Ride Sharing with Jesus

Ride-Sharing with Jesus--January 31, 2017

"For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He has a demon'; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds." [Matthew 11:18-19]

Here's a simple truth: if I am in a car that you are driving, by logical necessity, I will go where you go.  I am along for the ride. 

By logical extension, if you pick up other people for this ride to go to the same destination, I will be where they are, too.  This is not a choice: if I want to be in the same car you are driving, it means I will share the ride with whomever else you stop to offer a ride to, as well.

You could make it a boat, too, or a plane, or a train: if I am with you on this ride, then I will go wherever you are driving (or flying, or what-have-you), and I will get there with whomever else you choose to include.  We will all be in this together, if I am committed to staying in the same car where you are.  And I will have to deal with the fact that it comes with the price-tag of accepting all the people you choose to share the car with, even if I have my own hang-ups.  If the most important thing to me is being where you are, then it will mean I have to be ok with going where you want to go, and with whom you want to include.

It is no different in this voyage together we call following Jesus: if the important thing is going where Jesus goes and being where Jesus is, we are going to have to be ok with letting Jesus take us where he wills, and including people that he is letting on board.

Because, after all, Jesus has a way of going to unexpected parties and identifying with people without asking for my approval first.  This is not a choice.  That Jesus--he never stops to ask for my approval on his decisions first! (Thank God!)

I like to think this was one of the things that shook Jesus' first followers up the most--that they had to learn to follow their rabbi into unsavory places, disreputable parties, and socially unacceptable gatherings of people.  And because they wanted to be where their rabbi was, they learned to let Jesus stretch them by bringing them along.  I have to imagine that at the first party thrown by the local sell-out tax collector that they attended with Jesus, that good ol' Simon Peter and Andrew kept blushing and looking around to make sure nobody they knew saw them going in the front door.  I have to imagine that all of Jesus' first followers had to come to a point where they realized that being where Jesus was so important that they would share a table with whomever Jesus wanted them to share a table with.  I have to imagine that Jesus smiled from time to time, as he saw how his social schedule among the not-good-enough and unacceptable forced them to learn something.  I'll bet he said to them sometimes, right before going into a party that none of the religious so-and-sos approved of, "This is not a choice.  You're coming."

From the beginning, really, Jesus has always been taking his followers and stretching them that way--he has always brought us into table fellowship with people the respectable so-and-sos are shunning, and he has always pushed his disciples to identify with the people who were most marginalized.

There is this cartoon I have on my office door (a brilliant little piece by Daniel Erlander, whose site you should check out) where this person is answering his door and there is Jesus at the door knocking, but behind Jesus is a crowd of all sorts of people: people with different colored skin,  some people with bruises and scrapes and differing ages and heights, all different and each in need in some way.  And the man answering his door thinks to himself, "Why is it that whenever I ask Jesus into my life, he brings all of his friends with him?"

You could put it the other way around, too--that whenever Jesus takes us, he is going to bring us into the company of people we may or may not like and might or might not have chosen.  He is the one driving the car--so he gets to decide which parties we are stopping at along the way.  And Jesus has a habit of identifying with the people he hangs out with.  So that when people start accusing Jesus of being a drunkard and a glutton because he hangs out with so many of both of them, Jesus doesn't do a P.R. turnaround and say, "Nuh-uh!"  He doesn't quit going to the parties he is invited to, and he doesn't stop hanging out with people that others have deemed unsavory, or suspicious, or just plain "bad."

You will never see a place in the gospels where a verse reads, "And then Jesus, afraid of what others would think, decided not to go..." or "And then Jesus, uncomfortable to be too close to the outsiders and marginalized people, chose to wall himself in from people he didn't like."  Not once.

Instead, at every turn we find Jesus going out of his way to identify with a world full of people that were being viewed as suspicious, unsavory, or just plain "bad."  And once we, who claim to follow our rabbi Jesus, we who claim that going where Jesus goes is the most important thing to us, once we get that, then all of a sudden, we start to identify with anybody and everybody Jesus surround himself with.  We don't stay back in our own little enclave of "religious people," or people who like the same kind of music I do, or people whose skin has the same amount of melanin in it as mine, or people who talk like I do.  No, we learn to go where Jesus goes and to identify with all those whom Jesus shows up with.  (And to hear Jesus tell it later on, like in Matthew 25, Jesus promises to show up with the hungry, those held in prisons and detention centers, those who are without clothing, strangers, and those who are sick... among others....)

Following Jesus, in other words, means identifying with people we might never otherwise have chosen to even associate with... because they matter to Jesus.  In that light, I am reminded of the story of Casper ten Boom (father of Corrie, who wrote and lived the story The Hiding Place, about her family's resistance to the Nazis in Holland and their hiding of Jewish families).  In the days when the occupying Nazis insisted that all Jews wear yellow stars of David and be registered (for subsequent rounding up), Casper chose to wear a yellow star of David on his clothes as well, even though--or really, exactly because!--he was a committed follower of Jesus.  Casper's comment was that if everybody wore the stars, the occupying stormtroopers wouldn't be able to round up anybody!  It was an act of radical solidarity with those who were being scapegoated, thrown right in the face of the powerful. It was an act that took seriously Jesus' way of identifying with people even when it could have gotten him (and did) into big trouble.

That's what Jesus calls all of us to do.  This is not an option. If we are going to follow Jesus, we will go where he goes, and with whom he goes.  And Jesus has a way of bringing everybody along for the ride. 

Today, how are you and I called to go where Jesus leads us?  And who might we be called to identify with, too?

Lord Jesus, lead us where you are going, and stretch us with the breadth of your love when we get there!