The destruction of the temple seemed to end any idea that the reign of God would come on earth. To the followers of Jesus Christ, this terrible event appeared to signal the imminent end of this world and the approaching apocalypse. The farther in time the gospel composition is from the temple’s destruction, the more the end of the world is expected.

The teachings of Jesus were remembered by the early church through this lens of the destruction of the temple and this convinced the early church that what Jesus really meant was “My kingdom is not of this world.” This horrible conflict meant that the end was about to occur. The “apocalyptic” teachings attributed to Jesus such as “Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” or even more explicitly, “But truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God” illustrate this point.

This kind of gospel politics would indicate that Jesus would be a conservative Republican, one who was convinced that global warming or environmental degradation is politically irrelevant since the world is about to end in the violent “Rapture”. The pre-emptive attack on Iraq, in this version of “gospel politics”, was a good idea since it would hasten the end of the world (it’s certainly hastening the end of our economic prosperity as a country!). As Rev. John Hagee said, the same John Hagee who recently endorsed John McCain and whose endorsement was gratefully received by McCain, “The war between America and Iraq is the gateway to the Apocalypse.”

There are other political threads running through the gospels as well. John Dominic Crossan, for example, asks us to consider why Jesus of Nazareth would walk all the way to Galilee to begin his ministry when he could just as easily have done so closer to home? And why seek out all these fishermen? Why is Jesus systematically recruiting fishers to be his disciples? Crossan points out that the Roman imperial project of commercialization of the fishing industry took place during the time of Jesus. The rule of Herod Antipas was regulating and taxing the indigenous fishing industry around the Sea of Galilee pretty much out of profitability right around the time of Jesus. These formerly prosperous fishing families were now scraping to keep their boats and their lives together under the ruinous economic practices of Imperial Rome. Crossan argues that Jesus wanted to call disciples those who would understand the stark difference between his teaching that “the kingdom of God is in your midst” and the kingdom being forced on the Jews by imperial Rome. Antipas began to “commercialize the lake [Sea of Galilee] and its fishes in the name of Rome’s empire and both John and Jesus clashed with him in the name of Israel’s God.”

This is another war, the war of the mighty against the poor, the economic war that seems to be waged century in and century out on the most vulnerable in society.

The Jesus who is recruiting from among the ranks of the economically disenfranchised would clearly be a Democrat. And not a “new Democrat” but one of the old line Democrats who knew that working class folks were the backbone both of the party and of the country and that the struggle for decent wages and working conditions is the bedrock of democracy. The Jesus of Nazareth who came to call disciples from among the poor, outcast women, and “sinners” knew that women are the poorest of the poor and their bodies are often used by others, for labor or for sexual purposes, or, sadly enough, both. He wouldn’t condone stoning of women, he did not recoil from women who were menstruating and he taught women equally with men.

We moderns didn’t invent politics. It is as old as human history and the “parties” bear a striking similarity to one another over the ages. Who’s got power and who doesn’t? Who counts and who is expendable?

Moreover, the message for us today in “gospel politics” is that war very much determines how people look at candidates for president. Stay in Iraq? Leave Iraq? Pursue war, pursue economic turnaround? These were the issues in the first century and they are still the issues today.

Finally, I wish I could say that either the Republicans or the Democrats measured up to the gospel politics of Jesus, but to be truthful, they’re not even close.