Jesus reveals the universal, unconditional love of God

[The Great Open Dance]

God loves outcasts. Through his teaching and actions, Jesus reveals the universal love of God for all humankind. According to the psalmist, Abba knits together each person in their mothers’ wombs (Psalm 139:13), hence is the Creator and Sustainer of all. Since each person is beloved by Abba, each person should be beloved by us, including those whom society deems vile.

This religious insight appears early in the Jewish Scriptures. Roman philosophers like Tacitus believed that “the gods are on the side of the stronger.” In contrast, Exodus proclaims that the heart of God is on the side of the weaker—the powerless, oppressed, enslaved Israelites who are struggling to obtain their freedom.

God’s special concern is not for the mighty and the successful, but for the lowly and the downtrodden, for the stranger and the poor, for the widow and the orphan. The most defenseless people in the ancient world were those who did not have a powerful community to protect them. With no effective justice system, safety derived from family or tribe, which would punish anyone who harmed a member. Hence, to be without family or tribe was dangerous. For this reason, the Jewish law expressed special concern for the orphan, widow, foreigner, and poor, none of whom had the protection of community.

The Jewish law did not simply insist on deference to the vulnerable; the Jewish law placed a special concern for the vulnerable into the vulnerable heart of God, who assumes the role of their father, hence protector (Psalm 68:5). Deuteronomy declares:

For YHWH is the God of gods, the Sovereign of sovereigns, the great God, powerful and awe-inspiring, who has no favorites and cannot be bribed; who brings justice to the orphan and the widowed, and who befriends the foreigner among you with food and clothing. In the same way, you too must befriend the foreigner, for you were once foreigners yourselves in the land of Egypt. (Deuteronomy 10:17–19)

According to the prophets, the call to care for the poor is not a suggestion. It’s a command with consequences, and the consequences are brutal. The prophet Ezekiel interprets God’s destruction of Sodom as a direct consequence of their neglect for the poor: “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters were arrogant; they had abundant food and not a care in the world, but she refused to help the poor and needy” (Ezekiel 16:49–50). God is not an impassive observer of social structures; God condemns social stratification and advocates for those whom society ignores.
Jesus is a prophet of social justice. Jesus places himself within the tradition of the Jewish prophets. When he begins his ministry, he is selected to read the prophet Isaiah to his synagogue. Jesus reads:

“The Spirit of our God is upon me: because the Most High has anointed me to bring Good News to those who are poor. God has sent me to proclaim liberty to those held captive, recovery of sight to those who are blind, and release to those in prison—to proclaim the year of our God’s favor.” Rolling up the scroll, Jesus gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he said to them, “Today, in your hearing, this scripture passage is fulfilled” (Luke 4:18–24; from Isaiah 61:1–2).

Jesus then begins his ministry as includer of the excluded, enacting unifying love in a segregated world. His inclusion is so radical as to offend his listeners: “Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go two miles,” he instructs (Matthew 5:41b). Jesus’s audience would have known that this teaching referred to Roman soldiers, the hated occupiers, who could force any Jew to carry their gear for one standard mile. Jesus says to carry it for two, thereby fostering an audacious vision of reconciliation. But Jesus isn’t all talk; he expresses this love by healing the servant of a Roman centurion (Luke 7:1–10), showing love for the occupier, in imitation of the universal God who sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous.

Samaritans were loathed by many, accused of using the wrong Torah with the wrong tenth commandment, worshiping on the wrong mountain (Gerizim instead of Jerusalem), and intermixing with Greeks and Persians. Jesus visited and asked to stay in a Samaritan village, but they refused to host him since he was on his way to worship in Jerusalem. His disciples wanted to rain fire on the village, but Jesus rebuked them (Luke 9:51–56). Then, he went on to make a Samaritan the hero of his most famous story (Luke 10:25–37).

When he did interact with the hated religious other, he did so charitably. Jesus met a Samaritan woman at a well. She had gone through five husbands and was currently living with another man out of wedlock. In the eyes of the ancient world, she was impure, of the wrong gender and the wrong religion with a stained past. So outcast was she that she was drawing water at noon, in the heat of the day. Most women drew water together, communally, in the morning and evening. This gathering was an important opportunity to talk, share news, and build community. If the woman was at the well alone, then she was shunned, and anyone interacting with her would be contaminated.

Exhausted from his labors, Jesus asked her to draw water for him. In a world of strict dietary laws, this request was a particularly intimate act of transgression, an invitation to the uninvited. In exchange for the well water, he offered her living water. In the Jewish tradition, Abba is the Source of living water (Jeremiah 2:13; 17:13), “Source” here being the Hebrew word maqor: fountain, spring, or womb (Leviticus 12 ; 20:18). Thus, in offering her living water, Jesus is offering her God.

For the Samaritan woman, was living water a symbol for inclusion, community, self-acceptance, respect, value? However she interpreted Jesus’s promise, she willingly accepted his offer of new life, to the great dismay of the disciples, who were still stuck in a purity mindset (John 4 –30). In a final display of compassion, Jesus never asked the troubled woman to leave her current partner because he knew that, in such a brutally patriarchal society, she would be defenseless without a man.

Jesus reveals the inclusive, celebratory love of God. Jesus also displays God’s universalism through his practice of table fellowship. Much like dinner tables today, dinner tables in Jesus’s day were segregated. Jew ate with Jew, Roman with Roman, rich with rich, poor with poor, healthy with healthy, and sick with sick. Some of these divisions were the result of social conventions, others were the result of religious strictures. All of them were designed to protect one group from contamination by another, especially during a meal, that most intimate of times when something that is outside of us enters us and becomes us. During a meal, we cannot allow those who are other to us to enter our household. We cannot allow them to pollute us.

Jesus preaches against this segregation: “Whenever you give a lunch or dinner, don’t invite your friends or colleagues or relatives or wealthy neighbors. They might invite you in return and thus repay you. No, when you have a reception, invite those who are poor or have physical infirmities or are blind” (Luke 14:12–13). In the ancient world, poverty and sickness were frequently considered divine punishment; hence, outcasts deserved to be cast out. Those who cast out the outcasts were simply enforcing the divine will.

By insisting on hospitality toward outcasts, Jesus is communicating the universal divine compassion. And he insists that God’s embrace of the rejected, as symbolized through Jesus’s inclusive ministry, will be consummated in the coming kingdom, in which “people will come from East and West, from North and South, and will take their places at the feast in the Kingdom of God” (Luke 13:29). Over against any elitist conceits of purity and contamination, Jesus proposes the joy of open hospitality, joy that erases all social divisions and unites everyone into one family at one table sharing one meal.

In making this pronouncement, Jesus is not rejecting his religious tradition; Jesus is extolling the openness of his religious tradition. For example, Jose ben Jochanan, chief justice of the Sanhedrin in the second century BCE, had already declared, “Let your home be open wide and let the poor be members of your household.” We cannot know if Jesus encountered these specific teachings or not, but we can know that Jesus’s teaching was continuous with his tradition, even as he emphasized selected strains within it.

Jesus practices what he preaches by dining with the unclean, those whom his society hated, and not without reason. For instance, he eats with tax collectors such as Levi, Matthew, and Zacchaeus. Tax collectors were the quislings of their day, Jewish agents of the Roman Empire, backed by the violence of empire as they extorted money from their fellow Jews. Their greed sullied anyone associated with them, yet Jesus invites them into his new world in an intimate way.

God touches untouchables in the person of Jesus. Jesus dines in the house of Simon the leper (Matthew 26:6), breaking bread with the rejected. Asked to be healed by another leper, Jesus heals through touch, thereby returning him to the community, both physically and socially (Matthew 8:3). As Jesus is walking through a crowd, a woman with a twelve-year flow reaches out to touch the fringe of his cloak and is immediately healed. Jesus feels power flow out of him and demands to know who has touched him. The woman identifies herself, trembling in fear, undoubtedly aware of the taboo she has just violated, but Jesus simply responds, “My daughter, your faith has saved you; go in peace and be free of your affliction” (Mark 5:25–34).

Jesus endangers himself to reveal the agapic love of God. A crowd brought a woman “caught in the very act of committing adultery” before Jesus, asking him what they should do. They wanted to challenge his preference for mercy over punishment when almost every male present would have supported stoning her as well as, in all likelihood, anyone defending her.

The passage insists that she was “caught in the very act of committing adultery” to reassure readers that she had not been framed by a jealous husband who didn’t want the expense of divorce and saw a lynch mob as the most expedient solution to his problem. Still, it might have been a setup.
Or, it might not have been. Jesus doesn’t care. He goes on the rhetorical offensive, instructing the mob, “Let the person among you who is without sin throw the first stone.” After his challenge, the defeated men slowly shuffle away. Then Jesus says to the woman, “Where did they go? Has no one condemned you?” And she replies, “No one, Teacher.” To which Jesus replies, “I don’t condemn you either” (John 8:1–11a).

What if American Christians were more like Christ?

(adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 129-133)

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For further reading, please see:

Boyarin, Daniel. “John’s Prologue as Midrash.” In The Jewish Annotated New Testament, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, 688–91. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Falk, Harvey. Jesus the Pharisee: A New Look at the Jewishness of Jesus. 1985. Reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003.

Margalit, Natan. The Pearl and the Flame: A Journey into Jewish Wisdom and Ecological Thinking. Boulder, CO: Albion Andalus, 2022.