Over 16,605,425 people are on fubar.
What are you waiting for?
You see, Jesus was an outsider by his own right. In his very first public sermon he declared that a “preacher can find love everywhere but in his own tribe” (my obvious paraphrase of this passage), a sermon that resulted in an assassination attempt by his own community. He was Jewish, yet reserved almost all of his criticism and fighting words for the Jewish leaders. He rejected the rules of the empire and taught his followers to oppose it in radically subversive ways. He refused to observe oral traditions that everyone else seemed to observe, he made his friends among the “unclean” people of society, and staged a public protest in the temple in defense of the exploitation of outsiders– an act of civil disobedience that actually cost him his life.
Jesus was an outsider who lived his life with and for, other outsiders.
In fact when you read his most famous sermon, The Sermon on the Mount, he goes through a pattern of “Blessed are the _______”
Every word Jesus fills in the blank with are all descriptions of outsiders. The very people folks assumed would be guaranteed to be “in” are conspicuously missing from the equation. Meanwhile Jesus declares that the outcast, the set aside, the not included, the “without a tribe” and those who do things backwards, are actually the very people who will find this “Kingdom” he talked so much about.
I believe that Jesus came for everybody, but that not everybody embraces what he has to offer when they find him.
The people who do embrace him? Well, they’re people like me… and you. The outsiders were always the ones who embraced Jesus.
This is the unexpected benefit of being a Christian outsider: our hearts are more ripe and free from the distractions that keep us from embracing Jesus. In fact, in many respects the longing to quench the loneliness of outsiderness actually drives us to him. It certainly does for me.
Already relegated to the margins means we have few other distractions, few other barriers… we’re just people who know we can’t get our you-know-what together and find the message of Jesus compelling and full of grace. As a result, we develop a never-ending curiosity about this day laborer from Galilee, and find ourselves paddling toward whichever island we see this man of grace and love walking on.
Yes, being a Christian outsider is lonely– even when you’re a high-profile outsider. However, I am discovering that being without a tribe often frees me and pushes me to never stop chasing this man I find in the New Testament… the man with a message so compelling that nothing else in all of human history compares to it.
Today I take great comfort that Jesus came not for the people with their feet planted firmly on the shore, but for people like me who are often set adrift in the vast oceans of life– and who have no island of their own to drift towards.
If you’re feeling like a “Christian outsider”, feeling like you’re left without a tribe and aren’t sure where to go… let me just encourage you that this may in fact be the perfect place to discover the true heart of Jesus of Nazareth– because he was an outsider who came for other outsiders.
People like us.
