What Would Jesus Do?

It’s not yet Sunday morning in Crawford, Texas, but when it is, will the Bush motorcade rush to church past the growing tent city of war protestors, now called Camp Casey? It’s named after Casey Sheehan, the young Marine, a Catholic altar boy, Eagle Scout and camp counselor, who died in Iraq, and whose mother’s futile attempt to meet with President Bush has led to the Crawford encampment, as well as demonstrations in sympathy in New York and elsewhere.

Cindy Sheehan continues to be vilified by the Rabid Right, who give new meaning to the term “self-righteous.” It naturally suggests a question one would expect the right wing Christians among them to ask, at least on Sundays. They are moral questions about the morality of acts which they apparently justify as being within the political realm, and somehow exempt from moral judgment. At least that’s the best guess.

To sharpen these questions for those who tend to blend their politics with their religious beliefs, let’s put them in their terms: what would Jesus do?

This is often a rhetorical device meant to provide authority to support an argument apart from its merits. But when we’re dealing with those who use piety as a weapon, as the ipso facto proof of their claim to truth and greater virtue, then it’s fair game to ask them to ask themselves that question.

To honor the generally accepted words of Jesus Christ for what they say, one doesn’t have to believe that every word of the Bible as translated and interpreted by a self-appointed elite is sacred truth and a literal description of reality. One doesn’t have to believe that Jesus was more divine than the rest of us to take his teachings seriously as wisdom, as applying an ethic.

But shouldn’t those who invest the Bible and Jesus Christ with even more authority, be expected to take this question even more seriously? What would Jesus do?

Would Jesus vilify the mother of a young soldier who died in war, because that mother questions the justifications made by those who sent her son to die?

Would Jesus vilify those whose conscience is inflamed by the starvation and suffering of fellow humans, as “bleeding heart liberals”? The phrase, after all, refers to the heart of Christ, bleeding for such suffering.

Would Jesus even ignore starvation and genocide as it occurs in Africa right now?

Would Jesus excuse the torture of innocent captives, or even the torture of captive enemies? Would he vilify those who say such treatment is immoral and destructive, that it violates what few civilized rules we have for our savage conflicts?

Would he defend turning young Americans into barbarous and sadistic oppressors?

What would Jesus say about a society that wastes enough food and energy to feed and light much of the needy world, but self-righteously refuses to share its abundance?

Would Jesus vote to enrich the few at the expense of the many?

Would he advocate that a few enrich themselves from the suffering of the sick, and cause hardship to many who want only that their children have medical care? What would he do when treatment is even denied, so that some suffer and die because they cannot pay the usurious few?

If the fate of humanity, the health and perhaps the existence of life on earth in the future were threatened by practices that leaders refuse to change because their friends, already wealthy beyond belief, might not reap as much wealth and power, what would Jesus do?

Maybe a pastor somewhere in Crawford has the answers.