I’ve noticed a flurry of social media posts about Target lately. They always seem to be in the crosshairs of some of my Christian friends. It seems that they are selling merchandise with pictures of Satan and pro LGBTQ items. So some people I follow on Social media want to stop giving them their money.
We vote with our dollars. And If you don’t like something you certainly don’t have to buy it. But I think the question for people is, “should I buy my Xbox at a place that sells Satan T-Shirts?”
There is so much we need to think about, and it gets really confusing. But I believe correct thinking is crucial to Christians trying to live as we are called to live. We are supposed to be a healing presence in a broken world. I think we can all agree that this is the primary call on Jesus followers. We should bring peace, comfort, and healing wherever we go. After all, that was what Jesus himself did. He challenged the self righteous religious leaders of his day and pushed love and grace over everything else. Everywhere he went he was bringing healing and grace.
Why did he do those things? He did it because there is so much pain. So much brokenness. People are wounded and desperate to be loved and accepted. And the world keeps throwing crap at them all the time. And Jesus was very counter cultural. He challenges most of us when he says “Love your enemies and pray for them.” He says, “deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.” He said to the church that we should look and act like him. So when I think about Target, I think there is always a matter of conscience and no one should do what they are uncomfortable doing, but I also wanted to ask the question, “Would Jesus shop at Target?”
His world was a lot less commercialized that ours is. In addition, Jesus hardly ever had any money. One time to answer a question about money, he had to ask someone to show him a coin. For these reasons, it’s gonna be hard to find parallels about his shopping habits.
But I am hoping his character and the things he was passionate about can help us grapple with an answer.
First of all, Jesus was not interested in a culture war. We live in the wake of a massive culture war in the west, and especially in the United States. Where for a long time people fought to uphold certain values or moral standards. That was the case in first century Judea where Jesus lived. The Romans held political, military, and economic power. They were always working hard to alter the culture of the Jewish people and make them look more Roman. Of course, the Romans themselves were mostly Greek whether they knew it or not. Many of them spoke Greek. They had adapted Greek religious stories as their own, and they built their empire on the back of the Greek empire. But they were working to force the Jews (who had always been stubbornly counter cultural) to adopt Roman world views and practices. Some did, ironically we call those Jews Hellenized Jews (which is ironic because it translates roughly to “greekified Jews”).
This culture war was raging hard around Jesus and he never told anyone they need to be Greekish, Romanish, or Jewish. In fact, after he was gone his followers would push even harder and say explicitly that none of that mattered, you could actually be any of the above and still be Christian. The culture war simply was not an issue to Jesus. I think you can argue from the four biographies of Jesus that he saw only two cultures. They were the culture of the kingdom of heaven and the culture of the world, which Jesus considered to be in open rebellion against the kingdom of heaven.
The religious leaders of Jesus day were quite moral and upright and they knew it. Jesus still considered them in open rebellion because they were assured of their own goodness rather than depending on his.
The Romans and Greeks were in open rebellion because they wanted to say “Caesar is Lord,” when in fact (as his followers later pointed out) “Jesus is Lord.”
It’s the way things are. It’s the way human beings are. We want something to rule us. And in America, commercialism rules us. Money is often one of our favorite gods and we use our gods to fight a culture war. Jesus was interested in neither commercialism nor culture wars. He was interested in the kingdom of heaven.
Second, Jesus was interested most in bringing love rather than condemnation to the world. Jesus was always speaking truth, but in ways that hurting people could hear. I think Jesus would probably have some good questions he might ask a guy wearing a T-Shirt with Satan on it. He might hang around that rack at Target and ask someone shopping for those shirts, “what makes you want to wear that?” I bet he’d engage people who have been terribly wounded by the religious leaders of the day and want to push back against an authoritative, patriarchal, and hypocritical religious institution. Jesus would probably have some story to tell them about how their wounds are real and that there was real hope for them. I bet he would somehow tell them that hope comes not in fighting against hypocrisy but by accepting his healing in their own lives.
Third, I bet Jesus would tell people who do want to boycott target that they should probably look at themselves first. He famously said one time that people should remove the plank from their own eye before they worry about the speck in their brother’s eye. What that means is, we all have some kind of mess going on. Maybe its greed. Maybe it’s a desire for comfort. Maybe it’s just a desire to have our way. Or perhaps the culture war is more important to us than loving our neighbor. I think Jesus would likely say, “before you start pointing out what’s going on over there, let’s work on what’s happening in your own heart.”
Jesus and the Bible are both pretty clear that the biggest problem any of us have is not out there somewhere, but in our own hearts. I think Jesus would encourage all of us to train our focus on him first and let him work on what’s going on in each of us.
I’m not telling anyone where they should and shouldn’t spend their money. And I don’t think Jesus would either. But I do think he would say the only culture war worth fighting is inside of our hearts, asking whether we are aligned with the kingdom of heaven of the kingdom of the world. I don’t think he would say you should just quietly accept things and never speak, but I do think he would suggest lovingly speaking the truth and really getting to understand people before you even try that.
And I think Jesus would actually hang out at target. I’m not sure he’d buy anything because he hardly ever had any money, but I think he’d know that’s where there were people who needed him. Those are the places he tended to go.
It’s a hard question. And I’m certainly not in the business of telling anyone what they need to do with their dollars or with their life. Honestly I don’t think Jesus is either. I mean he does have some true things to say to us, things that none of us would enjoy hearing. But he says them so graciously, so invitingly, that if we hear them I think it could just change us all.