Cook County News Herald

What would Jesus do?




We are told by many preachers, priests and politicians that we are a Christian nation and hold Jesus as our role model. But what if Jesus lived today? What kind of a role model would he be?

If we compare him to the Jesus of the New Testament, he would be illegitimate, conceived out of wedlock, born to a single mother, father unknown, yet having a stepfather. His true birthplace would be in doubt as well as his birth certificate.

Some Scriptures tell us that Jesus of long ago was born in the town of Bethlehem and therefore in the true lineage of King David, yet other Scriptures do not mention where he was born. All they mention is that he was from a hick town.

Our role model would have spent part of his childhood in a foreign country just like Jesus in Egypt. Makes one wonder what kind of ideas he might have picked up there!

He would be an itinerant teacher promoting health care, helping the afflicted and the poor, and organizing the outcast. Some of us would take him, like they did Jesus, for being out of his mind, an embarrassment and an outright liar.

He would speak out against the brassy politicians turned preachers and the “holier than thou” preachers turned politicians because of their greedy profit-making at the expense of the less fortunate.

He would ask people to share resources just like Jesus asked his followers to share their fishes and loaves of bread. While selfrighteous and hypocritical religionists would claim that peoples’ plights and misfortunes were signs of their sinful lifestyles and therefore punishments from God, he would respond, promulgating natural equality and humanistic equanimity.

He would be called names, considered a traitor to his own people and compared to evil rulers of the past as he welcomed strangers and foreigners.

Finally, when we have had enough of him we would crucify him because he has the audacity to tell us to love our enemies and to forgive them for they know not what they are doing! Oops!

Jake Hjorth
Grand Marais



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