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The immoral Jesus

By Peter Fleming - posted Monday, 16 October 2006


Jesus Christ is indecent, outspoken, and known to be violent. He keeps bad company, is no role model for ordinary decent folk who just want to get on with their lives, and has absolutely whacko opinions on just about everything. He is, quite simply, immoral.

That friend of drug-mules and terrorists, Jesus of Nazareth, would, frankly, never be allowed to speak on an Alan Jones talk-back segment for more than a quarter of a minute, would he? Our Saviour is, to put it bluntly, a scandal, an abomination and an embarrassment.

Recently, a student in one of my theatre history lectures gave a presentation discussing whether or not a certain film conveyed “a message of Christian morals”. She, not I, had chosen the topic, and at the end I gently suggested that it may have been better to have asked whether it conveyed Christian values rather than Christian morals.

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While there is, undoubtedly, a Christian morality, it is not necessarily a sign of a Christian. The deeply entrenched dislike of hypocrisy in our Western culture stems from an acute awareness that apparently Christian acts can in fact mask despicable intent and wallpaper over more secret, darker deeds.

Conversely, we know from the word go, from the New Testament, that the despicable and the corrupt were often good friends of Jesus.

It astonished me that this student, of a quite definitely younger generation, and at a Protestant college, could have somehow missed out on this cornerstone of Christian teaching. It seemed only yesterday, when we older types were at university, that this simple thought - that Christianity was not the spiritual property of “the good” - was, after pre-eminence of the salvific message of Christ’s dying on the cross, the central conceit in the evangelical propaganda wars.

Notions such as that God kept an account book and weighed up our good deeds and our bad and thus determined our entry into, or exclusion from, Heaven, were regularly trounced; after all, had St Paul not made it clear that “all had sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”? Were we not encouraged to “come as you are”, “warts and all”, “saintly or sinning”? Was there not more celebration in heaven over the repentance of one sinner than over the many righteous? Did we not believe in the hope of death-bed conversions by the worst of the worst, after a lifetime of “immorality”?

It seems as if, in this era of hard-nosed, conservative over-regulators, status-seekers and high-achievers, we need once again to remind ourselves of the counter-cultural immorality - the wild outrageousness - of our Lord and Saviour.

There is nothing, at heart, very special about the word “morals”. Originally it just meant “customs”, or perhaps, better, “customary behaviour”; “what everybody did”; “the norm”, as we might say in Australia. In the pluralistic Roman empire, “mores” (to use the Latin) could vary from province to province, and just so long as the “mores” did not affront the majesty of the Emperor and what he stood for, people were free to do what they liked.

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Christian behaviour was, in Pliny the Younger’s time (circa 100 AD), noticeably different from the “mores”, and thus was considered a threat, although Pliny himself found it hard to understand why, since the principles he uncovered in the “sect” - which he perceived as honesty, integrity, and the worship of Jesus as a God - seemed harmless enough.

Over time, of course, as Christianity became the dominant religion in society, more and more people sought to advance their status by attaching themselves to perceived “Christian” “mores”: and given that a belief in sanctification implied that Christian influences had progressively improved the “mores” of individuals, the word “morals” itself came to have a certain aura of sanctification about it.

In the 1960’s, when I was growing up, people were praised for having “morals”. Johnny O’Keefe was reminding people of a truer form of Christianity when he sang the song contradicting the norm, in which the man of doubtful character in a street of gossips is the one who dashes out and saves a child from being run over, sacrificing himself in the act.

Yes, the world from the perspective of comfortable middle class Australian society in the 1960’s was divided into the moral “haves” and “have-nots”; a useful distinction to justify one’s own privileged position.

This moral dichotomy was, in the usual parochial and tribal way, broadened to comprise stiff, unemotional - and yet reassuringly familiar - British modes of behaviour under the category of “moral”, and thus a lot of immigrant behaviour became highly suspect. I remember in my ignorance going around to a Yugoslav friend’s place and being disturbed that his father, mother and friends sat around singing, clapping hands and wildly playing the piano-accordion; so much sheer fun - and without the restraint of the upright (piano, that is) - had more than a whiff of immorality about it.

And yet there is no question that Jesus of Nazareth was the most immoral Man to grace the steps of the Temple in Jerusalem.

What do we know of His behaviour?

You can judge a person by his suburb or home-town, can’t you? To be a “Nazarene” was already to be tainted with the suspicion of insurgency. “Could anything good come out of Nazareth?” was the common slur of the day. Nazareth was Macquarie Fields, Everleigh Street and Mt Druitt rolled into one, and we all know what people who come from those places are like.

We judge a person by what school he went to, don’t we? Jesus’ teacher seems to have been John the Baptist, the arch-radical who contradicted every decent principle of right living and who then dared to criticise the government, to boot. He took on Herod and for that was properly incarcerated, traitor that he was; and beheaded. And who would miss him?

You can tell a person by his friends, of course. Jesus was “the friend of drunkards and sinners”. If Mary Magdalene was not the prostitute which popular mythology likes to make her, Jesus nonetheless had encounters with several women of ill repute, and seemed to accept them among his entourage, even holding some of them up as examples to their “betters”.

Even worse, Jesus could be found in the company of financial powerbrokers when he wasn’t hanging around with the dregs. Here is where we who are most empathetic with the poor and the outcast must take righteous umbrage, if we are true to our principles, mustn’t we? It’s alright for Him to be seen with Mum Shirl, Roberta Perkins and Renae Lawrence, but how could He bring Himself to grace the tables of Jamie Packer, Rupert Murdoch and - gagg!!! - Christopher Skase? Aren’t they the “tax-collectors” of our time, and isn’t Jesus an embarrassment?

He talks theology with women. He touches the unclean. He breaks the food rules. He attacks the “battlers” just trying to make a living at the Temple.

These breaches are like: talking seriously with Tom Cruise, on any issue; having afternoon tea in the home of Jihad Jack; streaking across the paddock at the Rugby League Grand Final, with the score even-stevens and one minute to go; and holding a protest outside the offices of the Halliburton corporation, in the manner of the honourable Dick Cheney’s arch-nemesis Scott Parkin (the man who was subsequently thrown out of Australia as a threat to national security, even though the threat he posed was never explained).

People like Jesus just don’t belong in Australia, or in any society that calls itself civilized. After all, He comes into this world and then starts complaining. Nobody asked Him to come here, and if He doesn’t like it, He should go back where He came from. And what are the authorities doing about it?

Jesus Christ is indecent, outspoken, and known to be violent. He preaches the break-up of the family and shows irreverence to the lawmakers, keeps bad company, is no role model for ordinary decent folk who just want to get on with their lives, and has absolutely whacko opinions on just about everything. He is, quite simply, immoral.
They ought to bring back the death penalty for people like Him.

(Italics reflect the comments of talk-back radio callers.)

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First published in OnLine Catholics in Issue 122, September 20, 2006.



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About the Author

Peter Fleming graduated in Arts and Education from the University of Sydney; his studies focusing on Classical History, English Literature and American Music Theatre. He is a graduate of the NIDA Playwrights Studio. He has taught in schools, universities and tertiary colleges, covering subjects such as Ancient History, Religion, English Literature, Theatre History and Arts Administration. He also survived a year of teaching drama in North Carolina.

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