07 Jan Loving the Stranger

This article deals with how disciples of Jesus can respond to an increasingly strange and possibly hostile world.

The college campus is an interesting place. It is where you encounter people who differ vastly from you. People with entirely different cultural backgrounds, different languages, different foods and attire, all come together on the college campus. It can be a strange and exciting adventure. The college campus is also a place where we encounter people who think differently than we do. For example, we might encounter people who believe that India should be a Hindu Rashtra. We might encounter people who believe that financial success is the sole purpose that one has to live for in life. We might encounter people who believe that one’s gender identity does not always align with the biological sex. Or we might encounter people who believe that the Bible’s teachings on marriage and sex are bigoted and outdated.

How do we respond when we encounter such people?

The wrong responses
There are two wrong responses that we can have when we encounter people who are different. Let’s call them tribalism and assimilation.

Tribalism
The tribalist response is to find other people who are just like us and only interact with them. We can always find tribalists on college campuses — people who only hang out with others of the same language or community.

One particular way the tribalist response manifests itself among disciples of Jesus is to find other disciples and only hang out with them. It is to cut oneself off from the world around them. It is an easy response and it is being an escapist.
These are the disciples who know the truth that they do not belong to the world (John 17:16) but forget the truth that they are also sent into the world (John 17:18 and Matthew 28:19-20).

Assimilation
The way of assimilation is to mix with the people so completely that one loses one’s own identity. The disciples who assimilate do so at the cost of continuing to be disciples. These are disciples who forget the truth that they do not belong to the world. They buy into the lies of the world and believe in those lies.

The right response
The disciple of Jesus who seeks to imitate Him has an approach that is vastly different from the other two approaches. This disciple balances the two truths — that he or she does not belong to the world but also that he or she has been sent into the world.

For disciples of Jesus, the right response to encountering people who are different is to love them. It is to love them with the kind of love that Jesus demonstrated towards them – to not compromise on one’s beliefs and still love people who are starkly different.

But how do we love people who are different from us? We love people by doing the basics right – over and over again. The basics are what the Bible teaches throughout —- listen well (James 1:19), keep your word (Matthew 5:37), pray for them (Matthew 5:44), serve their needs (Luke 10:37), be hospitable (Hebrews 13:2), speak the truth to them (Colossians 3:9), and so on. Allow me to talk about four specific aspects here — listen, pray, read, and converse.

Listen
Jesus said in Matthew 7:12 I ought to do that which I wish others would do to me. I would want people who are different from me to listen to me. I wish they would ask me good questions about why I am different from the others — why I refuse to cut corners or why I refuse to step on others to get ahead. I wish they would ask questions with genuine curiosity about why I believe what I believe.

If that’s what I wish others would do, I ought to do the same to others. I ought to ask them questions with genuine curiosity — why they believe what they believe, why they do what they do. And love them genuinely. If someone believes in same-sex marriage, I can genuinely ask why they believe so (not with the intent of picking a fight and winning a debate). I can ask how they feel about their gender, and so on.
Every disciple of Jesus would do well to remember the instruction that James gives — to be quick to listen and slow to speak.

Pray
How many times have we promised to pray for a friend and never kept our word? Jesus specifically instructs His disciples to be people of their word.

We can pray that God would open their hearts to the good news that they can be part of God’s Kingdom if they repent and believe in Jesus. We can pray that God’s Spirit would convict them of their sin and their need for a Saviour. We can also pray for their various needs — that they would be able to study well or that they would be healed of their illnesses. Our prayers ought to be genuine, sincere, and persistent.

Read
The calling of a student is to study. As much as students are primarily called to study their specific field, they are also called to study general issues that concern our society. This is why the Indian Constitution allows graduates to have a vote in the Rajya Sabha elections, even though not all citizens get a vote.
Students ought to be faithful to their calling and study the concerns of society around them. To have a biblical response to the issue, I first need to understand the issue — in all its complexity. There are no shortcuts to gaining such an understanding. We must be willing to do the hard work of reading, studying, critiquing and engaging with ideas.

Converse
Speaking the truth in love is in itself an act of love. When we warn a friend that what they are eating is potentially spoiled, we are loving them by saving them the trouble of painful frequent visits to the bathroom in the future.

Similarly, warning a friend that unless they believe in Jesus, they are going to Hell is an act of love.
We must be careful though. A chai shop is not a pulpit where we preach sermons. Neither is it a debate podium. When we meet friends we engage in conversation, not sermons or debates. A conversation includes both speaking and listening.

We also must be careful that we keep first things first. Believing in the biblical sexual ethic is not what saves a person from Hell – it is believing in Jesus and His finished work on the cross. On some level, it is futile to convince a person of the biblical sexual ethic without talking to them about the good news of being saved when one believes in Jesus.

This does not mean that we shy away from sharing our convictions. It just means that we remember our priorities and that not all conversations need to revolve around the same topic.

It has always been about the basics
Being a faithful disciple has always been the same — whether we live in a familiar conservative world or a strange new world. It consists of doing the basics right. It consists of loving God with one’s heart, soul and mind (Matthew 22:37), and loving one’s neighbour as oneself (Matthew 22:38).

Jeyapaul Caleb lives in Bangalore with his wife Arpana. He is a middle-school English teacher, who likes to muse on culture, current events and politics as a disciple of Jesus.