This diary was inspired by kgirl's wonderful first diary, Are they still talking about that?
Kgirl's diary contrasted her mother's disdain for politics and her father's conservative politics to her own embrace of progressive politics and how that all relates to her identity as one who is faithful to Jesus. This diary picks up on the reference to Jesus and is my take on how I expect Jesus might react to his own mission were he to do it all over today.
In the first century Jesus probably would have had exactly the same attitude as kgirl's mother toward voting, not because he didn't care, but because he was completely detached from government, which is just as well for all the influence he would have had with the Roman government, or for that matter, the corrupt Jewish high priesthood of his day.
His response to the world's problems was to address them one person at a time, internally. The closest thing to a governmental response was the ancient and habitual practices of Jewish society itself, of which, of course he was a part. Those practices were historically ingrained and did not require any external government in order to perpetuate them.
Jewish society accepted the laws of its religion as its de facto government. The commandments to take care of the poor, the sick, and the foreigner in their midst was not a mere suggestion, but an obligation, individually and as a society. To fail in those duties was a personal and societal disgrace. Jesus taught that those same commandments should be obeyed out of something more than obligation, but obeyed nevertheless.
There was no voting involved. Neither Jewish society nor its Roman overlords were democracies, so no surprise there.
The only thing today, though, that has a chance to reestablish something like those Jewish obligations toward the weakest in society is democracy.
Sadly, the 21st century church that bears the name of Jesus is too often more focused on its individual members trying to save their own souls than it is on saving the lives of the needy, and it is so doctrinally fragmented that it would not be an effective answer to physical human needs no matter how hard it tried anyway. It's no longer one religion. It's hundreds of religions talking over each other in a bickering cacophony. The inability of the church(es) to address human need is naked evidence that what Jesus taught has been tragically lost in translation.
Ironically, the only way individual Christians today can address human need in more than a token way is to vote for government to enforce what Jesus' Jewish society took as a given, and what Jesus would have us do with a glad heart. But as it turns out, there aren't many orphans being fed or sick being cared for out of a glad heart.
Were Jesus here today, I am pretty sure he would realize that things didn't work out the way he had planned, and he would embrace the democratic process. He most likely would be arrested as a leader of the Occupy movement. He would still be preaching his preference for acting out of love, but I don't think for a minute he would hesitate to preach it in the context of political unrest.