Outsiders to Insiders

When was the last time you were surprised by Jesus?  Really.  When was the last time you read the Bible and were surprised by Jesus?  Something He did.  Something He said.  How He responded.

Jesus is surprising.  Although He did fulfill ancient prophecies with His first coming, He didn’t fulfill human expectations . . . He shattered those.  Each of the four Gospel accounts presents Jesus in a unique and surprising way.  Sadly, however, I don’t take time to really meditate on the Bible and on Christ as often as I should, and I need my spiritual posture adjusted so that it is aligned with Scripture.  Dane Ortland, in his book Surprised by Jesus, expressed this point exactly, “Like a bad back that needs to return repeatedly to the chiropractor for straightening out, our understanding of Jesus needs to be straightened out over and over again as our poor spiritual posture throws our perception of Him out of line - domesticating Him and conforming Him to our image, rather than transforming us into His image.”  My desire is that as we read and meditate on Scripture, we will again be surprised by Jesus, the One whom we honor and celebrate at Christmas.

One of the strongest desires humans have is the desire to be included.  We long to be included, even if - or especially if - that means that others are excluded.  We deeply desire to be “in.”

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus continually surprises us with how He turns all our social intuitions upside down.  Take His followers, for example.  This company, this community, was counterintuitive.  Those whom one would expect to be “in” were excluded, and those whom one would expect to be “out” were included.  Just to be clear, that doesn’t mean that Jesus doesn’t want those who are already “insiders” to be excluded.  His heart’s desire is for them to also be included (II Peter 3:9).  The challenge, however, was and is that the social privileges of the "insiders" often blind them to their need for Jesus and His gospel.

Luke gives many surprising examples of outsiders becoming insiders and vice versa.  Here are just a few.

In Luke 2, we see that shepherds visited Jesus in the manger after an angel appeared to them announcing the birth of Jesus.  Contrast this to wise men in Matthew’s Gospel who were important enough to be summoned by the king.  Shepherds were at the bottom of the social ladder.  They were often grouped together with tax collectors and revenue farmers.  One author wrote, “Most of the time, they were dishonest and thieving; they led their herds onto other people’s land.  Yet these socially marginalized men, these outsiders, were given a front-row seat, witnessing the incarnation of Jesus.  Surprising, to say the least!

John the Baptist calls the descendants of Abraham a “generation of vipers” and tells them to repent in Luke 3.  Descendants of Abraham were considered insiders, but John tells them that unless they repent, they will be excluded.  There’s no doubt they were stunned and dumbfounded by this rejection!

In Luke 4, Jesus surprised and angered the people in the synagogue by recalling two Old Testament stories.  He reminded them first that Elijah, a highly respected insider, didn’t visit the Israelites (insiders) during a famine, but a poor Gentile widow woman, an outsider.  Jesus also reminded them that Elisha didn’t heal any of the countless Israelites with leprosy, just Naaman, the Syrian.  Outsiders becoming insiders.

Tax collectors were hated outsiders, yet in Luke 5, Jesus invited Levi, a tax collector, to follow Him and become an insider.  Levi held a banquet for Jesus that was attended by a bunch of tax collectors and commoners while the scribes and Pharisees murmured outside.  They couldn’t imagine, in the pride of their hearts, that Christ would come and eat with tax collectors and sinners while they stood outside.  What kind of King does that?

Children were also outsiders, yet in Luke 9, Jesus set a young child beside Him and told His disciples that whoever welcomes them welcomes Him.  How surprised His disciples must have been?

In the parable of the Good Samaritan found in Luke 10, a socially despised Samaritan is the hero, not the priest or the Levite.  This would have been appalling to the religious shakers and movers.

In Luke 14, the insiders who are initially invited to the great banquet end up rejected and are replaced by “the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind.”

In Luke 17, only one of the ten lepers who were healed returns to give Jesus thanks.  Who do you think it was?  It had to be one of the Israelites, right?  Sadly, it was not.  It was a stranger.  A Samaritan man, an outsider, was the only one to return and thank Jesus for healing him.  Surprising?  

These are just a few examples of Jesus welcoming the socially alienated and alienating the socially revered.  Tax collectors, prostitutes, Gentiles, Samaritans, children, sinners: “in.”  Teachers of the law, scribes, Pharisees, lawyers, the dutifully religious, the socially respected: “out.”

That’s the surprising beauty of the Gospel.  We’ve all sinned, and our sin, our rebellion, has separated and alienated us from God.  Our sin made us enemies of God.  We were outsiders.  But God.  I love those words.  But God sent His Son Jesus, born in a lowly manger some 2,000 years ago, to live a perfect, sinless life and take the punishment that we deserve.  Every one of our sins, past, present, and future, was credited to Him as He was crucified.  Jesus, who knew no sin, was made sin for us so that we might be made the righteousness of God in him (II Cor. 5:21).

But why did He do that?  Christ died and rose again so that those who repent and believe can be clothed in His righteousness!  We can go from enemies of God to adopted children.  From outsiders to insiders!