Today’s Scripture Reading (October 8,
2017): Matthew 10
Karl Marx’s
gravestone contains these words: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various
ways. The point, however, is to change
it.” It is the drive that exists within all of us who look out at our world and
see wrong; we want to right that which is
wrong. Marx saw several things that he viewed as incompatible with a civilized society.
Poverty was wrong. The class divisions
within society were wrong. At the heart of Karl Marx’s ideology was the concept
that we were all created equal, that we all have an equal right to live and
breathe and enjoy the finer things in life. And religion was wrong because,
according to the way that Marx viewed Christianity
primarily, it promised a heaven that we could wait for while refusing to
change the reality in which we live. I have a few friends that still hold to
these very Marxian views and very Marxian
solutions to the problem.
Ultimately, Marxist ideology fails because it does not get rid
of the dividing lines. It does not get rid of poverty, but it changes the ones
who are rich. It fails to eradicate class, but rather switches the people who experience power in society, leaving us to continue our struggle with life. Changing power from Christian to
Muslim or from White to Black does not take care of the underlying illness of
our society, but rather simply changes where it is that we feel the pain.
Jesus came with a different idea. Not only did he attempt to
remove the power from those who held it, in his society the religious and
political elites that existed in the Middle East, but he also taught his
followers that they were not to rule, rather, they were to become the servants
of their brothers and sisters. It was not a lesson that Jesus’s followers
learned very well. As soon as Christianity came to power under the reign of
Constantine in the fourth century, it seems that we immediately forgot that we
were supposed to be servants and we became rulers. The problem? We had not, and
still have not, even come close to understanding the ideology of the one who we
claim to follow – and we still want to fix things that we don’t understand.
Of all of Jesus disciples, Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot
may have been the biggest threat to the unity of the apostles and the mission
of Jesus. There was nothing intrinsically evil about either one of them. But
they both appear to have well-established
ideologies separate from their decision to follow Jesus. For Simon, his
ideology was that of the Zealots of the first century. The Zealots were
committed to the violent overthrow of Roman Kings and the Herodian dynasty and
their supporters and restore rule over
Israel to the Jews. A little more than four decades after Jesus chose Simon to
follow him, a Zealot rebellion would result in the destruction of the Temple in
Jerusalem, the horrible destruction, and
the massacre at Masada, and the disappearance
of Israel from the world for the almost the next 1900 years.
It is entirely possible
that Judas Iscariot was also a member of Zealots. His ideology seemed to match.
He was frustrated that Jesus was not willing to take up arms against their rulers
and restore Israel to the Jews. But he also appeared
to be frustrated with poverty and class divisions. Judas Iscariot and Karl Marx
held some of the same belief structures. For Judas, Jesus just wasn’t moving
fast enough, and that alone made him a candidate for the betrayal of the cause
of the one who he served.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Mark 6
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