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Some Thoughts on Religious Shunning

Religious shunning can inflict a particularly deep kind of pain. I believe there are  religions out  there in which people could be shunned for reasons that seemed tragically disproportionate—for example, simply leaving the religion, questioning doctrines and rules that are obviously wrong, even though they continued sincerely to worship God. The loss involved can be enormous. Parents may cease normal association with their children; children may become separated from parents; brothers, sisters and lifelong friends can suddenly become strangers. A person may lose, almost overnight, the human world in which he or she once felt at home.

For those who have suffered this, there is a remarkably tender incident in John chapter 9.

Jesus had healed a man who had been blind from birth. Instead of rejoicing over this extraordinary act of mercy, the religious authorities became preoccupied with the fact that Jesus had performed the healing on the Sabbath. They repeatedly questioned the man and even questioned his parents. His parents were afraid to speak openly because, as John explains, the authorities had already decided that anyone acknowledging Jesus as the Christ would be “put out of the synagogue” (John 9:22).

The healed man, however, refused to deny what he knew to be true. He could not answer every theological accusation thrown at him, but he could testify to what he had experienced: “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see” (John 9:25).

Eventually, the authorities turned on him. They insulted him and “cast him out” (John 9:34).

Those few words can easily be read too quickly. Being expelled from the synagogue was not merely losing a seat in a religious building. Religion, family and community were closely intertwined. Whatever the precise social consequences of this particular expulsion, John presents it as a painful rejection by the religious authorities of the man's community.

And then comes one of the most beautiful sentences in the account:

“Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him...” (John 9:35).

They cast him out.

Jesus found him.

There is something profoundly comforting in that contrast.

The religious authorities regarded the man as troublesome and disposable. Jesus regarded him as someone worth seeking. When others pushed him outside the boundary of belonging, Christ crossed that boundary to meet him. The man had lost the approval of powerful religious figures, but he had not lost the approval, attention or love of God.

This distinction matters enormously for victims of religious shunning. Rejection by a religious community is not the same thing as rejection by God. Human beings may close a door and sincerely believe that they are acting for God; that does not mean God has closed His door. Religious authority and divine authority are not automatically identical.

Indeed, Jesus repeatedly placed mercy above the rigid application of religious rules. When challenged about healing on the Sabbath, he asked, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” (Mark 3:4). Elsewhere he reminded his critics of God's words, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice” (Matthew 12:7; compare Hosea 6:6).

That should give any religious person reason for humility. Discipline may sometimes have a legitimate place within a faith community, but when religious practice becomes indifferent to mercy, conscience, family affection and human suffering, Christians should remember the character of the One whose name they bear.

And for the person who has been shunned, John 9 offers something gentler still.

People you loved have walked away from you. People who once prayed beside you now cross the street rather than speak to you. You have wondered in lonely moments whether their rejection means that God has rejected you too.

John 9 answers with a picture rather than an argument.

A man stands outside, rejected by religious authority.

And Jesus goes looking for him.

There may be no immediate remedy for the empty chair at the family table, the unanswered telephone call, or the ache of being treated as though years of love can simply be switched off. Those wounds are real, and faith does not require us to pretend otherwise.

But neither does another person's rejection determine your worth before God.

The final word in John 9 does not belong to those who expelled the man. It belongs to Christ who found him.

For anyone left “out in the cold” by religious shunning, perhaps that is the thought worth holding close: being cast out by people does not mean that you have been cast away by God. Sometimes it is outside the door that we discover Christ was already coming to find us.

Come Sit With the Creator For a While

Sometime back in the fourth century, a troubled man sat weeping in a garden in Milan. His name was Augustine, and although he would eventually become one of the most influential Christian thinkers in history, at that moment he was simply a man in turmoil, painfully aware of the distance between the life he was living and the life he knew he ought to live.

Then, from a nearby house, he heard the voice of a child repeating a little refrain:

Tolle, lege. Tolle, lege.

“Take up and read. Take up and read.”

Augustine later described the moment in his Confessions. He took the words as an instruction, picked up the Scriptures, and read. What he encountered there became part of the great turning point of his life.

There is something wonderfully simple about those words.

Take up and read.

If you have never read the Bible, or have not opened one for many years, I would like to offer you that same invitation. Not an invitation to understand everything at once, to become religious, or even to settle beforehand what you believe about God. Just take it up and read.

We sometimes imagine the Bible as a distant book: ancient, formidable, filled with unfamiliar names, difficult passages and ideas belonging to another age. Yet the Bible says something rather different about itself:

“Assuredly the word is exceedingly close to you—even in your mouth and your heart—so that you might do it.”

—Deuteronomy 30:14 NKJV

I love that expression: exceedingly close to you.

That is increasingly how I have come to think about the Bible. Not merely as a book to be studied, though it certainly rewards study, but as something close enough to enter the ordinary circumstances of a human life.

In my quiet hours, when I sit with the Bible, my prayer is often very simple: Father, what do you have for me today?

Sometimes I need direction. Sometimes discipline. There are aspects of my personality that still need changing, and occasions when I need the uncomfortable honesty of Scripture rather than reassurance. At other times I come carrying a fear, a disappointment, or something I cannot resolve. I read, and sooner or later a sentence seems to arrest me. I stop. Read it again. Sit with it.

And there it is.

For me, this is not merely an interesting thought from an ancient writer. I receive it as communication from God, meeting me in the circumstances of my life.

Cancer medication sometimes has me awake during the night. Oddly enough, I have come to treasure some of those hours. The house is still, the world seems to have withdrawn for a while, and there is time to read without interruption.

Early this morning, my attention settled on a verse in Psalm 118:

“I called on the LORD in distress;
The LORD answered me and set me in a broad place.”

—Psalm 118:5 NKJV

I stayed there for a while.

Life has many ways of hemming us in. Illness can do it. So can fear. There are pressures outside our control: the unkindness of others, slander and gossip, unhappy relationships, financial worries, loneliness, uncertainty about the future. Then there are the pressures within us, those private struggles that other people may know nothing about.

The writer of the psalm knew that feeling.

The Hebrew language behind his words makes the image especially vivid. The word associated with his distress carries the idea of narrowness or confinement—a tight place, somewhere you can hardly move.

Then comes the answer.

The Hebrew word merḥāḇ means breadth, spaciousness, room.

The movement of the verse is therefore almost physical. The psalmist cries to God from the narrow place, and God answers him in spaciousness.

From confinement into room.

I find that image beautiful because God does not always remove the circumstance that confines us. Some things cannot simply be wished away. I still have cancer. A broken relationship may still be broken tomorrow. Someone who has treated us badly may never apologize. Grief does not obey a timetable.

And yet, in circumstances that have not changed, something within us can.

The walls no longer seem quite so close.

There is room to breathe.

That morning the verse was no longer simply something written by a Hebrew poet thousands of years ago. It had reached across those centuries and entered a quiet room where one man happened to be awake because of his medication.

“The word is exceedingly close to you.”

I thought again of Augustine in his garden and that child’s strange little song drifting over the wall.

Take up and read.

You do not need to approach the Bible with someone else’s certainty. You can bring your questions with you. Bring your doubts too, if you have them. Bring your disappointments, your curiosity, your objections, your hopes, and all the untidy pieces of being human. The Bible is remarkably unafraid of such things. Its pages are populated by frightened people and courageous people, doubters and believers, failures and saints, kings and prisoners, grieving mothers, angry prophets, bewildered disciples and people desperately looking for a way home.

So if there is a Bible somewhere in your house, take it down.

Open it.

You might begin with one of the Gospels and meet Jesus through the recollections of those who knew him. Or begin with the Psalms, where almost every human emotion eventually finds a voice. Do not worry about how much you read. A few verses may be enough.

And before you begin, you might even try the little prayer I use in those quiet hours:

Father, what do you have for me?

Then take up and read.

The book that seems so ancient may turn out to be exceedingly close.

Note

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Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.