Was Jesus Woke?

Of course not.

In order to be woke you have to have been asleep, unaware of “important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).”[1] You would have to have been inattentive to “social and/or racial discrimination and injustice.”[2] There never was a time, unless it be his early childhood, when Jesus was unaware of or inattentive to the social and racial injustices and prejudices of his day.

I mean, look at his parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). For the Jews of Jesus’ day there was no such thing as a “good” Samaritan. They viewed the Samaritans as unclean, ignorant and religious enemies of the Jews. So for Jesus to put the Samaritan traveler in the role of the one who helped the robbed and beaten Jewish traveler was as in-your-face as you could get with the perversity of racial discrimination. This is not unlike Mark Twain making Jim, the escaped African-American slave in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the moral center of the novel.[3] It is white people in that story who are perverse, just as in Jesus’ parable it is a Jewish priest and Levite who are perverse in their refusal to help their fellow Jewish traveler.

And don’t forget Jesus’ insistence on going through enemy territory, Samaria, to get to Galilee, and his insistence on stopping in Samaria, in Sychar, to have a divinely-appointed encounter with a Samaritan woman whom he leads to faith in himself as Messiah, which leads to the whole village coming to believe in Jesus. Jesus’ disciples had their prejudice against Samaritans and would never have gone through Samaria on their own, let alone had spiritual conversation with Samaritans or believed they were worth witnessing to.

Jesus was also aware of Jewish discrimination against non-Jews like the Syrophoenician woman, whose daughter Jesus frees from a demon (Mark 7:24-30). Jesus helped other Gentiles as well, like the Centurion soldier whose slave was paralyzed (Matthew 8:5-13). Jesus was very aware of the social injustices perpetrated against foreigners, the poor, those sick with leprosy, women, the uneducated, children, and those of non-Jewish ethnicity. Whereas we need to be awakened to these inequities, Jesus did not.

Jesus was woke, but never awakened.

Jesus believed Samaritan lives mattered (SLM), women’s lives mattered (WLM), lepers’ lives mattered (LLM), foreigners’ lives mattered (FLM), the poor’s lives mattered (PLM), children’s lives mattered (CLM), and Gentile lives mattered (GLM).

Now if by woke you mean politically liberal or progressive in matters of racial and social justice,[4] then by all means, Jesus was woke.

Jesus was the very opposite of conservative in the religious and political atmosphere of Israel. He violated the Sabbath, according, that is, to the conservative religious law of the Jews (Matthew 12:1-12; Mark 2:23-3:4; Luke 6:1-9; 13:10-16; 14:1-5; John 5:1-18; 7:22-23; 19:1-31). The Pharisees discriminated against Jesus and his disciples for the way they observed the Sabbath. They looked down on them and others who were more poor and uneducated, precluding them from any places of authority, because of how they did not do ritual cleansings (Mark 7) and keeping Sabbath like they thought they should.

The system was rigged against Samaritans, Gentiles, the poor, and the uneducated, as well as against radicals like the zealots. But Jesus chose his disciples and apostles from among these very kinds of people, even tax-collectors. He was very DEI, including a diversity of the normally non-included on his roster. Oh, Jesus was definitely woke in terms of being politically and religiously liberal or progressive. As he said with regard to the many traditions he and his disciples failed to keep,

³⁶ No one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch an old one. Otherwise, they will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. ³⁷ And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. ³⁸ No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins.  (Luke 5:36-38, NIV)

Would Jesus have been a democrat if he were living in present day America? No. Nor would he have been a Republican. Neither platform is in accord with Biblical truth. But he would have been woke. He would have been sensitive to the plight of the minorities in our country and very concerned to urge their acceptance and facilitate their progress in our culture.

 

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woke

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_(Huckleberry_Finn)

[4] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woke