It’s a curious thing, but the offence of the gospel may not be what people think it is.
For many, their objection is to the narrowness of the narrow gate. God, it is said, is too choosy, too picky for our contemporary sensibilities.
Why all this talk about a gospel of exclusion, of doctrinal purity, of sheep and goats? Why indeed. Yet in all honesty I think we might be looking in the wrong direction. The real offence of the gospel is not how exclusive it is, but how outrageously inclusive it is.
What offends me most is the absurd wideness in God’s mercy that I can’t find in my own heart. You mean, he will accept those people? Surely not! I’m thinking here of the sort of people we don’t want in our club. The ones who offend our morals, our tastes and our personal preferences.
The writer and philosopher Dallas Willard, for example, lists these people as ‘the broke and the broken. The drug-heads and the divorced. The HIV and the herpes-ridden. The brain-damaged and the incurably ill.’ The kind of people we wouldn’t want at our parties or sitting next to us in church.
And yet, for Willard, these are exactly the sort of people for whom the kingdom of God is now available through Jesus Christ. In his radical reading of the Beatitudes, these exact same people can find a place at God’s table.
Is this not outrageous? Often to our surprise we discover that the circle of the ‘blessed’ drawn by Jesus is now dangerously wide. Willard writes,
‘Blessed are the physically repulsive,
Blessed are those who smell,
The twisted, misshapen, deformed,
The too big, too small, too loud,
The bald, the fat, the old
For they are all riotously celebrated in the party of God.’
As the nineteenth century hymn writer Frederick William Faber put it, ‘for the love of God is broader than the measure of our mind.’ And so it turns out that God is actually trying to get many people into the kingdom, rather than trying to keep them out.
What offends us is that wherever we drawn the lines, we always find Jesus on the other side of the lines. It might not be popular to say this, but God is always to be found on the other side of the tracks.
This uncomfortable teaching should always shape our Christian social teaching. And, at its best, the church has been resolute in its welcome of the stranger and its defence of the marginalised.
Surely two of the most politically incorrect words in the English language are ‘salvation’ and ‘army’. So why has the Salvation Army been ranked as the second strongest non-profit brand in America? Is it because it is known for its work amongst the poorest and most excluded in society?
In the UK, the Salvation Army has gone out of its way to welcome the stranger and rehouse refugees in the name of Jesus. And, as so often happens, the blessing has come back to the congregations concerned. Love can be sacrificial, but it rarely leaves us untouched.
Such examples stand in stark contrast to the ‘othering’ of people who do not fit the identikit picture of who we find acceptable in polite society. Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to race.
