Jesus had social concern for all

When did it become fashionable to deny we are our brother’s and sister’s keeper? You would have thought Holy Scripture settled that long ago. The first pair of brothers split because of green-eyed envy at the sacrifices Abel was offering God while Cain gritted his teeth, shown up for his stingy excuse of devotion. We are responsible for each other to some extent, and to admit it does not merit being called a socialist.

Socialism is a faulty counterfeit of social concern. The one is not the other. Socialists want the government to own and therefore control everything. They deny private property. They want the government to control and operate the means of production, not a company owner. They believe in class warfare until there is a classless society. If the people you hear being called socialists do not endorse these tenets, they are not socialists. They are the victims of partisan mudslinging reminiscent of Sen. Joseph McCarthy tarring opponents as communists who called for social cooperation like that found in Social (note the adjective) Security. This New Deal proposal called for working people to cooperate by paying a small percentage of wages into a government-operated system that would pay them a pension at retirement. As sensible — and successful — as it has been, some still call it Marxist socialism.

The nation’s true religion of capitalism is being used to justify everything. Its gospel according to Ayn Rand says self-made men and women take full credit for whatever success their management positions seem to have produced singlehandedly, when in fact experience objectively shows that a factory full of people share the credit. These folks are rated for their productivity, and in America our workforce has some of the world’s highest. Yet their pay reflects it less and less.

An Anglican divine, John Donne, four centuries ago famously said that no man is an island, that if a clod of earth wash away, Europe is the less, that we are not to send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for us all. You would think that we would know from hard experience by now that we all must hang together or else we will all hang separately, as Ben Franklin and later Martin Luther King observed. The first spoke for the united effort needed to declare independence from Britain; the second for the joint push to end segregation. In each case the better angels of our nature saw to it that we put aside selfish, rugged individualism and join hands even if this was a personally new experience. The temptation of the capital sin of greed is to grasp to ourselves resources given by God to all as though we were somehow more entitled than less endowed neighbors.

Greed can so twist our thinking that we can be gulled into voting to further crush the middle class, to which we ourselves belong. Biting off our nose to spite our face, we evidently think that by voting for the advocates of avarice, we can become rich like them. But they of course do not want to see their numbers swell, so they will thank us for our votes as they throw us over the side, as we have seen so often in the past. Money elects candidates, even more so after the inexplicable Citizens United decision. The money buys what most seems to influence voters: who has more signs and commercials and robo-calls and mud.  Issues? What issues? Isn’t this a shallow way to choose?

Jesus must have been a socialist. He outfoxed the Pharisees by doing what no rabbi had done for hundreds of years: he put the citation from Deuteronomy about love of God on the same par with the one from Leviticus, which requires us to love our neighbor. And “neighbor” meant even despised Samaritans. The Torah held Jews to love both God and neighbor, but no one had ever made the commands equal. This ended it for Pharisees who could piously claim to love God while cheating their neighbor, as did the priest and Levite in the Good Samaritan parable.

Jesus had social concern for all, even for sheep not of his flock. He came to give his life as ransom for the many. We know from the renewed language of the Eucharist that “the many” is first-century idiom for all, not just for some rich friends.