The Offensive Inclusivity of Jesus

In the Gospels, we see Jesus mix with all the "wrong" people. He’s not afraid to eat with tax collectors and sinners (Luke 19:1-10). Nor is He is disgusted by the impurity of the sick, Jew and gentile alike (Matthew 15:21-28).

Jesus’ inclusivity shocks the religious leaders of the day. Why? Because they have their own categories of who’s in and who’s out and are offended that Jesus opens the doors of the kingdom to sinners of all stripes.

Nowhere do we see Jesus’ offensive inclusivity play out more radically than in His encounter with the woman at the well. The story is told in John 4:1-42. While the disciples are off fetching food, Jesus is sitting at Jacob’s Well talking to a Samaritan woman. To Jews, the woman is a religious and cultural half-breed. Even to her own kind, she is a social and moral outsider, ostracised because she has had five husbands, forced to draw water at the hottest time of the day away from the crowd. And she’s a woman! No self- respecting Jewish man, let alone a Rabbi, would be seen associating with her. Even the disciples, when they return, are so shocked by what they see that they remain silent (John 4:27). Yet Jesus, the friend of sinners, crosses the established boundaries to reveal to her that He “really is the Savior of the world” (John 4:42).

The story of the woman at the well demonstrates the inclusive posture of Jesus towards women, the sick, the outcast, and the worst of sinners, and it poses a challenge for us today, just as it did for the Pharisees two thousand years ago.

Jesus commands us to love our neighbour (Matthew 22:39). Which begs the question: ‘who is my neighbour?’ There is a danger of us believing our neighbour is someone we love because they are like us. But, as Jesus shows us in the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), our neighbour is the stranger whom we love precisely because they are not like us. Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman is a model for all our encounters with strangers or people we see as different because of their faith, or none, culture, attitudes, values, or lifestyle, or who are marginalised or oppressed.

So, who might the woman at the well be for us today? Whom are we keeping our distance from? Is it the refugee we don’t know how to talk to because we’re not ready to hear her tale of trauma? Is it the homeless man who makes us feel guilty for not knowing how to fix his multiple evident problems? Or is it the transwoman whose eye we avoid in case they think we are staring at them, or for fear of saying the wrong thing?

The real mark of our spiritual maturity is how we treat people who are different from us. If we are to join Jesus at the margins of society, welcoming and blessing repentant sinners of all kinds, we must allow His radically offensive inclusivity to seep into our very bones. If we were the woman at the well, isn't that how we would want to be treated?