Almost every kid has a memory of being excluded on the playground. I do. I was in the third grade when suddenly the popular girls decided that I couldn’t play with them. The insult stung longer than the few days they left me out of their activities.
But exclusion doesn’t stop as children grow into adults. From work cliques to Facebook jibes, people of all ages exclude others from acceptance, love and affection, often for no discernible reason.
But Jesus was different. He went out of his way to extend love where it wasn’t expected—to society’s outcasts. He included the excluded. And we can all learn from his example in the following passages.
- Jesus cared for children.
Jesus’s disciples were annoyed by the children that people brought to Jesus. Perhaps they thought the squirming, noisy kids weren’t as important as the adults Jesus was teaching. But Jesus told his disciples that the children could stay and that “the Kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”
Read the story in Matthew 19:13-15 - Jesus talked to a “sinful woman.”
Although the text does not elaborate on the woman’s sin was, it must have been public enough for the Pharisee whose house Jesus was dining at to know. When Jesus came to eat with the Pharisee, this woman began washing Jesus’s feet with a jar of perfume. The Pharisee was appalled that Jesus would let her touch his feet. But Jesus told the woman, “Your sins are forgiven.”
Read the story in Luke 7:36-50 - Jesus ate with a tax collector.
Tax collectors have never been popular, and the first century was no exception. So when Jesus went to Levi’s house to eat, and he ate with tax collectors, it caused quite a stir. It didn’t phase Jesus, though. His response? “I have not come to call respectable people, but outcasts.”
Read the story in Mark 2:13-17 - Jesus touched a bleeding woman.
In the Jewish tradition, the bleeding woman would have been unclean. Since she had been bleeding for twelve years, she would have been regarded as unclean. Yet when Jesus noticed that this unclean woman touched his robe, he responded with kindness rather than derision.
Read the story in Mark 5:25-34 - Jesus spoke to a demon possessed man.
Nobody knew what to do with the demon possessed man who wondered along the Lake of Galilee. People had tried to chain him, but it didn’t work. Jesus spoke to him, cast out the demon and told him, “Go back home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and how kind he has been to you.”
Read the story in Mark 5:1-20 - Jesus drank water from the woman at the well.
In the time of Jesus, Jews avoided Samaritans. In fact, they didn’t even use the same utensils. That’s why it was a big deal when Jesus did not ignore the Samaritan woman at the well. He engaged her in conversation, used her cup to drink water and offered himself as living water.
Read the story in John 4:1-41
