Posted on: 28th October 2025

A Christian follows Jesus, wherever he goes.  

Jesus lived in the world of Pilate and Herod, of Pharisees and Zealots,  a hectic unsatisfactory political world.  He engaged with it, walked to the city, the polis, of doomed Jerusalem, weeping because it did not know or value what made for its peace.  

Jesus was a political person. But not a competitor for political status or power. Excited people wanted to make him king, but he withdrew to the mountain  (John 6.15). He refused outright Satan’s offer to give him ‘all the kingdoms of the world’ if he switched sides (Matt 4.9).

Jesus was political in a human way. He wielded no sword, presided over no council or court. He could have chosen to collude with the way society is run by the powerful, but he often found free space for living in the wilderness. People hungry for food, health, peace, joy, love went to him there. 

Here Jesus practised politics constructively, not competitively.  As enabling service.

Consider the components of constructive politics: 

• He saw the crowds as sheep without a shepherd  (Mark 6.34).
• He had compassion, and shared his wisdom with them, and healed the sick.
• He asked what is to be done for them,  now that it was late, and they were far from home and hungry.
• He asked the caring question and got an unsatisfactory answer from his disciples – ‘Send them away  to the villages where they can buy for themselves’.
• He called disciples to practical generous responsibility – ‘You give them something to eat’. Their hands were empty, they could only find a lad with five loaves and two fishes – not enough. 
• He led them to risk working bravely with the little they had.   Or put it another way, to risk being surprised by God.
• He organized people into tidy fifties, distributed the food and gathered up the left-overs for recycling.

Let us take clues from Jesus and work with him constructively as creative, responsible, political human beings in God’s world. 

Politics often breeds distrust and disdain, we properly dislike the antics of competitive politics. But we still have to live together, as we find ourselves, hungry for humanity in the middle of one wilderness or another. We cannot do without politics of some sort, for we live in the polis, the human community.  We want politics that builds up human community, from the basics, from the rubble we humans  often reduce ourselves to. 

Few of us are called to the Westminster village.  But wherever we are, in family, workplace, community project; political skills,  graces and vision, are called for.   

For an earlier longer version of this piece, see ‘Does Jesus call us to political discipleship'