recognise continuity in Jewish and Christian understandings of divine justice and righteousness:
Torah directs human action away from greed and selfishness… towards peace… Jesus as the fulfilment of the Law is the same as saying Jesus stands against poverty; his ministry challenges human beings to obey Torah by eradicating poverty.
Here we see a thoroughly Jewish Jesus, living the justice of Torah and exhorting his followers to do the same.
The peace perspective
The Matthean Jesus helps us to see how a false peace is often maintained in the world using ‘violence, walls, and coercion’. Jesus rejects this phoney peace by condemning injustice and hypocrisy and by teaching his followers to love their enemies:
A covenant of peace is at the heart of creation and refers to how God intended creation to be when humans live mercifully and in harmony… One who works for shalom refers to one who seeks, against the social grain, to redistribute God’s gift of creation equally and partially to those who are deprived of it.
The way of Jesus is the way of shalom, understood as justice, well-being and peace for all creation.
The divine perspective
Mark Bredin highlights how the way of Jesus revealed in Matthew’s Gospel seems to turn the accepted ways of the world on their head.
God’s way of love and generosity is compared to the all-too-human ways of greed and injustice:
Jesus impresses upon His disciples that greatness in the kingdom of heaven is not measured in terms of worldly success. What is great in a world that encourages competition and self-striving has nothing to do with God’s will. The attitude and economic policies that lead people to see others as commercial commodities has nothing to do with Jesus’ teachings.
Nowhere is the upside-down character of God’s kingdom presented more starkly than in the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16). In the kingdom of God there seems to be little or no place for assessments of deserving and undeserving people:
The parable reveals Jesus’ profound critique of the principle of pay and reward that still today many Christians find difficult to handle. This parable, I propose, turns upside down the worldview of competition and battle in which creation is seen as a place of scarcity. Through this parable we glimpse at the values that God intends for human beings in order to make His goodness fully and dynamically present in all creation.
The unconditional generosity of the divine perspective represents a profound challenge to dominant human systems of power, status and reward.
Mark Bredin’s presentation of the Matthean Jesus should be deeply challenging and discomforting to every one of us who live a materially comfortable life. Indeed, he admits that a key motivation for working with this material is to constantly challenge himself about what God requires of him.
In a world of hunger, exploitation, injustice, cruelty and environmental destruction, are we willing to respond to this challenge and embrace the upside-down kingdom of God, where unbounded love, generosity and service replace selfishness, greed and complacency? Are we willing to accept the cost of discipleship?
Mark Bredin’s book is essential reading for those who answer ‘yes’, and even more so for those who are as yet undecided.
