The true meaning of Jesus’s radical message

Biblical scholars, one of the greatest of them once remarked, go looking for Jesus only to find themselves staring at their own reflection down the bottom of a very deep well. As with scholars, so with cultures. The Victorian Jesus was meek and mild and proper and principled. There’s a rather good sketch of ‘GOP Jesus’ doing the rounds on Twitter in which Our Lord tells his followers: ‘I was hungry and you gave me something to eat… And behold, now I’m all lazy and entitled.’ In our own politically troubled times, however, it is Jesus the zealous revolutionary who has risen.

There is much to recommend this intense, radical figure. The political Jesus is not just a product of the disappointed ex-Marxist imagination, but reflects our growing understanding of the poor, febrile, violent, despotic, colonial world of first-century Palestine. It was never very likely that the Romans would have crucified someone for being spiritual and nice, and so it is we have learnt to read words such as ‘peace’, ‘repentance’, ‘kingdom’ and ‘salvation’ in their true political register.