The Raven Foundation

 

 

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council in Washington, begins his recent article for CNN entitled My Take: Jesus was a free marketer, not an Occupier by stating that “One of the last instructions Jesus gave his disciples was ‘Occupy till I come.’”

 

The quote is from the Parable of the Ten Minas, found in Luke 19:22.  There are economic overtones in the parable – a mina was about a month’s wage in first century Palestine.  Perkins uses the parable to discuss modern economics.  Anachronistically, he claims that Jesus endorsed the free market.  The free market, of course, is a modern concept, so Jesus could not have been a “free marketer.”  Perkins then uses the parable to denounce the Occupy Wall Street movement, a movement that he claims, “take(s) over and trash(es) public property” and “engage(s) in antisocial behavior while denouncing a political and economic system that grants one the right and luxury to choose to be unproductive.”

 

Perkins explores the parable and the Occupy Wall Street movement from a spiritual perspective.  While I appreciate that perspective, his spiritual interpretation of the parable is false.  By their very nature, parables are mysterious.  Parables are like riddles that contrasts two worldviews.  One worldview could be described as the kingdom of violence; the other is the Kingdom of God.  Jesus confronts us with these worldviews and asks us to pick which worldview we will live by.

 

Jesus told the Parable of the Ten Minas near the end of his life.  He knew that the political and religious elite would soon kill him, and, in telling this parable, he tried to prepare his disciples for his death.  Jesus prepared his disciple for his death in parable and in straightforward teachings.  For example, in the previous chapter of Luke (18:31-33), he told his disciples that “the Son of Man” (a term he frequently used to describe himself) would be “handed over” and that his persecutors would “mock him, insult him, spit on him, flog him and kill him.”  Luke tells us that “The disciples did not understand any of this.  Its meaning was hidden from them, and they did not know what he was talking about.”

 

Two thousand years later, we need to ask ourselves, “Do we know what Jesus was talking about?”

 

Jesus starts the parable by saying, “A man of noble birth went to a distant country to have himself appointed king and then returns.” Perkins assumes that the king is Jesus, but is he correct?  While Jesus does refer to himself as “the Son of Man,” he never explicitly refers to himself as a king.  But we do claim that Jesus is king – a different kind of king.  Jesus transforms our understanding of “king.”  He is the true King who doesn’t lead his army in violence and warfare.  Jesus had nothing to do with the kingdom of violence.  Rather, according to Luke 6:27, Jesus is the true King who leads his disciples in the Spirit of love, a love that embraces even our enemies.

 

That changes everything, including our interpretation of parables.  Instead of Jesus referring to himself as a man of noble birth going to a distant country to have himself appointed king, could Jesus be talking about the actual king of Judea – Herod?  In fact, this is exactly how the Herodian Dynasty received power – from a distant country called the Roman Empire.  As Jesus continues the parable, the king behaves exactly as you’d expect.  He is good to the two servants who live up to his expectations by earning even more money for the already rich king, and he punishes the third servant who fails to earn the king more money.  In fact, Jesus ends his parable with this alarming, and prophetic, statement, “But those enemies of mine, who did not want me to be king over them – bring them here and kill them in front of me.”

 

Perkins is wrong to assume that Jesus is the king in the parable.  Jesus is not the king; rather, he is the third servant.  When Jesus teaches to “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those mistreat you,” he flips our violent worldview upside down.  It is not the kingdom of God that rewards those who are good and punishes those who are bad.  That reciprocity describes the kingdoms of violence, the kingdoms of this world.  Jesus was not enslaved to that violent reciprocity; rather, he freely loved all people.  Jesus did not kill his enemies who did not want him to be king over them.  It was Herod, Rome, and the religious elite who killed Jesus.  They killed him because after Jesus occupied the Temple (Luke 19:45-46) they thought his movement was antisocial as he denounced their political, economic, and religious systems.  Jesus responded to their violence with nonviolence and love: On the cross he prayed that his persecutors would be forgiven (Luke 23:34) and in the resurrection he offered peace to those who betrayed him (Luke 24:36).

 

What does this mean for the spirituality of the Occupy Wall Street movement?  The kingdom of violence infects every aspect of our world.  Jesus challenged that kingdom with the Kingdom of God’s Love – a love that embraces the cosmos, as the Gospel of John says.  There are certainly aspects of our economic and political systems that are spiritually destructive and exploitative.  The movement is right to critique those aspects.  The spiritual problem with the movement is that it has divided 99% of us “good people” against 1% of those “bad people,” who have not lived up to our economic and political expectations.  That division is the result of the spirit of violence that Jesus came to deliver us from.  If the OWS movement wants to be effective, it must seek to include its perceived enemies.  Because if we really want to make political and economic change, we need to be in this together.  All 100% of us.

 

Things for the 99% to think about while Occupying Wall Street (or wherever):

The top 1% should pay their fair share.

When politicians try to divide the rich against the poor, rich and poor alike should refuse to take the bait. Here are some basic facts to consider: The wealthiest 1% pay an average tax rate of 30% and they account for 38% of all income taxes. The top 50% of tax payers pay practically all of the nation’s taxes (97.30%) and 40-45% of American income earners pay zero taxes. Now, I won’t deny the tax code we have in place is a bit of a convoluted mess or that it could use some serious reform, but overall it seems fair to me and we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be deluded into thinking that 1% of the people in this country are the cause and cure of 100% of our problems. And let’s face it, isn’t all this talk about fairness a little transparent? I mean, really, the truth is we are only annoyed with the 1% because we aren’t one of them! If we were rich and powerful, too, we wouldn’t be mad at ourselves, would we? So let’s be smarter than the politicians give us credit for and stop denying the love part of our love/hate relationship with the 1%. That would be fair.

We can balance the budget by cutting spending.

According to the Congressional Research Service, which prepared a report for members of congress on the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global war on terror, we have spent a total of $1.283 trillion since 9/11. While we are all arguing about who should pay more taxes, what spending to cut or which investments are worth making, we might just check in with the Pentagon and ask to see their balance sheets. The Congressional Budget Office consistently complains that they cannot get a clear reckoning of where all that trillion plus has been spent. Seriously?! I think all this 1% talk is a smoke screen to keep us from looking at the budget that really needs to be reformed.

Wall Street got us in this mess and they need to be held accountable.

We love to blame Wall Street for the mortgage crisis and housing downturn, but a closer look reveals our shared responsibility. We all participated in the boon years when housing prices soared and home equity loans allowed us to pay for our consumer lifestyles. As a nation we spent to excess, ran up credit card bills, and never wondered if we were going a bit overboard. Wealthy Wall Street traders and the average American homeowner became a lot alike as we all borrowed against the value of our portfolios only to see values dive, leaving us with nothing but debt. The Wall Street derivative traders believed in the value of their securities as surely as we believed in the value of our houses. Both turned out to be illusions.

My point is…

Look, I’m not denying that lots of people are in deep financial doodoo or that there are things that need fixing on Wall Street and on Main Street. Sure some guilty people made out scot free and innocent people are suffering, but is it really productive to waste all that energy being angry about it? I’m afraid that the Occupying Wall Street movement, by playing the cynical game that politicians like to play of dividing us against ourselves, is going to get us nowhere. The 99% need to stop blaming the 1% for all their problems and begin to realize that we need each other, all 100% of us, to weather the storm we are in. We even need the politicians – I know, we want to jettison the whole lot, but if we stopped falling for their simplistic, self-serving cr@#, they’d have to stop dishing it out. David Brooks said it: “It’s not about declaring war on some nefarious elite. It’s about changing behavior from top to bottom. Let’s occupy ourselves.”