Or, do you also go "outside the safe walls" of people like yourself to look for friends? Do you humbly realize that others who are different from you can liberate you because they have much to teach you? And Love to reach you?
Jesus had family, he attended synagogue and temple regularly, so he had friends there, and he had his twelve apostles and numerous followers, both men and women. But he regularly, on his own, went outside this group of observant Jews to make outsiders his friends.
Jesus told a parable about a good Samaritan because he knew Samaritans. Jews despised them and stayed away from them. Jesus talked alone to a Samaritan woman; men didn't talk alone to women then and they often don't talk alone to women now, lest people start talking. He healed a Samaritan leper. He healed a man possessed by demons who, instead of living at home, lived naked among the tombs, "dead" to his family and community. He healed the slave of a Roman centurion, although the Romans were the hated Occupation Force. Finally Jesus became the Ultimate Outsider himself, murdered like a criminal outside the walls of Jerusalem, the political and religious capital of the Jewish people.
Jesus sought out the outsiders, but not only to help or save them. So often we think "helping" or "saving" is enough. But no one likes to be seen as the object of "help." No, being only an object of help dehumanizes us. As the photo above says, "If you've come to help me, you're wasting your time." Jesus made friends of the people whom he helped and saved because it is only in the equal give and take of a friendship that both people can grow, can be liberated from preconceived ideas and stereotypes. Can be mutually healed. Can understand what it means to be loved for oneself.
The poor, the Samaritans, the mentally ill and possessed, the women, the lepers, the centurions, - these were the people who gave Jesus a sure and steady love when his own - the Pharisees - disowned him. These friends enlarged his human experience so he could speak passionately in their favor. They liberated him from the narrow concerns of the community of Jews who were his family and friends from the temple and synagogue. He was willing to be humiliated and scorned because he knew that he and the Father were one, and that God, often scorned and rejected by His own people the Jews, always spoke out for and protected the poor and the outcasts.
Today the church "St. Paul Outside the Walls" stands within the modern city of Rome but outside the walls of ancient Rome, a symbolic tribute to St. Paul, who took the Christian faith beyond the temple and synagogue, and outside the walls of Jerusalem, to the many lands of the Gentiles - the non-Jews. St. Paul understood that to "be Jesus" is to have humility, and humility means stripping oneself of pride, of thinking one knows everything, of thinking that "your kind" is the measure of all things. "Jesus "humbled himself" (Philippians 2: 8.)
Paul humbly saw the Gentiles with open eyes and an open heart so he understood that they, too, were meant to have the Gospel preached to them.
Paul understood that "this is God's way, the way of humility. It is the way of Jesus, there is no other. And there is no humility without humiliation...In the end, humility means service. It means making room for God by stripping oneself, emptying oneself." (Pope Francis.) It means entering into the Passion of Jesus, being an outsider to welcome all to the circle of God's embrace.
Even we who are Christians are so used to a society that only loves its own, only reveres wealth, status, and success, that we find it hard to understand Jesus. As Pope Francis says, "We will never get used to a humble God." Understanding Jesus will take our lifetime!
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