Jesse Jackson's Liberal Jesus

Jesse Jackson's Liberal Jesus
by LaShawn Barber, Columnist

October 21, 2004

Columnist LaShawn Barber "A conservative Christian is a contradiction in terms. Christ wasn't a conservative. He fed the hungry simply because they were hungry. He didn't require that they go to work first. He healed the sick, simply because they were sick...Jesus was a liberal...", preached Jesse Jackson in a recent column. (web site)

We've heard it all before. Jesus was a liberal because he fed the hungry and healed the sick. Implicit is the common notion that conservatives don't want people to be fed or healed. Liberals think they've cornered the market on compassion simply because they advocate bigger government programs to do the caring and feeding. To sum up the difference between liberal compassion and true compassion, I'll borrow an old saying: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."

As "Reverend" Jackson knows, liberal, conservative, libertarian, constitutionalist, etc., are labels we fallen humans came up with to express our political ideology. Labels are just a quick way to describe where we are on an imaginary political line. I'm distressed not by Jackson's labeling my Lord and Savior a liberal. As a professing Christian, he deliberately panders to those with little or no understanding of who Jesus is and what the Bible reveals about him.

Promoting racial strife and victimology for a living is one thing; using the Bible to perpetuate such foolishness is quite another. For political gain, however, Jackson seems willing to deceive the biblically illiterate about the nature of God.

Non-political conservative values, such as promoting traditional families, self-restraint, self-reliance (physical, not spiritual), to name a few, are biblical attributes. Feeding the hungry and comforting the sick are also biblical attributes, but Jesus Christ did much more than this in his 3-year ministry. That is not all he did or ultimately why he came.

Christ wasn't a traveling doctor or soup kitchen volunteer walking the countryside curing ailments and filling bellies with loaves of bread and fish. He was extending an offer to heal spiritual sickness and provide the bread of life -- Himself -- to satisfy spiritual hunger. The physical feeding and curing were signs pointing to the real feeding and curing.

Christ indeed fed the poor: the poor in spirit. He said, "I am the bread of life....Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever."

The portrait of a "liberal" Jesus misses these points entirely. Then again, those doing the painting believe he was only a man. They say he was a good teacher, a wise prophet, philosopher and all-around great guy but ignore the fact that the "good teacher" claimed to be the Son of God. He claimed authority to judge sin, not simply to point it out. Such authority is given to no mere man.

In his boldness, Christ told unbelieving Jews that if they indeed knew God, they'd also know him because he and God were one. He even claimed to be the "I AM" himself, the name of the God of the Old Testament. Jesus is also the spotless Lamb slain to pay for the sins of those he came to save and will return to deliver God's wrath on an unrepentant world. Isn't it interesting how the "Jesus was a liberal" crowd tend to skip over this part?

I certainly didn't expect Jesse Jackson to properly declare the word of God and pander at the same time in a 650-word column, but a hint would have been nice. ***

Visit La Shawn Barber's blog at www.lashawnbarber.com.

La Shawn Barber is a columnist for American Daily, reviews books for Townhall.com.