I sometimes wonder if Heaven's walls are pitted with holes left by Jesus' head as he watches how we try to be his Body on Earth. The more I learn about my faith the more I realise that I am getting it wrong, taking it too far or not taking it far enough. One example that I've been thinking about recently is the way we talk about Jesus hanging out with prostitutes. As a speaker and mentor, I've talked about this a lot as well as hearing many other speakers and pastors do the same. And we all seem to emphasise the same thing: How amazing it is that God with skin on would spend time with someone who sells their body for money.
It's amazing to me how I can be so right and so wrong at the same time.
I have no doubt that I am right about Jesus hanging out with prostitutes and that, when he did, he was neither judgmental nor superior. This is a beautiful and good thing and one of the reasons that many of us are drawn to him.
But I am wrong as a person because when I talk about who Jesus hung out with, I talk about them in a way that is judgmental and superior.
It's so easy as a Christian to get the facts right and the heart wrong. Which is exactly how I would describe the religious leaders that Jesus constantly challenged.
It seems that some of us talk about prostitutes as if it was their first choice on their CAO or the only thing they could do with their 1.2 GPA. As if young women in First Century Palestine chose it as a career because they really enjoyed sex and wanted a flexible schedule.
Prostitution would have been (as it is for the most part now) the final option for those who have run out of choices. Take Mary Madalene for example. She was from the town of Magdela (hence the name …) which was decimated by the Romans. Who knows how she escaped or if she was there at the time, but we can be sure that she had lost her home, her family and her community. All those who cared for her were gone. So by the time she meets Jesus, she's been selling the only thing that she has left to sell. Her body.
While Pharisees and religious leaders blame her and her colleagues for God's seeming abandonment of Israel, she is not the cause of Roman oppression and violence, she is both the victim and product of it. She is among the most vulnerable, the most broken, the most hurt in their society.
So it's no surprise that Jesus gravitates toward her in her pain and shame. We like to think he hung out with her in spite of her prostitution but perhaps he hung out with her because she was a prostitute.
When we act surprised that he did, we acknowledge his grace while exposing our own lack of it. We shouldn't be surprised that he wanted to be a part of her life, we should be surprised that he wants to be part of ours.
Shane Claiborne tells a story in the The Irresistible Revolution about a friend of his who told him that Jesus never hung out with prostitutes. Shane disagreed with him and pulled out his Bible to prove him wrong. But before Shane could find his proof, his friend told him that Jesus never hung out with prostitutes because he didn't call them by that name or see them through the lens of their past. They were just hurting, broken people in need of rescue.
Prostitute is our word for them … not his.
Being surprised is being jarred by seeing the world or God working in a way that we don't think it should. Being surprised by Jesus' lifestyle is to have been expecting something else.
So to follow Jesus is to take our place among the whores, the beggars, the drunks and gluttons … and to not use any of those words in our hearts as we look around at the company of saints we join.