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The 2008 election seems like ancient history now. I hesitate to recall it, but an incident early in the presidential primaries sticks with me.

In a late 2007 debate among the Republican candidates, someone asked, "I have a quick question for those of you who would call yourselves Christian conservatives. The death penalty: What would Jesus do?"

Mike Huckabee responded by defending his support for the death penalty, but he failed to answer the WWJD question directly. The moderator, Anderson Cooper, pushed: "I do have to . . . press the question . . . what would Jesus do? Would Jesus support the death penalty?"

Governor Huckabee’s reply was a clever evasion: "Jesus was too smart to ever run for public office, Anderson. That's what Jesus would do."

Cooper later conceded that Huckabee’s answer was "probably one of the best answers you could possibly come up [with] to that question." And many political pundits concluded that Mr. Huckabee came away the clear winner of the debate.1
I found this brief episode very illuminating. One could reasonably conclude that as bothan ordained Baptist minister and a former governor of Arkansas, Mr. Huckabee would be uniquely qualified to answer this question. That he did not, and that he offered the answer he did, is cause for reflection.

This exchange illustrates that Jesus is not irrelevant to many voters. Indeed candidates of both major parties find it necessary to emphasize their faith. At the Saddleback interviews, both Senator McCain and now President Obama went to some lengths to secure their Christian credentials. But as Cal Thomas writes, “All politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, love God. Or more accurately, they love to use God to baptize their political agendas. In the Congressional Directory, which lists biographical and staff information about members of the House and Senate, no one is an atheist.”2

Generalities are fine, but the Devil is in the details. Huckabee’s evasion, and the silence from the other candidates present, indicates that Jesus is not entirely welcome in the conversation. We are not sure what to do with Him. We may celebrate Him if it serves our purposes, but when the particulars challenge the party line or popular opinion, as Jesus so often does, He is quickly, if politely, set in a corner where He can be admired without interfering with the politics of winning.

The reverse is also true. Jesus is no more comfortable on this political stage than He is welcome. Jesus is Lord, not leverage. He will not be managed or cajoled, much less reduced to a sound bite. Though we may try to shove a round peg into the square hole, the fact is that the politics of Jesus resists every attempt to be co-opted by any person or party. He simply cannot be conformed to the ideology of power politics.

Satan offered Jesus all the power of the “kingdoms of this world,” but He said, “No!” (Luke 4:5-7). He fed five thousand, and the crowd would “make him king.” But Jesus rejected populist politics and withdrew to the mountain (John 6:1-15). He resisted being set up as a judge of the law and rebuked His disciples when they were inflicted with the urge to be in charge: “The kings of the Gentiles” are like that; they “exercise lordship over… [but it is] not so among you . . .” (Luke 12:13, 14; 22:25, 26).

Ironically, Huckabee’s clever reply possessed more than a little truth: Jesus was too smart to run for public office. Or to put the matter in first century context, Jesus was smart enough to know that the gospel of the kingdom could not be, and should not be, aligned with or exploited by any of the political factions of his day. Although this King, this kingdom, was for the world, it was not of it (John 18:33-40). There is a better way.

Despite all the political options of His day — and there were more than a few — Jesus resisted politics as usual and chose to address the current moral, economic, religious, and political challenges with the counter-cultural message of the kingdom of God. The fact that He came preaching a kingdom indicates just how deeply “political” His ministry was; there is little other way to hear kingdom language except as politically loaded. No, it wasn’t that Jesus was non-political but that His politics was not their politics; His kingdom was not their kingdom.

Greg Boyd sums up this contrast of kingdoms nicely. The kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed “operates differently than the governments of the world do. While all the versions of the kingdom of the world acquire and exercise power over others, the kingdom of God, incarnated and modeled in the person of Jesus Christ, advances only by exercising power under others. It expands by manifesting the power of self-sacrificial, Calvary-like love.”3

Sadly, this important distinction has been lost on many well-intentioned Christians; the damage to our witness is incalculable. By identifying ourselves with a particular brand of power politics, we politicized our faith and set ourselves up for a fall. With the ever-fickle political winds now shifting from right to left, the church finds itself compromised by association.

Jesus is king! But His kingship is not such that can exist comfortably within the limits and confines of our political expectations. His way is not the abdication of the political but a whole new kind of politics: “Tell the daughter of Zion, ‘Behold, your King is coming to you, lowly, and sitting on a donkey, a colt, the foal of a donkey’” (Matthew 21:5). This is good news: The King of the Jews rules from a cross, and the “rulers of this age . . . are coming to nothing” (John 19; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; 2:6-8). Do we believe that?

In the end, Huckabee’s response was perhaps more true than even he realized. For had he, surely he would have had to reassess his own candidacy in light of it. Indeed, we all must reassess our actions and expectations regarding the politics of this world, for if Jesus would not be made king, why do we who follow Him insist on being king-makers?

References
1. Media Matters (http://mediamatters.org/items/200711300003)
2. Blinded By Might: Why the Religious Right Can’t Save America, Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, p. 87
3. The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church, Gregory A. Boyd, p. 14

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