Jesus did not preach income equality between the rich and the poor. He preached the complete reversal of the social order, wherein the rich and the poor would switch places. ... Jesus is not simply describing some utopian fantasy in which the meek inherit the earth, the sick are healed, the weak become strong, the hungry are fed, and the poor are made rich. He is advocating a chilling new reality in which the rich will be made poor, the strong will become weak, and the powerful will be displaced by the powerless.
This is where political presuppositions intrude on a scholar's imagination.
Aslan must relegate Jesus' belief in the imminent in-breaking of the kingdom of God through divine action to the realm of utopian fantasy because he wants Jesus to be a political radical instead of a mistaken eschatological prophet.
No one would be more appalled than Jesus by a liberal's kingdom of God exhausted by equality between rich and poor. But Jesus did not simply preach a revolution which would benefit the poor at the expense of the rich. Jesus expected few to be saved, not merely a reversal of fortunes for the many over the few. It is not just a simple matter of reversal but of final judgment under God's perfect justice which animates all the difficult sayings of Jesus, beginning with the call to repentance, which meant first of all renunciation of the world, not just for the rich but also for the poor: "No one can be my disciple who does not say goodbye to everything that he owns."
The real Jesus is more chilling than Reza Aslan wants to admit, indeed, more chilling than Christians want to admit. Jesus imagined an end to the world as we know it, transformed and swept clean as in the days of Noah, not by water, but by the fires of hell, into which the tares, the sons of the devil, are cast at the final harvest. That is the meaning of "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel."
