Part 543. Challenge and campaign for justice

 The following is attributed to Martin Luther King Jnr.

I am convinced that love is the most durable power in the world.  It is not an expression of impractical idealism, but of practical realism.  Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, love is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilisation.

Another quotation:

Discipleship in today's world means standing up for justice, confronting inequality, and living out the love of Jesus in every action.  Kurt Struckmeyer

One more:

Social reforms are never carried out by the weakness of the strong, but always by the strength of the weak. Karl Marx

And finally:

The poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order. Gustavo Gutierrez 

The authors of the literature contained in the books of the bible attribute to God the concept that God is love and this is personified in an individual known to us as Jesus.  God is love and, according to these authors, Jesus tells us what that love entails and to follow him in achieving it in the world.  Achieved not by piety but by action, not by waiting for some future event but by action now. Love your neighbour is not a sentimental expression of hope: it is a demand to go out into the world and actively seek justice for the downtrodden and poor. 

Jurgen Moltmann was of the opinion theology must always be related to concrete human situations and that the teaching of Jesus about the Kingdom of God requires of his followers commitment to the overthrowing of everything in the social order that is contrary to its demands.  

Part 542. Excellent exposition by Jon Swales: Jesus is strange

 

I commend the following article by Revd. Jon Swales for your attention.  The concepts and ideas in the article are reflected in many other posts on this blog.  Jon writes with authority and eloquence.

Jesus is strange.

Not strange in the way we sometimes make him strange in order to keep him safely religious, but strange in a much more unsettling sense. He is a stranger to both secular and religious sensibilities: an enigma, a mystery, a man who refuses to fit neatly into the categories we construct for him.

So we tame him. We create sanitised cultural imaginations of Jesus, reshaping him into a King who blesses our wealth and leaves our economic arrangements largely undisturbed; a friend of empire, a supporter of just wars, and someone who somehow has very little to say about greed, accumulation, possessions, consumerism or the relentless pursuit of more.

But then there is the wild Messiah.

The Jesus we encounter in the earliest stories about him is much harder to control. He flips tables. He announces good news to the poor. He warns the rich. He tells those who have more than enough to give it away. He touches the untouchable, eats with the wrong people and welcomes those respectable religion has pushed to the margins. He refuses to measure human worth by wealth, status or power.

And when confronted by the machinery of violence, he does something profoundly strange. He refuses to become violent himself. This is a King who would rather die for his enemies than kill them, a King whose kingdom does not advance through the sword, and whose victory comes not through crushing his enemies but through loving them.

This is the wildness of Jesus, and perhaps that is why we so often try to domesticate him. We smooth off the rough edges, explain away the difficult sayings and turn his teaching into inspirational wisdom. We sing about him without listening to him. We place him safely inside our religious systems, where his voice can be heard but need not disturb us.

But Jesus keeps escaping our attempts to contain him. He stands there in broad daylight in the earliest Christian stories, strange and uncompromising, and he says, “Follow me.”

Following Jesus means more than agreeing with a set of beliefs about him. It means stepping into his strange kingdom. It means moving towards the broken rather than away from them. It means feeding the hungry, not simply with bread but with dignity, friendship and hope. It means caring for the sick, not merely as problems to be solved but as people to be loved. It means clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless and refusing to look away from those whom society has learned to ignore.

It means forgiving when vengeance feels easier, making peace when violence seems more powerful, and loving enemies when everything around us tells us that enemies should be hated. It means crossing the boundaries that divide us and refusing to allow fear, prejudice or social status to determine who belongs.

And it means asking uncomfortable questions about the things we accumulate, protect and call our own. Jesus does not seem particularly impressed by our obsession with having more. Again and again, he turns our attention towards the poor, the hungry, the outsider and the least. His kingdom creates a different economy of life: people before profit, generosity before accumulation, relationship before status, and enough before more.

This is not sentimental Christianity. It is deeply political in the oldest sense of the word. It concerns the kind of community we become, the kind of world we imagine, and the kind of King to whom we give our allegiance.

The wild Messiah still stands in opposition to the powers that deform human life. He still calls us away from greed, domination and violence, away from the endless desire to possess, and towards mercy, justice, reconciliation, simplicity and the care of those who have been pushed to the edges.

To follow Jesus is to become strange. Not strange for the sake of being strange, and not eccentricity dressed up as holiness, but strange because the values of the kingdom are strange in a world organised around wealth, power, consumption and violence. In such a culture, the followers of Jesus should look different. They should be a people who give rather than hoard, welcome rather than exclude, forgive rather than retaliate, serve rather than dominate, seek justice rather than protect privilege, and choose peace rather than worship power.

They should be a prophetic people, a people who live as though the kingdom really is near.

Because perhaps the most unsettling thing about Jesus is not simply that he was strange. It is that he still says, “Follow me.”

And perhaps the real question is whether we are willing to follow him into the strangeness of his kingdom.

— Jon Swales, 2024

Appetite whetted? If so, the following article written by Jon Swales may be of interest:

I’ve got a hunch, 

maybe even a dream, 

that we as church leaders need 

to keep on returning to theology—

not just the kind that fills books, 

but the kind that lives and breathes in the world. 

It’s about getting back to thinking theologically, where the heart of the Christian faith meets the messy realities of the world we live in. 

As Karl Barth once said, we need the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. We’ve got to bring scripture and tradition into dialogue with what’s happening around us—engage with the real issues people are facing today.

At the center of this is Jesus Christ, the one who stood with the marginalized and took on the systems of power. 

Theology that’s grounded in Jesus isn’t content with “business as usual.” It’s got to stir things up, challenge the comfortable, and disrupt the status quo. This is prophetic theology—the kind that speaks truth in a world that often doesn’t want to hear it. It cuts through denial and addresses the realities of injustice and oppression head-on.

But I don’t just dream of a theology that talks about change. 

It’s got to lead to action. 

Theology aligned with God’s kingdom doesn’t sit on a shelf or stay in a sermon. 

It’s lived out. 

It’s a theology that brings hope to those in despair and justice where there’s oppression. It’s not afraid to get messy and step into the hard places. 

It’s a theology in service of liberation, one that refuses to rest while the vulnerable continue to suffer. 

It listens to the cries of the poor and oppressed and responds with action, not just words, rooted in the radical love and mission of Jesus.

This is the theology I dream of—

born from love, in love, and for love. 

A theology that’s alive, prophetic, and liberating. 

One that demands transformation—

in our hearts, in our communities, 

and in the systems around us. 

It’s time we return to that kind of theology, where we refuse to let injustice and despair have the final word. 

A theology driven by the 

countercultural, 

revolutionary 

love of Christ.

Part 541. Political Involvement and Christian Social Action.

Before you call yourself a Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, or any other theology, learn to be a good human first.

Anon

Christian theology needs to speak of social revolution, not reform; of liberation, not development; of socialism, not modernisation of the prevailing system.

Gustavo Gutierrez.

In the context of the above I invite you to read the article: Standing at the Crossroads: Rethinking Christian Social Action by Rachel Arnold.

https://gracetruth.blog/2026/10/02/standing-at-the-crossroads-rethinking-christian-social-action-by-rachel-arnold/?

An interesting article. My intention is to concentrate on two issues: political involvement and what the article describes as a Christian approach to social action.

As the article indicates there is a massive amount of effort put in by churches (and by it should be noted  secular organisations) to assist individuals at point of need.  Sometimes this support is provided by an organisation acting alone, sometimes organisations are in partnerships or are working collaboratively. Why this support is needed is well documented by, for example, The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and there are innumerable reports setting out ideas of the action necessary to overcome the causes of poverty, deprivation, destitution, domestic abuse, homelessness etc. However the essential structural change can be achieved only by political decisions resulting in reallocation of resources by the government.  Like it or not, change of the magnitude required will be achieved only by a signficant shift in political attitudes: and these are determined often by reference to public opinion.

In the 1960's JK Galbraith expressed the opinion, in a USA context, that the country had the resources to eliminate the issues affecting what he described as the underclass but lacked the public and political will so to do.  For a present day exposition of this see: Taxpayers Against Poverty founded by Rev. Paul Nicolson.

In the 1980's the Church of England Report: Faith in the City stated at paragraph 3.7:

Yet while many members of the Church of England have found it more congenial to express their discipleship by helping individual victims of misfortune or oppression, fewer are willing to rectify injustices in the structures of society.  There is a number of reasons for this preference for 'ambulance work'. No-one minds being cast in the role of protector and helper of the weak and powerless: there is no threat here to one's superior position and one's power of free decision. But to be a protagonist of social change may involve challenging those in power and risking the loss of one's own power. Helping a victim or sufferer seldom involves conflict; working for structural change can hardly avoid it.  Direct personal assistance to an individual may seem relatively straightforward, uncontroversial  and rewarding; involvement in social issues implies choosing choosing between complicated alternatives and accepting compromises which seem remote from any moral position.....We have little tradition of initiating conflict and coping with it creatively. We are not at home in the tough, secular milieu of social and political activism.

Christians need to engage in the tough, secular milieu of social and political activism, as proposed by Liberation Theology proponents such as Gustavo Gutierrez and Jürgen Moltmann, not necessarily by aligning with a political 'tribe', but finding and persuading political allies to support policies aimed at achieving social justice.

The article makes the valid point that organisations providing help at point of need should be looking at advising on other support that may be available to individuals. This leads to the concept that organisations should not regard individuals as customers or clients on the other side of the counter but as individuals with whom a rapport may be developed.  This concept is well argued by such as Rev. Jon Swales and Rev. Samuel Wells.  Let us not kid ouselves that this is only a Christian response.  Other faiths and those of no faith are just as capable of coming alongside, being with, individuals and helping, supporting, advising, listening or caring.  There is no Christian monopoly.

Unlike the author of the article I do not believe there is a distinctive Christian approach to social action.  Rather there is a human response that manifests itself in supporting individuals and campaigning for social justice, hence the quotation at the top of this post.