touch and taste
our physical senses are such a strong and helpful way to encounter the world around us. sure, thinking and feeling is important too, but smells and textures and tastes and colors and sounds add shape and substance to our lives. the smells and textures and tastes and colors and sounds that i've encountered among the orphaned children of the world have overwhelmed and inspired me. it's no wonder then that Jesus, when he sends out the twelve in matthew 10, instructs them to engage the people of need around them through their senses. mission is embrace. this involves touching lepers - those on the fringes of society - orphans.
in order to bring the message of hope and help to those in need, a wider embrace is necessary. for when the King says in matthew 25 that the one we embrace, the one we feed, the one we visit, the one we heal iss him, then we realize that our senses have put us in touch with the divine.
images and ikons
it should not be surprising that orphaned children have challenges with affection and attachment. if rejection and abandonment are the common means of relationship and communication, barriers are built. children shrink away from hugs. they dismiss themselves from activities. they love to receive letters, but do not write back. it is because the embrace many of them have experienced is not one of grace and love, but rather of abuse and criticism.
i know what Jesus looks like. sunday school teachers and scholars have their ideas, but i have seen him. he has red cheeks and a blister on his lip. he has his head shaved because of an outbreak of lice. his beautifully dark african hair is now blond because of malnourishment. this is not poetry. this is sound theology. it is because in genesis 1:26-27, when God created human beings, God did so in God's own image. these precious children are living ikons of Christ himself. when they understand their true identity, when they have a wider embrace to accept who God made them to be, then they will have the courage to survive.
Jesus never cared how they got sick
i challenge you to survey the gospels and find one place where Jesus asks a diseased person how he or she got sick. that is not the issue at hand. the issue is God's healing mercy breaking into our diseased reality. this is why Jesus ate with those on the fringes of society. table fellowship - as it does today in so many cultures around the world - speaks loudly.
Jesus has a wider embrace to gather those who have been shunned, to encourage those who have been beaten down, to heal those who are sick, to bring joy to those who have only known despair. by keeping a distance, our God could not have brought such a beautiful salvation. but through being here and being now among us, God is still creating people in God's own image. God is still embracing the unlikely and unlovable and calling them his own.
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