Of Rents and Their Healing

Albert Nolan makes the case in Jesus before Christianity that Jesus's original message was the urgent need to heal the rent — the tear, the rift, the splitting or separation — in the social fabric of his time and place.

Among the Jews in 1st-century Palestine, the vast majority were poor, oppressed, afflicted, and for these and other reasons considered "sinners" by the tiny middle and even tinier upper classes. Their "sins" may have arisen simply because they were illiterate and uneducated, unprepared to interpret and follow God's complex laws, and accordingly fated to be punished by God. Alternatively, their "sins" may simply have rubbed off on them from "unclean" family members or even from wayward ancestors several generations back.

Jesus's heart went out to these "sinners," in deep compassion for their suffering — particularly since he, like John the Baptist before him, foresaw that yet worse things would befall the helpless of Israel when a soon-to-come revolt against Roman rule failed and Jerusalem and its Temple fell once and for all.

First and foremost, Nolan says, Jesus set about to heal Israel by preaching against the rent in its social fabric and the false presuppositions about "sin" that underlay it. When, for example, he excoriated the well-educated scribes and well-off Pharisees as he so frequently did, he was challenging the narrow-mindedness of the privileged classes which thwarted the needed social healing.


It strikes me that the need to heal rents caused by intolerance and injustice generalizes to any time and place, including our own. Indeed, this may be why Jesus said that "the poor you will always have with you." There will never be a time and place, in other words, where oppression of the have-nots by the haves is absent.

As Nolan makes clear, to be "poor" in Jesus's world was not primarily a matter of money, though it was that, too. More than a lack of money, though, it had to do with having no status, no dignity, no respect ... no "face," as the Chinese would say.

That loss of dignity translated into what we would today call personal dysfunctionality. It even led to physical illnesses of what we might label a psychosomatic variety. We hear a lot in the Gospels about Jesus healing the sick and casting out demons. When people are scorned and hopeless, they suffer in more tangible ways as well. Jesus knew that.


The key word in the above is "compassion." Jesus, according to Nolan (p. 36), "set out to liberate people from every form of suffering and anguish — present and future." He set out to heal them as individuals and to heal Israel as a nation. In order to do so, he went so far as "to become an outcast by choice" (p. 34, italics in the original). He took compassion, which at bottom is "a response to suffering" (p. 36), to the max.

Implicit in the idea that people's suffering and anguish are intolerable, when due to the ignorance and oppressiveness of others, is the notion that healing, forgiveness, and solidarity are the deepest, most profound, most blessed of values. They couldn't be called "Christian" at the time of Jesus, since the advent of Christianity as we know it was still decades away. But today we can legitimately call forgiveness, healing, and solidarity the truest Christian values of all.


Realizing this is so both does and doesn't come as a surprise to me.

It doesn't come as a surprise inasmuch as there are lots of "factoids" in the Gospels that show Jesus as being sympathetic to the poor. Christians are, after all, taught to be charitable and kind. Mother Teresa was, after all, a major role model.

It does come as a surprise, however, to imagine that forgiveness, healing, solidarity, and social harmony and unity are the principal Christian teachings. Those ideas — which may be summed up by the phrase "social justice" — are not what we hear the most about from the pulpit today!