EDITORIAL
CITIZEN GOD Jesus is born. Last month 7.8 million people looked for jobs and could not find them. Jesus is born. An estimated 400,000 to 500,000 idle black teenagers roam the urban ghettoes and...
...The world food crisis that received so much attention a year or two ago may have eased...
...but over a half-billion people still suffer from hunger and malnutrition-not so much because the earth does not produce enough food but because they are poor...
...Once he rooted himself in one particular man's flesh and blood with two feet to carry him from town to town, two hands to chop wood, make pitchforks and chairs, touch, bless and cure, and one voice to teach, condemn corrupt leaders, expel demons, pray and explain the costs and rewards of love, he was God caught in the limits, risks and demands of political interaction...
...If they had money-if the world's wealth were equitably distributed-they would be be able to buy food or land to grow food of their own...
...to set the downtrodden free...
...To acknowledge and announce the birth of Jesus this year, which is really what the Christian is called to do every day, is to face again the ways in which Christianity is inevitably a political religion...
...The powerful men of his own day would have written him off with a sneer as just another pious teacher...
...Thus, as Christmas draws near, the best words and the worst words are printed side by side, apparently coexisting on a page as the situations they represent coexist, usually without enough tension between them, in life...
...Isaiah, as the Advent liturgy reminds us, called for the time when men would "bend their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks," in a time when "one nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again...
...An estimated 400,000 to 500,000 idle black teenagers roam the urban ghettoes and rural slums so far untouched by the government's broadest programs for general economic stimulus...
...Meanwhile he freed his contemporaries and us from the burden of the law, from the hyprocrisy of religious leaders and a false idea of what religion is...
...When Jesus made his first public speech in the synagogue at Nazareth he read from Isaiah and applied the words to himself: he had come "to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives...
...Nor can the gospel, whose ultimate message transcends the ideological limitations of national or party dogma, be twisted or compromised into another "ism"-be it capitalism, Marxism or liberalism-to serve narrow political ends...
...In Nebraska last month the papers reported a Ku Klux Klan cross burning and an alleged attempted lynching of a black man by fellow National Guardsmen...
...For once God became man he also became a citizen...
...We say that Jesus "saved us from original sin," but what we mean is that he gave us the power to free ourselves from the collective effects of individual selfishness, greed and oppression...
...Of course Christianity is not a political party...
...In a Utah jail Gary Mark Gilmore says he waits impatiently to be legally murdered-he waits for a volley of fatal gunshots all too many fellow citizens say they are eager to fire...
...Without being a political revolutionary himself he planted the seeds of that crucial revolution in Western political thought that would enable enlightened politicians to say centuries later that all men are created equal...
...A new book recounts in grisly detail how FBI officials apparently tried to drive Martin Luther King to suicide...
...At Camp Pendleton in California some of the United States Marines are members of the Klan and last month a band of blacks attacked a group of whites with knives and clubs...
...Jesus had read the prophet Isaiah, in fact he probably modeled his own life on the vision of Isaiah, and so worked out his own understanding of his messianic mission, very much in the way we are called to model our lives on the life and self-understanding on Jesus...
...If today's church does not witness to the political and social consequences of Jesus's birth it will be continually written off by the world it is called to serve...
...Yet, Christianity is political in the sense that the Christian life, properly lived, and the power of the gospel, when its implications are thoroughly spelled out, are inevitably catalysts for political, social and cultural change...
...American congressmen seem to have been taking bribes from South Korean lobbyists, and government officials in Japan, the Netherlands and Italy have reportedly taken bribes from our Lockheed Corporation...
...In New York one college student has been indicted for killing another college student on a ROTC hazing exercise...
...If Jesus had not been a political threat he would not have died young...
...From then on Jesus was never content to merely teach...
...He had to dramatize his words by physically changing people's lives and eventually radically altering their social relationships with one another...
...He described a national leader who would "judge the poor with justice and decide aright for the land's afflicted" when "the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid...
Vol. 103 • December 1976 • No. 26
