PEOPLE.

People. If there was one thing Jesus was about, at least if the gospels are anything to go by, it was people. Of all the great men who walked the face of the earth, who left their imprints in the sands of time, who were recorded in the books we have come to know as the scriptures, only one of them was profoundly known to be a man of compassion. Of all the men, only one disregarded the rules of social strata, damned the consequences of being a misfit and gave His affection and attention to people who were the ‘trash’ of society and disrespected by everyone else.

He was called a glutton and a drunkard; and was condemned to the title ‘a friend of sinners’, prostitutes and tax collectors. And if you’re familiar with the political context of the times, you would appreciate that tax collectors were as bad, if not worse than prostitutes at the time. Tax was one of the ways Rome was successfully oppressing the people of Israel, and so it made sense that anyone who accepted a job from the oppressor to oppress his own people was a traitor and was to be regarded as worse than the oppressor himself. Yet this one man cared nothing about anything other than these souls that lay beneath the faces of men; their very persons, their very essence as human beings.

And so if you stripped Christianity of its doctrines, and rules, and principles, and you reduced it to the person and personality of Jesus, you would have nothing other than a man who loved the dejected and downcast and abhorred the double standards of men who thought that rules and regulations were more important than the human beings these rules and regulations were made to protect. I’m talking about the teachers of the law, Sadducees, Pharisees and the Scribes. I imagine that the reason Jesus did not deal kindly with them was this:

That you could not love principles and ‘rightness’ more than you love people.

Because that would defeat the entire purpose of the law, which was (if you skim it down to its bone) to protect person A from the evil in the heart of person B. Yet, with all the pain in my heart, I cannot help but admit that Christians are some of the least grace-giving, judgmental group of people I know. And I do not speak pointing fingers, because after all four of them would point back at me. I speak merely of what I have seen and heard.

I’m pretty sure you’ve heard countless times about love; even too many times maybe. So I do not intend to bore you with 1 Corinthians 13. What I would like to do with today’s piece is to draw your consciousness to what truly lies behind the deeds and expressions of human beings. I hope to draw your attention to the fragile existence that we each carry, for which reason we ought to look at people through the lens of the One who sees the innermost parts of people.

Mary went to Jesus’ tomb, literally saw Jesus there and asked Him to His face where they had put Jesus’ body. This is how John records the encounter [John 20]:

¹³ They [the two angels] asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”

“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.”  ¹⁴ At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”

¹⁶ Jesus said to her, “Mary.” ¹⁷ She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!”

I have never had the courage to say this, but I have always believed that it was neither the sound of His voice nor the way He said her name that made Mary realise it was Jesus. I have always believed that He called out to the person within her, and beyond the voice her ears could hear, her heart heard Him truly call her.

And I may be wrong, but my point really is that if Jesus truly was divine and was just, then His natural inclination when sinners were brought to Him should have been judgment. He should have looked at them and concluded that they deserved every punishment that came to them. When sick men and women came to Him, He should have seen people who had brought illnesses and curses upon themselves by their sins. Instead, the record says that He was moved with compassion. And in the instances where we weren’t told, we can easily glean that He looked beyond the façade and saw real people with real needs who were really just living out a reality that was inconsistent with what they truly desired on their insides – compassion and empathy.

Call today’s piece a lesson in emotional intelligence rather than the usual exegesis on scripture, and you will not be wrong. While this piece had been cooking in my heart for a long time, it was a video I saw that got me to pull out paper and pen. It was an excerpt from a show about a life coach (Inyala) who was helping out six sisters who had a terrible relationship among one another. All six sisters had a terrible relationship with their mother as well. This video you are about to watch was an exchange between the life coach, two of the sisters and their mother.

Let me give you a brief background for the sake of context. In this excerpt, Inyala is trying to help the daughters understand why their mother has become the kind of person she has been to them, particularly the oldest of them who was the most closed-off and hostile among all six of them. Her mother’s testimony is that she was raped by a relative, who this first child had a very close relationship with.  I want you to pay attention not only to the words spoken in this video, but also to their body language.

So what’s the point? The point is to love people beyond simply loving them because the Bible says so. The point is to encourage you to learn some emotional intelligence, at the very least as a concept which is primary to compassion and empathy and the very essence of the person of Christ, whose pattern we purport to follow. The point is to remind you that people are way more than what they show or what we see. The point is that the next time you look a person in the face, see them through the lens of the Father, as image bearers. They do not have to be visibly hurting; they may simply be irritating, or dismissive, or mean, or simply disconnected. And that may be the true test of Christlikeness for anyone who calls Jesus master. The point is to call you to recognise the complexities of the human experience, and to encourage you to rethink love outside the cliché we have heard over and over again and see men beyond the vessel of clay they are clothed in and love them sincerely, from the insides of your heart.

Love,

Rad!💖