To Feel Valuable Is Nice; But Not Enough

Yeshua welcomed and ate with tax-collectors and sinners. For this he was criticized and condemned. This is good news.

Why? Because he saw value in people regarded as unworthy; without any value.

He saw value. This does not mean he valued them, as in he bestowed value on them with his countenance. It means something more fundamental: that their value was inherent. That value is not something anyone bestows on anyone or anything else. Value is not something we have, it is what we are. All of us. Value is recognized, not bestowed.

Yeshua chose to be with those on the margins of society. The outcast and the downcast. “Sinners” literally means those who have missed the mark. Who is not that? Yet these were judged unworthy and beyond the pale. Therefore unrespectable. Every society in human history defines their own sinners.

Tax collectors are especially interesting. They were fellow Jews working for the occupying Roman empire. They were complicit in oppression. They were turncoats in the eyes of many. They were understandably despised. Yeshua welcomed them.

Why? Because Value. Value is inherent to all beings.

This does not provide easy answers about how to relate to specific people, groups, or parties we oppose, distrust, or even fear. What it does is change the way we fundamentally see them, and ourselves, in relation to our shared essential value.

These are difficult questions without easy answers. Yet to me, this story about Yeshua welcoming such people and being castigated for it has more fundamentally to do with how we regard ourselves. How do we value (evaluate) ourselves? For does not how we regard ourselves shape how we regard others?

Could it be that this story about Yeshua could be received as an invitation first to welcome ourselves? For all our missteps, complicity in what is wrong or harmful, and shame? Could it be this is a story about the value that is unconditional and that belongs to every being and cannot be lost? Is this about us, not them?

Does this not turn the tables on our normal ways of judging one another? Might this be the kind of transformation we truly seek in our own souls and in our world--a treasure so easily lost? The realization of essential value in every other, and in ourselves?