[Jesus said to the disciples on the mountain:] "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you." (Matthew 28:19-20a)
The instructions come all the way from the top.
Jesus himself is the one who directs his followers to cross boundaries and invite everyone to share in the Jesus Way of Life. That's important to remember. The disciples didn't make this call on their own. It wasn't ever that Jesus set a policy of strict restrictions not to allow "outsiders" or "THOSE people" into his little group, but then Simon Peter and Andrew decided to overrule him after he ascended into heaven. It has always been Jesus--and then the Holy Spirit following Jesus' ascension--who was leading the charge to welcome outsiders, foreigners, strangers, and the ones labeled "those people" to join in the community of disciples. We are the ones who are constantly dragging our feet and needing to be pulled along in the movement God was leading.
And to be clear, it really would have been a scandalous thing to hear Jesus say "all nations" here in this passage that many of us heard this past Sunday. Because "the nations" is another way of saying "the Gentiles." In the worldview of first-century Judaism, there are really only two kinds of people in the world: "us" and "them." There are the in-group members of the people descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob... and then everybody else is "the Gentiles." In fact, just about everyone in the New Testament you see the phrase "the Gentiles," the literal words in the Greek are "the nations." It's anybody else in the whole world--they're all outsiders. And, of course, it was terribly easy to envision those Gentile outsiders all as wicked, decadent, sinful and abominable people. As long as you don't have to picture the actual faces of real people, you can imagine them as cartoon caricatures of the worst possible stereotypes. And being Gentile was also, of course, something you just are. It's not a sin you can repent of like robbing a bank or coveting your neighbor's donkey. It's who you are. So it was just very easy for "insiders" to look down on "outsiders" as hopeless doomed and outside the realm of God's acceptance. They were bad people who couldn't stop being bad, because it was in their very make-up--so went the conventional wisdom of the day. That's why it's such a huge thing for Jesus to now so clearly and explicitly overturn the old conventional wisdom and say, "The very ones you thought were unacceptable are the very ones I am sending you to. Go welcome them into this new life in my love and my way."
Jesus very clearly tells his circle of first disciples--all of whom had the ancestry and lineage of belonging in that group of "insiders"--that he was the one directing them to cross the biggest boundary they could imagine, the one that separated "insiders" and "outsiders." The community of Jesus' followers was not going to be homogenous, made up of identical people who all ate, dressed, spoke, and thought alike. From the beginning--and by Jesus' explicit direction--this was going to be a new kind of community. This was going to be a found family of people who did not share the same DNA, but instead shared a common life of discipleship learning the way of Jesus.
This is really important, because sometimes Respectable Religious folks forget that Jesus is really the one who put us on this trajectory. Sometimes church folk will say, "You can't really accept THOSE PEOPLE into your church, can you?" each with their own personal list of who they have deemed unworthy, unacceptable, and abominable. And then sometimes you'll hear folks say, "This idea of welcoming everybody is just some pushy modern impulse!" But of course, the moment we read Jesus' actual final instructions to the disciples here in Matthew 28, it becomes clear that the directions come all the way from the top. It is Jesus, the one to whom all authority in heaven and on earth have been given, who dares his followers to push past old boundaries, cross old border lines, and invite everybody they meet to share in this new life in Christ. In other words, if we have a problem with the notion that EVERYBODY really is welcome in the found family of Jesus (yes, even "those people" we had been told were unworthy and unacceptable), then our problem is really with Jesus himself, who has been sending us to "all nations" scandalously for the past two thousand years. It's not us in the modern day who are pushing the envelope; it is Jesus. Jesus is the one being radical; we are the ones who will have to get accustomed to his bold vision and wide welcome.
I wonder how that might change the way we live out our faith today. I wonder who we have been looking down our noses at, closing our hearts and doors to, or writing off as unacceptable, whom Jesus would send us directly out to. I wonder where we have gotten things all backward and thought we were defending the cause of righteousness in the name of "keeping the riff-raff out" because we thought that's what God wanted, when it turns out Jesus has told us very clearly, "These are the folks I want you to reach." Who might you be sent to today? Whom might we be led to welcome, to invite, to love?
Because the instructions don't come from me, from some present-day bishop, or from some religious-trend-analyzer. They come straight from the top: from Jesus.
Lord Jesus, enable us to follow your directions and reach out to everyone we meet, across whatever boundaries we have imposed in between us, so that all will know your love.
No comments:
Post a Comment