By Sam Amadi
Mathew Dowd, a former CNN analyst, celebrated New York Times contributor, former President Bush’s speech writer and a republican turned democrat now running for political office in Texas stirred the Hornets’ nest on Sunday when he twitted that if Jesus was on earth today he would be woke. Dowd got this inspiration while attending church service in Texas. This tweet infuriated many conservatives and evangelicals. How dare you, many said.
But Dowd is right. Yes Jesus would be woke if that means he would peel through the make-beliefs and deceit of the systems of civil and criminal justice and point out the racist, classist and gendered exploitations and dehumanization of human beings. Jesus would be ‘woke’ in that he would refused to be seduced by the empty formalisms of our social institutions and zero in on the brutal indignities of social interactions. In that sense, Jesus would be ’woke’ as we know him from the gospels and epistles.
But Jesus will not suffer and peddle the gross foolishness that says that there is no right or wrong; that victims are not themselves, in some sense, villains; that the cause of injustice is either absence of enlightenment or adversarial interests; and that by self-indulgence we will find the holiness to treat one another with dignity and truth.
Jesus will acknowledge that all men and women matter equally before God. But the matter equally precisely because they are CREATED by GOD to be MALE and FEMALE. He will laugh at the silliness of people CHOOSING to be bisexual or no sexual or being transgender. He will not applaud them for acts of courage. He will rather mourn at such error because he knows what damage it will do to their capacity to be truly human in the image of God and the consequent destruction it will cause to holy and righteous community. But Jesus will not hurt or discriminate against those who have erred in their thinking and chosen foolish lifestyles. They remain children of God. He will continue to preach to them and pray with them. He will continue to share bread with them because he knows that but for the grace of God, his disciples are not better than them.
Violence- physical or verbal against any persons for their beliefs or lifestyle is completely incompatible with the man who told his disciple never to even call any man or woman a fool, because doing so earns you a place in hellfire.
So Jesus as a ‘woke’ will be cool to accept that God has given all men and women the right to decide what they want to believe or do. But that right of choice does not change the fact that God has established what is right and wrong. Our choice does not negate the nature of things or their consequences. Being ‘woke’ for Jesus and his true followers will be something like what the greatest Christain philosopher, Apostle Paul, once told his disciple, Titus:
“ For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. 4[†]But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, 5[†]he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but faccording to his own mercy, by gthe washing of regeneration and hrenewal of the Holy Spirit, 6whom he ipoured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior” (Titus 3:3-6).
We need to be tolerant to sinners and those who rebel against God by choosing sinful lifestyles because we were foolish like them in the past until the grace of God helped us to see the truth and get cleaned from our self-indulgence. We also recognize that because the world lies in wickedness of sin its justice systems will be deceptively and grossly unjust and it is our responsibility to peel off these layers of deceit and find the foundations of lies and injustice and uproot them.
I hope Maureen Dowd will agree with this version of ‘Jesus de Woke’?
• Dr. Amadi is a lawyer lecturer.