And I hope many on this list know the Ewan MacColl song: "Jesus was a Workingman"
Jesus was a working man A hero you shall hear Born in the slums of Bethlehem At the turning of the year, YES The turning of the year When Jesus was just a little little lad All the streets ran with his name For he argued with the Older Men And put them all to shame, YES Put them all to shame His father he apprenticed him A carpenter to be To plane and drill and work with skill In the town of Gallilee, YES The town of Gallilee He became a roving journey man And he wandered far and wide And he saw how wealth an poverty Lived always side by side, YES Lived always side by side So he said come all you working men Ye farmers and weavers too If you would only organize The world belongs to you, YES The world belongs to you So the fishermen sent three delegates And the farmers and weavers, too And they formed the working comittee of twelve To see the struggle through, YES To see the struggle through When the rich men heard what the carpenter had done To the Roman troops they ran Saying "Put this rebel Jesus down He's a menace to God and man, YES A menace to God and man." The commander of the occupying troops He laughed and then he said "We've a cross to spare on Calvary Hill, By the weekend he'll be dead, YES The weekend he'll be dead Now Jesus walked among the poor For the poor were his own kind And they wouldn't let the cops get near enough To take him from behind, YES To take him from behind So they hired them a man of the traitor's trade And a stool pigeon was he And he sold his brother to the butcher's men For a fistful of silver money A fistful of money Now Jesus lay in the prison cell And the beat him and offered him bribes To desert the cause of his own poor folk And work for the rich men's tribe, YES Work for the rich men's tribe. The sweat stood out upon his brow And the blood ran in his eye And the nailed his body to the Roman cross And the laughed as they watched him die, YES Laughed as the watched him die Two thousand years have passed and gone And many a hero too And the dream of this poor carpenter At last it MUST come true YES It surely MUST come true. [I rewrote the last verse] (of course, MacColl wrote this in the 1950s when he (and too many of us) thought the Soviet Union was the "wave of the future" but as the re-written last verse says --- Rosa Luxembourg was right ---as the environment worsens and the earth burns it's either "Socialism or barbarism!") On Thu, Dec 24, 2020 at 11:03 AM Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote: > NYT, Dec. 24, 2020 > The Forgotten Radicalism of Jesus Christ > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#4773): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/4773 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79204595/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
