The beauty and mystery of the Gospel is that God became Man and walked among us. Jesus came to be with us, the creatures separated from God because of sin. We were the outcasts, the marginalized, the others—and He came to bring us into fellowship once again.

Too often, the otherness I see around me prompts me to detach rather than follow in Jesus’ footsteps. I forget that He came to welcome me in so that I might go out and welcome the others in the same way. I forget that the social issues of our day—immigration, race, gender, and more—are the very places where Jesus would have showed up.

So I need regular reminders, and I’m guessing you do too. This month’s magazine provides plenty of them, including one article titled “What’s in a Name?” written by Tyler Glodjo who reminds us: “The God we serve lived fully human at the margins, a man of sorrows acquainted with grief, entirely aware that life there often leads to death—whether by a cross, a lynching tree, or a bullet.”

Another reminder comes from Chad Thornhill who addresses our tendency to detach in his article titled “The Problem with Others.” He asks these probing questions: “What does it look like to truly and fully, as Christians, embrace the other? And subsequently, how might our awareness of our own otherness reconfigure how we deal with these divisive social issues?” Good questions, ones that we need to wrestle with in prayer and in community.

How do we deal with our tendency to forget the others in our world? We do as Jesus did—we move toward those on the fringes and remember that we have more in common with the others than we think.

Erin Straza

Illustration courtesy of Seth T. Hahne. Check out his graphic novel and comic review site, Good Ok Bad.

[button link=”http://christandpopculture.com/capc-mag-volume-2-issue-18-outsiders/” size=”medium”]Return to CAPC Mag Volume 2, Issue 18: Outsiders[/button]

cMag0218_port