The Jesus my mom helped me to see

So, I would have loved to have posted this yesterday, given the whole Mother's Day thing, but alas I'm a day late. No surprise to those of you who know me well.

In part this is a post to honor my mom, who was particularly effective at modeling Jesus' love for those who are marginalized. Mostly, though, this is a post that will hopefully (re)introduce you to a part of Jesus that might not be so familiar.

There's a GREAT book from a while back by Philip Yancey called "The Jesus I Never Knew." Each chapter helps readers to see true things about Jesus (from the Bible) that, for whatever reason, over the course of history lots of people have missed, forgotten or failed to model (I'm guilty of all three). It is both an encouragement to the Church, to make sure we're preaching and modeling a full Gospel, and to those who don't believe, to make sure you really know who He is, before you decide you're not interested.

One of the things we forget about Jesus (myself included) is who the people were with whom he spent significant time. Who he reached out to while he walked the earth. Who wanted to be with him.

Yancey writes:

"...we noticed a striking pattern: the more unsavory the characters, the more at ease they seemed to feel around Jesus. People like these found Jesus appealing: a Samaritan social outcast, a military officer of the tyrant Herod, a quisling tax collector, a recent hostess to seven demons.

In contrast, Jesus got a chilly response from more respectable types. Pious Pharisees thought him uncouth and worldly, a rich young ruler walked away shaking his head, and even the open-minded Nicodemus sought a meeting under the cover of darkness.

I remarked to the class how strange this pattern seemed, since the Christian church now attracts respectable types who closely resemble the people most suspicious of Jesus on earth. What has happened to reverse the pattern of Jesus' day?

I recounted a story told me by a friend who works with the down-and-out in Chicago. A prostitute came to him in wretched straits, homeless, her health failing, unable to buy food for her two year-old daughter. Her eyes awash with tears, she confessed that she had been renting out her daughter--two years old!--to men interested in kinky sex, in order to support her own drug habit. My friend could barely hearing the sordid details of her story. He sat in silence, not knowing what to say. At last he asked if she had ever thought of going to a church for help. "I will never forget the look of pure astonishment that crossed her face," he told me later. "Church!" she cried. "Why would I ever go there? They'd just make me feel ever worse than I already do."

Somehow we have created a community of respectability in the church, I told my class. The down-and-out, who flocked to Jesus when he lived on earth, no longer feel welcome. How did Jesus, the only perfect person in history, manage to attract the notoriously imperfect? And what keeps us from following in his steps today?"
...

In his own social interactions, Jesus was putting into practice "the great reversal" heralded in the Beatitudes. Normally in this world we look up to the rich, the beautiful, the successful. Grace, however, introduces a world of new logic. Because God loves the poor, the suffering, the persecuted, so should we. Because God sees no undesirables, neither should we. By his own example, Jesus challenged us to look at the world through what Irenaeus would call "grace-healed eyes."
...

Projecting myself back into Jesus' time, I try to picture the scene. The poor, the sick, the tax collectors, sinners, and prostitutes crowd around Jesus, stirred by his message of healing and forgiveness. The rich and powerful stand on the sidelines, testing him, spying, trying to entrap him. I know these facts about Jesus' time, and yet, from the comfort of a middle class church in a wealthy country like the U.S., I easily lose sight of the radical core of Jesus' message.

To help correct my vision, I have read sermons that come out of the Christian base communities in the Third World. The gospel through Third World eyes looks very different from the gospel as preached in many U.S. churches. The poor and the unlearned cannot always identify Jesus' mission statement ("...he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor...to proclaim freedom for the captives and release for the prisoners...") as a quotation from Isaiah, but they hear it as good news indeed. They understand the great reversal not as an abstraction but as God's promise of defiant hope and Jesus' challenge to his followers. Regardless of how the world treats them, the poor and the sick have assurance, because of Jesus, that God knows no undesirables.

So, thanks mom, for spending significant time sincerely and sacrificially loving people, who--to lots of the world--may seem disgraceful, untouchable or too messed up. In doing so you helped me to see a clearer picture of Jesus.

And thanks Jesus for instituting an upside value system where the weak are strong. The poor are rich. The humble are exalted. Thanks for coming for the sick and not the healthy. Sorry I haven't lived that very well. Help me to know you better. Help me to learn grace from those you loved. Give me eyes to see like you see.