Days of Awe and Wonder: How to Be a Christian in the Twenty-first Century

by Marcus J. Borg

because of this reversal of Israel’s political aspirations, the injunction to nonresistance, and the advice to pay tribute, Jesus is widely held to be nonpolitical. But such a conclusion is incorrect. Jesus’s attitude toward Rome was not based on an apolitical stance, but on the conviction that in the political affairs of the world the judging activity of God was at work. Regarding his own society, he was intensely political in the sense we have given to that term: he was concerned about the institutions and historical dynamic of Israel. The means he used, including public revolutionary gestures, challenged current practice. The end he sought was the transformation of the cultural dynamic of the quest for holiness into a cultural dynamic that would conform Israel to God as compassionate.