You see them everywhere you go; people who don’t fit into society or its clichés because they are bigger, smaller, taller, shorter, or different looking. Maybe they’re deformed or have tattoos, strange haircuts, or you can tell that there’s something about them that isn’t quite “normal”. My twenty-seven year old son, Paul, is one of those people. If you stopped to talk to him, it wouldn’t take you long to figure out that he isn’t firing from all the same cylinders than you are. That’s because Paul is mentally ill with a sickness that has tormented him since he was eight years old.
It’s interesting to watch people meet and talk with Paul. At first they seem interested in knowing him, but after a few minutes of listening to him, most people are scrambling for an excuse to leave. It’s both sad and heartbreaking for a mother to watch because outside of his illness, Paul is such an extraordinary young man; he loves the Lord, would literally give you the shirt off his back, and he has the heart of a true servant.
I call people like Paul societies “un-desirables”; they are people that are generally alone in a crowd, quiet, and even somewhat unapproachable. Many are almost defensive if and when you do approach them because they’ve been ignored and outcasts in society for so long. But for the most part they’re invisible – and to be brutally honest, lonely.
I was teaching at a women’s conference recently and I spotted such a woman that I’ll call Jenny. Jenny was grossly overweight with long stringy hair and a prominent overbite. She sat in the front row by herself and took notes as I taught. Between the many breaks I never saw anyone talk with Jenny or even approach her. Instead, Jenny just stood in silence in the corner of the room while the other women conversed with one another completely ignoring her. During meals, she sat by herself, and at night, when the conference was over I’d watch her walk by herself through the swarms of women and go to her room alone. My heart aches for the Jenny’s and the Paul’s of the world.
If Jesus were walking the earth today as He did 2,000 years ago, the Paul’s and Jenny’s would be the very people He’d be dining and talking with. Matter-of-fact, Jesus was drawn to the “undesirables” and caused quite a stir because of it. In Matthew 9, Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house right after calling Matthew to follow Him as a disciple. During the meal, many tax collectors and prostitutes and other disreputable people – the undesirables of the day – came to eat with Jesus and His disciples. When the Pharisees saw this they were appalled at why, if Jesus was the Son of God and the coming King of the Jews, He’d eat with such wretched people. On hearing the Pharisees question His disciples about who He was eating with, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
The Pharisees question was less a request for information than a charge against Jesus. They were saying that if He was who He said He was then Jesus wouldn’t be eating with such people. But this meal would be just one of many. Jesus would go on to become known as “a friend of tax collectors and ‘sinners’” (Matthew 11:19).
Jesus’ response to the Pharisees contempt against Him connects His healing ministry with His “healing” of sinners. The sick need a doctor and Jesus heals them; likewise the sinner need mercy and forgiveness, and Jesus heals them. The Pharisees were not as healthy as they thought; more important, they did not understand the purpose of Jesus’ mission. Expecting a Messiah who would crush the sinful and support the righteous, they had little place in their hearts for one who accepted and transformed the sinner and dismissed the “righteous” as hypocrites.
Jesus challenges the Pharisees to “go and learn” from the story of Gomer, the prostitute and the prophet Hosea in the book of Hosea, where God tells Israel that He desires mercy, not sacrifice. The Hebrew word for “mercy” is almost identical in meaning to “faithful covenant love,” which, according to Hosea, is more important than “sacrifice” (an aspect of ritual worship). In other words, Jesus was telling the Pharisees that the covenant of love far exceeds what is politically (or otherwise) correct. Further, He was admonishing them, saying that they were once again making the outside of themselves clean while losing the heart of the matter, as exemplified by their attitude to the tax collectors and sinners.
If Jesus is our example (and He is) and He lives within us through the Holy Spirit, we should be allowing Him to love others – including the “undesirables” – through us. Learning to love people can be hard, especially when they are different from us. But the Bible admonishes us time and time again that love is crucial if we are to have the heart of God. 1 Peter 1:22 tells us to “love one another deeply…” and chapter 3:8 says to “be sympathetic, loving one another as brothers,” and 1 Jn 3:10 tells us that “anyone who does not love his brother…is not a child of God.” The bottom line is that if the love of God is in us, it will flow from us to others – including to those we feel don’t deserve it because of how they look or act.
In closing, one of the verses of the Bible that God often brings to mind when I think of the Paul’s and Jenny’s of the world is Hebrews 13:2: “Keep on loving each other as brothers. Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.”
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