The Rest of the Story

Usually this is a movie-review blog. However, I preached a sermon today, and people wanted to see what it was, and since I have no other platform by which to share large blocks of texts, since Facebook notes have fallen from favor, here we are:

One of my favorite ways to pass the time while driving to and from work at various far-flung doctor’s offices is to read the marquee signs put up outside churches. Most of them list the times of their Sunday School and worship services, others offer a nice “Jesus Loves You” or “Have a Blessed New Year.” But OTHERS give their opinions on the political or cultural topic of the hour. Some of my “favorites” have been “Stand for the national anthem” during Colin Kaepernik’s protest, “X belongs in Texas not Christmas,” and on a particularly warm August day, “Oh, so you think it’s hot HERE?” However, my #1 personal favorite has to be “Which lives matter? Jesus answered by dying for all,” because much like a tweet, conveying a brief yet catchy sentiment often sacrifices volumes of relevant backstory, a phenomenon I like to call “Well, yes, but…”

In this particular case, according to the beliefs of conventional Christianity, Jesus’s intent was to die as the ultimate sacrifice to God, assuming the weight of all of humanity’s collective sins, and negating the ritual animal sacrifices made by the Jews as penance for their sins. The focus on Jesus’s death and eventual resurrection is undoubtedly important – without the bold proclamations of the resurrection story and the hope it gave to his followers, it seems unlikely that the impact of his radical message would have survived long enough to assemble new leaders and grow to be an entirely new religion.

However, the often laserlike focus on Jesus’s death as the end-all-be-all of his story negates the times when, throughout the gospels, he singled out marginalized demographics as mattering in particular, which is the backstory that the church marquee sacrificed for the sake of brevity. It is important to realize, in this era of increasing political discord, that while, according to our beliefs, Jesus was a savior to all, he was also a savior to ALL, equally, without prejudice.

During the course of his ministry, Jesus healed unclean lepers, defended and elevated women, elevated the reviled Samaritans over religious leaders of the day, and used shepherds, children, and the poor as subjects of his parables and teachings. There are dozens of examples, but I’m going to highlight 3 in particular, as examples of times when Jesus might have said something like “Samaritan lives matter,” or “women’s lives matter,” or “the lives of lepers and those with chronic illnesses matter” rather than the conventional wisdom of the day, which was “male Jewish lives matter.”

During the early first century, tensions between Samaritans and Jews were high. The first-century historian Josephus indicates that during Jesus’s life, the Jews destroyed a Samaritan temple, and a few years later, the Samaritans retaliated by destroying a synagogue. Combined with the Jews looking down on the Samaritans for being what they termed a “mixed-race people,” and it’s fairly easy to see why the two groups were not on good terms. However, Samaritans are the group that Jesus uses to illustrate one of his best-known stories – a story about a man left for dead on the side of the road, who was passed over by a priest and a Levite. The book of Leviticus and the Jewish Talmud both contain laws regarding cleanliness and dead bodies. More specifically, they state that a dead body is considered unclean, and that anyone who comes into contact with the body is similarly unclean, for an entire month, which would be really inconvenient, if one’s primary job were working in the temple. So it may be that the priest and the Levite were avoiding the man because they didn’t want to become unclean – they were following the religious law of the time, and for them, the hassle of potentially becoming unclean while checking to see if the man was dead or alive outweighed their need to know if the man was actually dead or alive. The Samaritan, however, had no such law, but was also a member of a racial group that was oppressed by the Jews, so seeing a mostly-dead Jew by the side of the road might not necessarily raise a whole lot of concern.

However, Jesus says, the man was overwhelmed with pity. He bandaged up the man’s wounds, loaded him up on his donkey, and we all know the rest of the story. Jesus could have used a regular garden-variety Jewish laborer, or someone else that wasn’t part of the religious elite to illustrate his disgust with the dispassionate and overly-pious religious leaders. But he didn’t. He took the culturally-unusual step of holding up a Samaritan’s example as one to be emulated – after all, they were considered to be of a different, lesser race than the Jews, with different customs, who were largely reviled by the majority-Jewish citizenry. Jesus, through his parable, reached out to an oppressed minority, and elevated them above the religious leaders and teachers of the day. In doing so, he implicitly states that “hey, Samaritan lives matter.”

In several instances in the Bible, Jesus uses lepers to make a point. Lepers, in that time, were considered unclean, and their disease was been seen as an outward manifestation of inward sinfulness. Lepers were often grotesquely disfigured due to leprosy’s penchant for causing pigmented lesions all over the body, as well as sensory loss of peripheral nerves, meaning that a sore on fingers or toes might not be noticed for days, until it had become infected and gangrenous, and then eventually fall off. In addition, leprosy was a chronic disease – a death sentence in those days. According to Levitical and Talmudic law, they had to live away from the rest of society, and were not allowed to approach or touch others, out of fear of contagion. The book of Matthew, in chapter 8, tells a very brief 4-verse story of a leper approaching Jesus to ask for healing. According to Matthew, Jesus met with the leper, and then broke the religious laws when he touched him and cured him of his leprosy. Most times, when this story is told, it centers on the compassion Jesus had for the man, and “oh, wasn’t that a nice thing that he did.” But it misses the point that Jesus intentionally broke the law by touching the man to heal him. In this case, he chose to depart from the traditional approach to lepers, which was to stay as far away as possible. Instead, he reached out in an act of defiance and protest and subversion of the law and said “Hey, your life matters, too.”

Jesus was also a feminist in his time. Sure, he walked all over Palestine with 12 men, but that’s according to the gospels, written by men, and the apostles, all of whom were men. Reading between the lines, however, one can see several instances in which Jesus said “You know what, women’s lives matter.” He uses women to illustrate many of his parables and teachings – The parables of the persistent widow, the lost coin, the ten virgins, and the metaphor of the childbearing woman are all used to illustrate his various teachings. All of these stories portray women in a positive light, which was unusual compared to teachings by other rabbis and religious leaders of the same time. In addition, there are no recorded instances in the gospels where Jesus personally belittled, disgraces, or stereotypes a woman, or encourages another to do so on his behalf - an action that, again, was out-of-character for rabbis and religious leaders of the time.

The Samaritan woman at the well is a great example of Jesus ignoring the social conventions of the time in order to reach out and elevate a person of the opposite gender and nationality. In this story, Jesus approaches a Samaritan woman while she is drawing up water from a well, and asks her for a drink. She expresses surprise that he, a Jewish man, would first of all talk to her, a Samaritan woman, and second of all ask for a drink of water from her bucket, which, according to Levitical laws, was ritually unclean. He then goes on to introduce a teaching metaphor for the well water as representative of the eternal life that could be had by following him as the Messiah, and encourages her to recruit more followers for him. Normally, in that time, a man would not openly discuss theology with a woman, and it was even more unconventional that a rabbi was discussing theology with a woman. In addition, the woman was also a Samaritan, a nationality of people who, as previously stated, were looked upon unfavorably by the Jews. She was ALSO a woman who had been married and divorced five times, and was living with a sixth man to whom she was not married. The book of John indicates that Jesus knew all of this when he approached her, and yet he did it anyway, a move that was incredibly unconventional for a male Jewish rabbi, as evidenced by the reactions of the disciples, who are described as “shocked, or surprised.”

However, Jesus went even further than openly discussing theology with a female and a non-Jew. In in chapter 4 verse 6, he says “Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I give them will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life,” and with this statement, offers Jewish salvation to a Gentile woman. The woman then goes to her town and recruits more followers – becoming the first evangelist mentioned in John’s gospel. This was an unprecedented event. The idea that a woman, who had been married and divorced five times, and was a Samaritan, would become a disciple of Christ, and an evangelist was simply unheard-of. Jesus, however, saw the multitude of ways in which this woman was oppressed. He also saw her potential, and rather than telling a man to go be an evangelist, as would have been the accepted action of the day, said “you know what, women’s lives matter - it’s time to let a woman lead the way.”

So in this time of women being told to sit down and be quiet, of minorities being unconstitutionally deported back to their countries of origin, of walls, and executive orders, healthcare reform, and tweets, ask yourself - whose lives matter? Jesus answered by reaching out and lifting up those who were oppressed and discriminated against, and only then, did he die for all. And that, in the words of the late, great Paul Harvey, is the rest of the story.