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By Peter Green

It was a fascinating experience to study as the token foreigner at Northern Seminary in Chicago. You may think Australians are not that different to Americans, but I soon realised that American politics and evangelicalism are very different to the Australian experience.

We Australians like to pride ourselves as being the “land of the fair go” with a generous social safety net, free health care and a national disability insurance scheme creating a more equitable society (not to mention our gun control laws, introduced by a conservative Prime Minister, that have kept us free of mass shootings for almost 30 years).

However, recent trends in Australia have shown cracks in that narrative. The recent referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament was soundly rejected by over 60% of the population, the anti-immigration sentiment that has plagued many Western countries is alive and well here, and unfortunately, the attitudes of Christians do not always differ from the general community.

This has led me to wrestle with the issue of how Christians are to respond to those on the margins of society – the Aboriginal population, the refugees, the poor and other marginalised groups. We have a Christian Lobby group in Australia that is very vocal on (anti) gay and trans rights, abortion and religious freedom, but strangely silent on these other issues of justice, issues that the Bible is much more vocal on. This is what led me to write on Jesus being a friend of outcasts and sinners for the Jesus Was book. After all, if we are followers of Jesus, surely we should try to emulate him, right?

The attitudes of Christians do not always differ from the general community. This has led me to wrestle with the issue of how Christians are to respond to those on the margins of society.

What I didn’t expect was pushback from editors who recognised that my essay could be seen as controversial. My approach is based on Craig Blomberg’s1 idea of “contagious holiness” that Jesus demonstrated. Unlike the Pharisees who feared contamination by things that might make them ritually unclean, Jesus seemed to have the idea that his holiness was something that would rub off onto other people, no matter how unclean they were.

Two thousand years later, nothing much has changed. When I was young, our church, along with many others, lived in a sort of parallel universe. We never discussed politics at home, and there was a fear of secular culture which was getting darker and darker in line with the end-times vision of a great tribulation coming before Jesus would return around the year 2,000 (my pastor had charts showing 2,000 years from Adam to Abraham, 2,000 years from Abraham to Jesus and 2,000 years from Jesus until his second coming, which would bring in the 1,000 years millennial reign; all this tied in nicely in his view, with the creation week).

In this parallel universe we went to church twice on Sundays (three times at one stage) and once during the week, apart from the many Christian conferences and evangelistic rallies. We had Christian music, Christian books and (dreadful) Christian movies. We did not dance, drink alcohol, go to movies or listen to rock music. All this to keep us “unspotted from the world” (James 1:27 KJV – always the KJV back then) and obeying the command to “come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you” (2 Cor 6:17 KJV).

While there are many things about this Christian Universe that I appreciate (I still listen to Keith Green and 2^nd Chapter of Acts’ music), the struggle to remain separate from the world is not something Jesus modelled. He went out of his way to dine with prostitutes and sinners while remaining unspotted himself. When researching my chapter, I found there has been quite an effort to explain away Jesus’ practice of dining with sinners; maybe they were just ritually impure, or maybe they were former sinners who had repented of their past professions. Or, if they were still sinners, surely Jesus would have called them to repentance and demanded they turn from their wicked ways. Dining with someone in that time was a mark of acceptance of those you dined with, and the thought of a holy Jesus accepting unholy sinners as low as prostitutes and tax collectors is a bridge too far for many.

The struggle to remain separate from the world is not something Jesus modeled. He went out of his way to dine with prostitutes and sinners while remaining unspotted himself.

I have no doubt Jesus called all he met to follow him, but what that looked like varied for different people. In my chapter I put forward the case made by Bible scholar, Mark Powell that many of the prostitutes and tax collectors were likely to have been slaves and did not have the luxury of leaving their profession, but Jesus’ idea of radical hospitality was to accept them as they were and call for change on the inside, even when the outside could not be changed.

To find out more, you will have to read the book (shameless plug) but I suspect some will find the proposition that there could be a Christian prostitute or Christian tax-collector too shocking to contemplate, which is funny, because for me, from this side of the world looking in at America, I feel the same about Christian MAGA supporters! The challenge is to take seriously Paul’s injunction to accept those whom Christ has accepted and not “condemn someone else’s servant” (Rom 14:1-4).

Blomberg, C. L. (2005). Contagious Holiness: Jesus’ Meals with Sinners. (D. A. Carson, Ed.) (Vol. 19, p. 180). England; Downers Grove, IL: Apollos; InterVarsity Press.

Radical Hospitality ...

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