If you map out the stories of Jesus, a pattern shows up: He is rarely where respectable religious people expect Him to be.
He eats with tax collectors who collaborated with empire, like Levi and Zacchaeus, and calls them by name instead of by their reputations (Matthew 9:9–13; Luke 19:1–10). He touches people everyone else considered untouchable—a man with leprosy (Mark 1:40–45), a bleeding woman who had been isolated for twelve years (Mark 5:25–34), even a dead body at a widow’s funeral (Luke 7:11–15). He talks theology with a Samaritan woman whose gender, ethnicity, and relationship history should have put her far outside the circle (John 4:4–26).
Jesus seems drawn to the margins like gravity. He announces his mission as good news for the poor, freedom for prisoners, sight for the blind, and liberation for the oppressed (Luke 4:18–19; Luke 7:22). Not as a photo op, not as a “mission trip,” but as his ordinary route—“the Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14), emptying Himself to take the form of a servant (Philippians 2:6–8).
When we say “Jesus was woke,” this is part of what we mean: He notices who is being pushed to the edges and then quietly, stubbornly, walks toward them.
He leaves the ninety-nine to find the one (Luke 15:3–7). He tells his followers that whatever they do for “the least of these” they do for Him (Matthew 25:31–40). He does not offer cheap charity from a distance. He redraws the map of belonging itself, breaking down dividing walls and creating a new humanity where old categories lose their power (Ephesians 2:13–16; Galatians 3:26–28).
For modern disciples, that’s uncomfortable news. It means following Jesus will likely move us closer to people and places our social circles have learned to avoid: neighborhoods under surveillance and over-policed (echoes of the prophets’ warnings about unjust systems in Isaiah 10:1–2; Amos 5:11–24), workers on strike whose wages have been withheld (James 5:4), queer and trans communities fighting for basic safety and dignity—today’s version of those labeled “sinners” and “unclean” (Luke 7:36–39; Matthew 21:31–32)—and people whose records and reputations make them “bad optics,” like the woman caught in adultery or the criminal on the cross (John 8:2–11; Luke 23:39–43). Jesus keeps insisting that mercy, not image management, is at the heart of God’s kingdom (Matthew 9:10–13).
The good news is that love already lives there. We’re not bringing Jesus into those spaces for the first time; we’re catching up to where He’s been the whole time. There is nowhere we can go that God’s presence cannot reach (Psalm 139:7–10), and nothing—no label, no border, no policy—that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:38–39; Matthew 28:20).
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