NYT, Dec. 24, 2020
The Forgotten Radicalism of Jesus Christ
First-century Christians weren’t prepared for what a truly inclusive
figure he was, and what was true then is still true today.
By Peter Wehner, Contributing Opinion Writer
That line comes from a marvelous new TV series on Jesus’ life, “The
Chosen,” in which Jesus, played by Jonathan Roumie, invites Matthew to
become one of his disciples. Simon Peter, already a disciple, registers
his fierce objection. Matthew is a tax collector, who were viewed as
tools of Roman authorities, often dishonest and abusive. They were
therefore treated as traitors and outcasts by other Jews.
“I don’t get it,” Simon Peter says to Jesus about his decision to invite
Matthew, to which Jesus responds, “You didn’t get it when I chose you,
either.”
“But this is different,” Simon Peter answers. “I’m not a tax collector.”
At which point Jesus let’s Simon Peter know things aren’t going to be
quite what his followers expected.
First-century Christians weren’t prepared for what a truly radical and
radically inclusive figure Jesus was, and neither are today’s
Christians. We want to tame and domesticate who he was, but Jesus’ life
and ministry don’t really allow for it. He shattered barrier after barrier.
One example is Jesus’ encounter, in the fourth chapter of the gospel of
John, with the Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus and the woman talked
about Jesus being the Messiah, why he was even deigning to talk with
her, and the unnamed woman’s past and present, which she initially
sought to hide from Jesus. (It included her five previous husbands,
according to the account in John, and the fact that “the one whom you
now have is not your husband.”) Yet not a word of condemnation passed
the lips of Jesus; the woman felt heard, understood, cared for. Jesus
treated her, in the words of one commentator, “with a magnetic dignity
and respect.”
The encounter with Jesus transformed her life; after it the woman at the
well became “the first woman preacher in Christian history,” proclaiming
Jesus to be the savior of the world to her community, according to the
New Testament scholar Kenneth Bailey.
This story is a striking example of Jesus’ rejection of conventional
religious and cultural thinking — in this case because Jesus, a man, was
talking earnestly to a woman in a world in which women were often
demeaned and treated as second-class citizens; and because Jesus, a Jew,
was talking to a Samaritan, who were despised by the Jews for reasons
going back centuries. According to Professor Bailey, “A Samaritan woman
and her community are sought out and welcomed by Jesus. In the process,
ancient racial, theological and historical barriers are breached. His
message and his community are for all.”
This happened time and again with Jesus. He touched lepers and healed a
woman who had a constant flow of menstrual blood, both of whom were
considered impure; forgave a woman “who lived a sinful life” and told
her to “go in peace,” healed a paralytic and a blind man, people thought
to be worthless and useless. And as Jesus was being crucified, he told
the penitent thief on the cross next to him, “Today you will be with me
in paradise.”
Jesus was repeatedly attacked for hanging out with the wrong crowd and
recruited his disciples from the lower rungs of society.
For Christians, the incarnation is a story of God, in the person of
Jesus, participating in the human drama. And in that drama Jesus was
most drawn to the forsaken and despised, the marginalized, those who had
stumbled and fallen. He was beloved by them, even as he was targeted and
eventually killed by the politically and religiously powerful, who
viewed Jesus as a grave threat to their dominance.
Over the course of my faith journey, I have wondered: Why was a hallmark
of Jesus’s ministry intimacy with and the inclusion of the unwanted and
the outcast, men and women living in the shadow of society, more likely
to be dismissed than noticed, more likely to be mocked than revered?
Part of the explanation surely has to do with the belief in the imago
Dei, that Jesus sees indelible dignity and inestimable worth in every
person, even “the least of these.” If no one else would esteem them,
Jesus would.
Among the people who best articulated this ethic was Abraham Lincoln,
who in a 1858 speech in Lewiston, Ill., in which he explained the true
meaning of the Declaration of Independence, said, “Nothing stamped with
the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on,
and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.”
Yet another reason for Jesus’ connection with outcasts undoubtedly had
to do with his compassion and empathy, his desire to relieve their pain
and lift the soul-crushing shame that accompanies being a social pariah
and an untouchable.
But that is hardly the only reason. Jesus modeled inclusion and
solidarity with the “unclean” and marginalized not only for their sake
but for the sake of the powerful and the privileged and for the good of
the whole.
Jesus must have understood that we human beings battle with exclusion,
self-righteousness and arrogance, and have a quick trigger finger when
it comes to judging others. Jesus knew how easily we could fall into the
trap of turning “the other” — those of other races, ethnicities,
classes, genders and nations — into enemies. We place loyalty to the
tribe over compassion and human connection. We view differences as
threatening; the result is we become isolated, rigid in our thinking,
harsh and unforgiving.
Jesus clearly believed that outcasts had a lot to teach the privileged
and the powerful, including the virtues of humility and the vice of
supreme certitude. Rather than seeing God exclusively as a moral
taskmaster, Jesus understood that the weak and dispossessed often
experience God in a different way — as a dispenser of grace, a source of
comfort, a redeemer. They see the world, and God, through a different
prism than do the powerful and the proud. The lowly in the world offer a
corrective to the spiritual astigmatisms that develop among the rest of us.
It’s easy for us to look back 20 centuries and see how religious
authorities were too severe and unforgiving in how they treated the
outcasts of their time. The wisest question those of us who are
Christians could ask ourselves isn’t why we are so much more humane and
enlightened than they were; rather, it is to ask ourselves who the
modern outcasts are and whether we’re mistreating them. Who are the tax
collectors of our era, the people we despise but whom Jesus would
welcome, those around whom are we determined to build a “dividing wall
of hostility,” to use the imagery of the Apostle Paul?
“How Christians, including me, responded to the AIDS crisis in the ’80s
haunts me,” my longtime friend Scott Dudley, senior pastor of Bellevue
Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Wash., recently told me. “Had we, like
the first Christians, cared first and cared most for modern day ‘plague’
victims, I think we’d be in a whole different conversation with the
L.G.B.T.Q. community. We may still have significant differences of
opinion. However, I believe the dialogue would be one of more mutual
respect, and I believe the L.G.B.T.Q. community would feel less afraid
of the wounds Christians can inflict.” But even if the conversation were
not different, as Scott knows, caring first and caring most for those
victims of a plague would have been the right thing to do.
No society and no religious faith can live without moral rules. Jesus
wasn’t an antinomian, one who believes that Christians, because they are
saved by grace, are not bound to religious laws. But he understood that
what ultimately changes people’s lives are relationships rather than
rule books, mercy rather than moral demands.
Jesus’ teachings are so challenging, so distinct from normal human
reactions and behaviors, that we constantly have to renew our commitment
to them. Every generation of Christians need to think through how his
example applies to the times in which they live. We need our
sensibilities to align more with his. Otherwise, we drift into
self-righteousness and legalism, even to the point that we corrupt the
very institution, the church, which was created to worship him and to
love others.
The lesson from Jesus’ life and ministry is that understanding people’s
stories and struggles requires much more time and effort than condemning
them, but it is vastly more rewarding. And the lesson of Christmas and
the incarnation, at least for those of us of the Christian faith, is
that all of us were once outcasts, broken yet loved, and worth reaching
out to and redeeming.
If God did that for us, why do we find it so hard to do it for each other?
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