Loving the Person Who Isn’t “One of Us”

Loving one who was different in religion, interests, race, dress, or lifestyle is an area in which the twelve Apostles and the Religious Establishment of Jerusalem did not imitate Christ. And, if we will be honest with ourselves, we also have trouble in following Christ in this regard. He received Gentiles, lepers and the blind. He rescued a woman taken in adultery. He made a hero of a Samaritan in one of his best-known parables. He ate with sinners and tax collectors.

Christ’s church is supposed to be the place where the outcasts and rejected find acceptance. It was created to be the place where Jew or Gentile, free or slave, male or female would all stand on equal footing. Think of the great fault-lines of our society: high income vs. poor; Republican vs. Democrat; believers in Christ vs. atheist, Muslim, or Buddhists; and black vs. white. Does the church bridge these great divides in human experience? We cannot even model unity among those of us who
confess Christ and try to follow him!

In the parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus answers the question, who is my neighbor? The context is a discussion of the second greatest commandment: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy self. One of the most informative texts in regard to loving others is in the gospel of Mark (9:38-41 ). In that passage Jesus must confront his own disciples for their suspicion, hatred, and exclusion of someone whose experience of Christ is different from their own.

"Teacher," said John, "we saw a man driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us." "Do not stop him," Jesus said. "No one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, for whoever is not against us is for us. I tell you the truth, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to Christ will certainly not lose his reward.”

Do we sometimes make the same mistake as John did that day? We equate being “one of us” with belonging to Christ. John was wrong and Jesus rebuked that narrowness and told him to stop judging other people who were following Christ. Let us be known as a body of believers loving one another. Let us meet our neighbors in service to them. Let us love across the dividing lines, neither compromising our beliefs nor judging another’s faith. It is Christ who is judge of us all.
—Hugh Price