The Jesus Conundrum

I was tuned into “Artist Confidential” on my XM radio listening to Art Garfunkel talk about his work with Paul Simon when I started thinking about Jesus. Since my mom was a hippie, I grew up listening to a lot of folk music. Simon & Garfunkel were 8-track staples at our house, and despite the fact that they were two Jewish guys from New England, they wrote many a tune about Jesus.

Back in the 1970s Jesus was a hippie icon. He was the longhaired dude who welcomed into his fold people of socially unacceptable backgrounds. Jesus talked non-stop about peace and non-violence despite his own terrible death. I remember the day my mother got the “Jesus Christ Superstar” soundtrack as a birthday gift from one of her friends, she played it ad nauseam for the next two weeks. Mom also took us to see a college production of “Godspell”. In the 1970s, Jesus was the man: a healer, a listener, and an amazingly compassionate person, G-d minus the gloom, judgment, and ego, if you will.

I’m not a Christian and I was raised in an agnostic household, so what perplexed me as I listened to Art tell his musical story was, how did Jesus go from being the ultimate, peace-loving, hippie ideal of the 1970s to the judgmental warlord of doom in a mere 30 years? From the time I was a toddler to now as I’m raising a toddler, I want to know how the same group of people who touted Jesus as their role model of compassion now hold him up as their icon of judgment, conquest and war. Did I miss something?

From what I remember in the early years of my childhood, when people spoke about Jesus, they spoke about his tremendous capacity for love, his obsessive motivation to spread his message of peace, his drive to use his powers as a healer to go to people who were ostracized and bring them back to the society that shunned them. The only time you ever heard of Jesus raising a ruckus was when he booted the moneychangers from the Temple. Even the movies about Jesus were way different back in the ‘70s. “Jesus of Nazareth” came out in 1977 and focused on his whole life, but mostly on the fact that he was a sensitive guy who loved people. Then, of course, there were the aforementioned musicals.

Now in my daughter’s early childhood, I’m listening to a whole different take on Jesus. George W. Bush used Jesus to get elected, not once, but twice, pushing a war platform. Jesus seems to be evoked by new millennium Christians as a means to keep people in line. “Do what I say or you will have Jesus’ wrath to deal with!” Even movies such as “The Passion of the Christ” focus less on Jesus the gentle teacher, and more on his gory, violent death. In a paltry 30 years Christians have moved from praising his works with the poor to supporting public figures who use Jesus as a means of control.

I wonder now how those former hippies would react to their hippie Jesus if he walked down their pristine suburban street today? Most likely, they would call the private security company hired to keep less desirables out of their gated community, and go back to exchanging snarky emails gossiping about who was sleeping with who at church.

I think if Jesus were to come back from the dead and size up his “flock”, he would be sorely disappointed. He would be disgusted that his clergy would stand at a pulpit designed to preach about doing good, and instead use it to tell their congregations who to vote for in a political election. The Jesus I knew back in the 1970s would have considered such an act a grave abuse of position. Then again, the Jesus from the Simon & Garfunkel songs would have completely disassociated himself with the politicians who currently run our country; particularly those who tout family values yet have histories of multiple acts of adultery, divorce, and estrangement from their own children.

As a Jew, this is about as far as I’ll go in terms of thinking about Jesus. Most Jews believe that Jesus was an okay guy, more mensch than messiah, but a good person, nonetheless. I just think it’s a crying shame that the nice guy I knew in the ‘70s, the one who wanted to change the world and care for those less fortune, the one who wanted to teach the world to sing and furnish it with love, is now the guy who could give a damn about the destruction of the environment, genocide in Africa and Iraq, and the growing poverty rate in the U.S. Jesus, my friend, you need a new PR person.