God’s way of including people is not reasonable

Every day we're reading or listening to part of the Bible together and sharing thoughts with you. Today it’s Bern Leckie:

What did I like about today's passage?

I think Jesus wants us to take a leap here, and gives us lots of encouragement. The religious people around him are like many today for whom faith has become sensible, understandable, containable, manageable, even (for them) the mainstream establishment and home to all that is proper and reasonable.

But most of these pictures from Jesus about God and his coming Kingdom are anything but. We might be so used to them that we don’t realise how weird and unreasonable they are, even though we can hopefully still relate to them. OK, if we’re not sheep farmers, we might only relate to the joy of finding a lost thing, but not the madness of leaving 99 undefended – that’s not reasonable. The coin I get more – finding a day’s wages is no small thing, but even if I find a coin that’s not worth the time it took to look, I feel excessively happy.

The lost, prodigal son story is super famous, and I don’t know how many of Jesus’ audience knew the original Buddhist version where the returning son earns back his place in the family after much work. For anyone who expected that, Jesus’ new ending is even more shocking than it is for first-time listeners. Unreasonable, uncontainable love and joy from the father, despite the protests of the sensible elder son.

I love that Jesus is not rallying the sensible to defend the traditional, but warning them to expect an unreasonable revolution as God’s Kingdom comes. They (and we, in our culture where Christianity is mainstream and traditional) should be shocked by Jesus, especially on issues of inclusivity. Expect God to pursue and bring in the people we didn’t expect. Walking with Jesus, starting to see the world his way and joining him on his mission should change our minds.

What did it show me about Father God, Jesus or the Holy Spirit?

God knows how we like to get settled in our understanding and form regular habits. God also knows, and warned through countless Old Testament stories, prophecies, songs and poems, as well as the flow of Israel’s history, that when we stick to what seems reasonable to us about God and religion, our minds and hearts are not in the right place.

So Jesus and the Spirit shake things up radically. They call and enable us to leap from what we think we should reasonably do and who is living a reasonably good life to what God can amazingly do, far more inclusively than we expect.

What am I going to do differently as a result?

Reflect on how God has changed my mind over years about inclusivity and ask what’s next.

Who am I going to share this with?

By next Sunday, I will have a talk finished on being trained by God, to share with you!