It’s staggering to think that in two millennia of Christian nations full of Christian leaders, there are almost no visible signs of Christ’s message in them. No emergence of a Christian nation that embodies the message of Jesus: charity, peace, humility, love. Nation after nation and not one leper touched, not one beam pulled from an eye, by so many alleged Christian leaders.
Instead, leaders lust for power and wealth and work to retain it.
This is the message they present and it is passed on as some hieratic scheme for living life: acquire money, advance in prestige, feel better than those below you, envy those above you.
There are no visible signs that Christian leaders emulate Christ but it is all too obvious people emulate leaders. The doctrine of acquisition and exclusion is the message that flows downward to the average people and that is what is adhered to religiously, not the message of Jesus. Imagine Christian leaders embodying and emulating the message of Christ and that becoming the status quo of nations. Imagine that they might prompt charity, peace, love and humility to become de rigueur in society. Or that their behavior and actions, not money, might be the example that trickles down to the population.
Even in the United States, a “Christian Nation” where leaders are always pressed to proffer up their allegiance to Christianity prior to elections, there is a battle waging regarding extending care to all.
On one side is an effort to insure and give access to medical care to all pitted against a side adhering to the message that has trickled down from above. This message of some Prosperity Gospel, which boils down to money and status, more or less. Those who don’t produce at some arbitrarily gauged level do not deserve assistance; those who do produce deserve more.
This gospel that seems to take bank balance and status as the prerequisites for dispensation of charity and good will. I don’t remember Christ talking of a financial caste system for those worthy of his love or not. I do remember reading something about a camel and the eye of a needle.
It’s hard for me to grasp that a group of people could devote their lives and core belief systems to the teaching of a man and seem to show no traces of it. They study from a book that is believed to be the living word of God and seem to reject their own master’s teaching.
In Matthew 25 is the parable of the sheep and the goats. Directly from Jesus comes a pretty clear account of how one should deal with those who lack in life. “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Essentially, helping the needy is tantamount to helping Christ himself. Those who do not show this charity “will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”
And yet here we are in America. The most self-professed Christian Nation on earth fights internally about whether to help the poor, sick and needy. Where are these Christian leaders?
These people who must publicly declare their belief in Christ to even dream of being elected, where are they? Did they say they follow Christ’s message simply for a vote? Do they adhere to the false doctrine of their prosperity gospel that staunchly?
And where are the sheep of the flock of the Christian Nation? Why are they not chasing those who espouse Christ but do not embody him from the fold? Even Christ himself took the time to braid the lash before he chased the money changers out of the temple. He studied what bothered him and removed it.
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Yet the sheep in the flock of this Christian Nation continue to re-elect the same batch of wolves that mouth Christian platitudes and act in ways that show no allegiance to his message. They espouse the Prosperity Gospel and shun those they feel below them, condemning and trying to bind morality through legislation, not through love and the emulation of Christ. They adhere to prosperity religiously, not the words of their God through his living Word, the Bible. And to them, to question this status quo and belief system is to question Jesus himself. To doubt it or question is anathema, heresy, wrong.
As an atheist I may doubt the veracity of the divinity of God, Jesus or the Bible but I cannot doubt that the message given by Jesus would make for a better world if lived up to by the proponents of that message. It’s troubling to think Christ’s alleged most ardent believers in this day and age would dislike the man if he returned today and repeated Matthew 25 to their faces.
