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Notes -
Interesting. What do you think of the times that he heals people -- people he knows to be sinners, unclean, or undesirable -- or when he calls Matthew, a tax collector, someone who at the time people viewed as an "elite" to follow him?
Jesus healed sinners and the demon-possessed with the instruction to sin no more. His miracles weren’t meant to be a blank check to go out to continue to sin. (“A wicked generation looks for a sign”, says Jesus from Matthew 16.) That’s a big difference. Today’s social justice calls on people to tolerate and not change their ways, but Jesus calls on people to be loving. And sometimes being loving means calling on people to repent of evil and change from their sinful behaviors. God does not tolerate evil. He patiently waits, but there will come a day of the Lord where He will no longer wait.
As for Matthew the tax collector, he was by no means an elite. He may have gotten rich but only by cooperating with the Romans against his own people, much like the Jewish Councils in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere occupied by the Nazis. There was no mistaking who the ruling class was at those times; the film The Pianist also depicts them a little bit.
SJWs also call on people to repent of evil and change their ways; they just have a different idea of what constitutes evil. Transphobes, homophobes, xenophobes, racists, sexists, capitalists, Republican voters, gun owners, climate change denialists, etc. are all being asked to “go forth and sin no more” by abandoning their previous beliefs and behaviors and becoming SJWs themselves. By 2020, BLM activists thought the day of reckoning had finally arrived, and they declared, “We are done waiting.” (PDF)
Basically, I think you’re missing that SJW’s tolerance only extends to the in-group, which in some ways is not totally far off from Jesus’ own teachings. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” vs. “You brood of vipers,” and so forth.
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I certainly agree with that. But the issue then, as with many others in the Christian ethos, is what does constitute sin? A traditionalist perspective is going to pull from orthodox teachings about sin, whereas a more liberal approach would involve understanding and analyzing the cultural context of the scripture that proports to declare something is a sin, and also through the lens that the Bible is the inspired word of God, written by people who were imperfect and may have embellished, editorialized, or understood God in a different perspective, while still viewing it in an overall authoritative light.
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Re Matthew: this is an excellent and often unapprecied point.
The reason being a "tax collector" was seen as dirty/dishonorable job was that it often meant that you would be working against your own friends, family, community, etc... on the behalf of a distant and foreign power. It's only natural for people to have an issue with that and view you with suspicion as a result.
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