The Jesus Manifesto: Part One: Class Systems

I have been reading Richard Rohr's Jesus' Plan for a New World. This book really contributed to me wanting to explore the Sermon on the Mount. We love to take little pieces of the Sermon on the Mount out of its context, slap it on a t-shirt, and say, "Look, this is what Jesus said!" But if you don't read the individual teachings within the whole teaching of the sermon on the mount, you can easily become lost, confused, and misinformed on Jesus' intentions.

One of the first questions I asked was, "who is Jesus talking to?" Once I had the answer to this question, the Sermon took on an all new light, I could see it from a perspective of a first century peasant Jew instead of a middle class white American male of the 21st century.

Class Systems:
In our society, we divide up the population by class. The Gilbert-Kahl system, we see that America is divided into six classes:
1. Executive Class: Top politicians, corporate executives, and heirs of large buisnesses reside here
2. Upper Class: Doctors, Lawyers, Medium sized buisness owners
3. Middle Class: Proffessional laborers (electricians, plumbers) non retail sales, lower management positions
4. Working class: factory workers, lower skilled manual labor, clerical, retail sales
5. Working Poor: minimum wage workers
6. Underclass: part-time workers, unemployed. etc...

We can add a bottom class to this system. Your worth is based upon what you can consume and produce, so those who are not able or willing to consume or produce are not even classified here.
7. Expendable: criminals, welfare recipients, nursing home occupants, mental institution occupants, mentally handicapped, and the seriously disabled, the unborn.

This is not a knock on the bottom class, if you know someone who would be classified there. You will see.

The class system of Jesus' day had nine class systems, the top five ran society, and the bottom four were peasant classes.
1. Caesar: received 50% of the GNP, in Jesus' day it would be Tiberius
2. Governor: recieved 25% of the GNP, in Jesus' area this is Pilate
3. Retainers (maintain the system): military officers, lower bureaucrats (Herod), The High Preist (Caiaphas) pharisees and scribes (worked like H&R Block, helping you wade through all the red tape of religion for a fee)
4. Merchants: Lower on the scales than in our Consumer based society
5. Land Owners: Owned all the land
6. Farmers: Rented the land from land owners
7. Artisians: Fisherman, carpenters, masons
8. the "unclean" Lepers, tax collectors, pig farmers, gentiles (non Jews), and pig farmers (see story of Lost Son from Luke)
9. The Expendable: criminals, beggars, cripples, lame, blind, handicapped

When Jesus opens the Sermon on the Mount he says, blessed are the poor (ptochi) which means destitute, those who are crouching, he is referring to the bottom two classes.