Beyond Boundaries and Bare Minimums--January 12, 2023

Beyond Boundaries and Bare Minimums--January 12, 2023

[God says to the Servant:] "I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeons, from the prison those who sit in darkness." [Isaiah 42:6b-7]

The thing about kindness is that it goes beyond: it does more than some "minimum requirement," it sees past the boundaries of "my group," and it asks, "what would be helpful for the person who I now can see before my eyes?"  Kindness--both God's and our own... and the place where they meet in Jesus--doesn't keep its head down or bury its face in a screen.  And it doesn't look the other way in the name of "minding its own business," either.  Kindness asks, "What might someone else, other than myself, be going through--and how might I bring goodness into their situation?"

The more time I spend looking more closely at passages like this one from further on in Isaiah 42, the more I see just how much kindness is at the very heart [no pun intended] of Jesus' mission, as the embodiment of God's Servant.  We get a glimpse here that God's own purpose in the world is healing, restoring, freeing, and consoling, and that the Servant of God--again, whom we Christians recognize as Jesus Christ--has been sent precisely for the work of kindness that sees beyond boundaries and goes beyond bare minimums.

In particular, I would note how the Servant is called to be "a light to the nations"--that is to say, beyond the borders of just the one nation of Israel.  There would have been plenty of people in Isaiah's day who said that God's work was limited to "their people," "their group," "their nation," and "their kin." Sure you help out your own, they'd say--that's all well and good.  But going beyond the boundaries to be a light for "THOSE people"?  That would start to upset some folks.  Taking care of "your own" can sound like meeting the minimum requirements; but helping those beyond the lines, people who might not help you back, people who are different, maybe strange, and possibly frightening, can seem "too much."  "You'll spread our limited light too thin if you go out illuminating the nations," you can hear the protest go.  "It's fine to help open the eyes of our blind people, but don't go helping them foreigners--they might not be our kind of people, you know?"  That sort of thing.  To be a light "to the nations" calls for the kindness that sees beyond in-group and outsider status.  To care for those who are imprisoned in a dark dungeon somewhere means going out of your way to recognize that there are indeed those shadowy places that many don't want to have to think about.  It requires, in other words, the energy and attentiveness to see and act beyond our own little narrow field of vision.

And when you think about it, that is exactly what we see in Jesus, as the gospels tell the story.  Jesus doesn't just keep his head down and live a quiet little life helping out just his mom, adoptive father, brothers, sisters, and fellow residents of Nazareth.  He is always moving outward, in ever wider circles.  He goes from town to town healing and casting out the spirits that oppress people.  He expands his social circles from only upstanding, respectable religious types to all the "wrong" people, from tax collectors to prostitutes to notoriously generic "sinners."  He crosses cultural and national boundaries by befriending Samaritans and helping Gentiles.  And he tells people from the beginning that he has come to do all this as his purpose from the start--this is not an accident or an unwitting case of mission-creep.  Jesus, as God's Servant, has come to embody the very kindness of God, which always goes beyond expectations and seeks to see what--and whom--others overlook.

Now if all of that is true, or even just in close to the right ballpark, then it's also true that we are called to practice that same kind of boundary-crossing, extra-mile-going kindness, too.  After all, even though we Christians recognize Jesus as "The Servant" figure the prophets talked about, in a sense "The Servant" is really a description of what God's people were supposed to be all along.  At their best, the people of Israel and Judah were meant to be collectively the Servant of God and a "light to the nations," whose way of practicing justice and mercy drew others into the radiant presence of God.  So this whole way of life built on kindness that goes beyond minimums isn't just reserved for Jesus; it's not something possible only for a superhuman Son of God.  It is a way of seeing that our eyes are capable of beholding, too; it is a kind of action that our hands and feet are capable of moving in.  

And maybe it really is simply a matter of starting to see as Jesus has been teaching us to see all along.  His stories are so often about the way kindness grows--or doesn't grow--depending on how we see the neighbors around us.  The Samaritan on the road between Jericho and Jerusalem [see Luke 10] sees the man lying in ditch by the side of road as a neighbor in need, and as Dr. King pointed out, he asks the pivotal question, "What will happen to this person if I don't help?" rather than merely wondering, "What could happen to me if I do help?"  His deep kindness starts with a willingness to see more than the priest and the Levite can see, as pre-occupied as they are with their lists of religious things to do.  And on the flip-side, the pitiable rich man finds himself alone in the underworld having been unable to even see--to truly recognize--the face of a fellow child of God in Lazarus who laid at his gate hungry and sick [see Luke 16].  He is unable to offer kindness to Lazarus because he cannot see rightly that this is a neighbor whose sheer existence should pull the rich man beyond the boundaries of his property to welcome the poor beggar in.  Perhaps, then, the key for us to grow in Christ-like kindness is to let Jesus heal our eyes first, so that we will see beyond the narrow confines of our usual routines and in-groups.  Perhaps we are in need of having our sight healed, so that we can then see as fully and widely as Jesus does... and then we can move like he does, beyond the boundaries of bare minimums.

Let's start there today, then--let us dare to ask Jesus to open our eyes to see more widely and deeply, so that we can take the next step and the next and the one after that, as we grow in Jesus' compassionate love.

Lord Jesus, heal our eyes to see like you do--beyond the lines of "our group" or "our interests" or "our limited experience"--so that we may love with the kindness you have shown us.