A God of Radical Inclusion

In ancient Israel, if you were physically impaired, it was believed that this was due to either your own sin or the sin of your parents or even ancestors.  The impact of a significant physical impairment in the ancient world was not only the impact on your ability to work and engage in other day to day activities, but exclusion from the community itself.  If it was believed that God was punishing you or your family, through your impairment, then it was considered righteous to participate in God's punishment and exclusion.

By healing the sick and the blind, Jesus, as the one in whom God was revealed, rendered this entire way of perceiving the impaired.  If Jesus revealed God's will, and if God was punishing the impaired, then the impaired would not have been healed because it would have removed a divinely brought punishment.  On a more broader level, Jesus was destroying the very underlying understanding of God's nature.  Rather than being a God of exclusion, God was one of radical inclusion.  God's will was to bring those outside the community into the community.

The God who is reflected in the Church should be a God whose business is always to seek inclusion rather than exclusion.  This is not to suggest that God does not demand holiness and righteousness; only that God's desire is to create a mechanism for the unholy and unrighteous to become holy and righteous through participation in the Body of Christ, the Church.  And that means that we, as part of the Church universal, should be about the business of including, reflecting the nature of the God who seeks nothing but inclusion.