Jesus in Our Context

To fully benefit from the insights of Jesus we must approach his teachings with a fresh perspective. Too often Jesus is read with a kind of awe and piety he would disdain.

Christianity proclaims that Jesus, the son of God, was fully human. He prayed for daily bread, he enjoyed a fine wine, he laughed with his friends, and he feared death.

For Jesus faith is not a set of religious beliefs, it is a way of living.

But for many modern Christians their faith is focused on another world, not the everyday world of work, politics, entertainment, preparing for retirement, and making ends meet. Faith is a private matter that looks beyond the everyday to the eternal.

This separation would be entirely alien – would probably be repugnant – to Jesus. Fundamental to the teachings of Jesus is the integrity of faith and daily life. Faith is a way, not just to heaven, but to living in harmony with our most basic nature. For Jesus, human nature was created by God and at its core is incorruptibly good.

Whenever we live in a manner that is inconsistent with this nature we are setting ourselves up for unhappiness, failure, and worse. Living our lives in a manner that is coherent with our fundamental nature is the way of justice, righteousness, peace… and ultimate satisfaction.

Jesus was, of course, very much alive – and entirely contemporary – to those whom he encountered. But for us there are only a few stories passed down through twenty centuries wrapped in a social and economic context that is unfamiliar to us.

Jesus has been further distanced from us by a wide array of religious imagery and ritual that would often cause him to smile and occasionally frown. Unfortunately, many of these practices – beautiful and rich with meaning – can also serve to make Jesus seem outside our daily reality, when his teachings were meant to shape our daily reality.

In the following we will re-examine the teachings of Jesus, mostly from the Gospel of Matthew, with a particular emphasis on their implications for the daily life of business and commerce.

For some Christians this effort to insert Jesus into the heart of the modern business enterprise will be troublesome. Some will perceive that in the process of updating the teachings of Jesus for a corporate context I have misconstrued and misrepresented the essential gospel. I am sure my skills are insufficient to the task, but I am equally confident that if Jesus was walking with us today, he would be visiting the corporate canyons more often than the great cathedrals.

For some Christians – and even more non-Christians – this blog will seem a fatally flawed effort to join the sacred and the profane. For these readers any corporate leader who gives serious attention to the counsels of Jesus is clearly unsuited for the hard-nosed competitive turmoil of corporate life. Corporate leaders require a warrior instinct, not the sensitivity of a saint. I would respond that more than a few saints were also warriors and business leaders would benefit from the courage, consistency, and realism that characterized the life and teachings of Jesus.

But this requires a new – and probably more accurate – understanding of both Jesus and his First Century context.