The baby born in a manger became a rabbi with a unique gift: to make the soul of the outsider feel its worth. As Greg Carey notes, his dinners with prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners-serious outcasts-were as much a sign of his kingdom as his teachings, healings, and exorcisms.
Perhaps because exclusion was part of his own experience.
Don't let our picture of the "holy family" fool you. The real Jesus had a serious reputation problem. Jesus grew up in a small village as a boy whose paternal origin was unknown. This made him a "mamzer": in Aramaic (the language he spoke) equivalent to our "bastard." Bruce Chilton, in Rabbi Jesus, said, "Such men and women lived in a caste apart, unable to marry within the established bloodlines of Israel, and so were often excluded from the mainstream of religious life."
The Aramaic translation of Deuteronomy 23:3 (the one in use at the time of Jesus) stated: "No mamzer shall enter the congregation of the Lord." Though the application of such texts is often softened in real life, it's quite likely that this was a clobber verse used against Jesus.
Some leaders of his time made two comments that could be thinly veiled references to his mamzer status: "Where is your father?......We are not illegitimate children" (Jn. 8: 19, 41)
Why bring it up this Christmas season? Because we're in a state of high alarm these days and the people who pay the price are members of any vulnerable group. Stirring fear-based animosity toward immigrants, Muslims, African Americans, members of the LGBT community, and others, is a cheap path to power for demagogues in the mold of Donald Trump.
If you find yourself singing O Holy Night this Christmas Eve - long lay the world in sin and error pinning, till he returns and the soul felt its worth - consider that the Christ in your Christmas carol felt the sting of social stigma himself. His concern for stigmatized minorities isn't something he just thinks is wrong. It's something he feels in his bones to be wrong, because he grew up with it and knows how it tries to rob a soul of its worth.
Ken Wilson is co-pastor of Blue Ocean Faith, Ann Arbor and author of A Letter to My Congregation: An Evangelical Pastor's Path to Embracing Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender People into the Company of Jesus (ReadTheSpirit 2014).
Originally published on the Third Way Newsletter.