Yes! God Does Love Everybody!

New Testament Scholar John Dominic Crossan once told me that whenever you take Scripture out of context you set yourself up for pretext.

Simply put when we read the Bible without any consideration of its original context we can make some really bad assumptions about what we are reading.

When I was an active pastor I used to encourage my congregation that when reading the Bible they should ask the important question: “What did those who first read this text understand it to mean from their perspective?”

Just this morning historian Karen Armstrong opened my eyes to a new way of understanding the resurrection by reading that story in light of Jewish ritual tradition (context).  

In her little book, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate, Armstrong reminds us that one of the Jewish beliefs during the time of Jesus and Paul was that God could not allow himself to be contaminated by a dead corpse.

It was believed by observant Jews that not even God was to have anything to do with a decaying polluted corpse. The parable of the Good Samaritan reflects this Jewish belief and explains perhaps why the Levite and the Priest passed by the beaten man whom they must have thought was dead (Luke 10).

Scholar Ken Bailey tells us that had they stopped and touched the corpse they would have been defiled and unable to perform their liturgical duties.

So when God raised Jesus from the grave the conventional belief that God would have nothing to do with the dead was blown completely out of the water. 

Then a few years later the Apostle Paul claims to have seen Jesus sitting on the right hand of God. A raised dead man, resurrected no less, and sitting in close proximity to God.

Now this was scandalous. For a Jew of Paul’s time this was bad juju. The idea or the claim that God raised Jesus from the grave and had him sitting at his right side was unthinkable for any practicing Jew of that time.

Writes Karen Armstrong: 

“But when Paul saw that God had embraced Jesus’s filthy, degraded body and raised it to the highest place in Heaven, he realized that in fact God had an entirely different set of values.”

So what does this mean for us today?

Have you ever heard the old saying: “Rules are meant to be broken.”

Well in this case rules were broken. God suspended an ancient written rule in order to make himself available and open to all people. 

The Apostle Paul came to understand this as his life mission from that moment on, taking his newfound faith in Jesus to the rest of the non-Jewish world. 

Paul became convinced that God is for everyone. He shows no favoritism: to individuals, or certain people groups, or to any one nation, or even to one particular religion.

This morning Franciscan Richard Rohr reminded me in his daily meditation that the notion of private salvation has done way more harm than good in the history of Christianity. 

Once folks get their ticket punched for heaven (saved) they can continue to live in and even support toxic situations. They believe their eternal destination is secured so they can ignore the systemic and institutional corruption that surrounds them. They fall into the inevitable trap of seeing the world as the world sees itself.”

When we live as if our own private salvation is all that matters in the world then we are reducing God’s love down to an exclusionary gift reserved for a chosen few (those who look like me?). 

Look, here’s the Good News in spades: God loves the whole world. He loves the defiled, the smelly homeless person, the wino who smells like stale urine, the adulterous husband or wife, the alcoholic or drug addict, the arrogant know-it-all, the worse of the worse God loves.

He even loves those who lie and those who pretend they don’t. He loves the arrogant and the flamboyant. He even loves the ignorant and the sophisticated. He loves all those whom we think might defile us if they were to come too close to us.

Seeing Jesus sitting next to God was compelling evidence enough for Paul to realize that if God can break this ancient prohibition of steering clear of a rotten corpse and raise that corpse to new life then what does this say about the true heart and nature of God.

Perhaps John says most succinctly: “God is love!” 

He sure is, through and through. 

Remember that when you attack another person or practice character assassination on another human being. We’ve all done it. I have and I am regretful for doing as such.

But here’s the Good News: God loves me even when I am at my stinking worse! 

God loves me even when I am dead in my own sin.

 He loves me even when I  am a living corpse.

This is the Good News we’ve all been waiting to hear!