Most of us are familiar with Grimm’s fairy tale of the princess and the frog. A prince, having fallen under the hex of a witch, was changed into a frog, and a frog he would have to remain until a certain princess should take him home and share her table and bed with him. Only then would he be a prince again.
Each day the frog sat by a spring in the forest lamenting his fate. One hot day the princess retired into the coolness of the forest, tossing a golden ball into the air as she went. As she came to the spring she inadvertently dropped the ball, and it fell into the depths of the pool. All attempts to retrieve it proved in vain. Seizing the opportunity, the frog volunteered to fetch the precious ball, provided the princess would promise to grant a request of his. In hopes of getting back the golden ball, the princess hastily agreed. Thereupon the frog dove to the bottom of the pool and soon produced the golden ball. In her excitement over recovering the treasure, the princess dashed home happily, forgetting her promise to the hapless frog. As the story turns out, not until later—and after the persistent efforts of both the frog and her own father—was the princess persuaded to keep faith with the frog.
Most of us, I think, are inclined to criticize the princess for lapsing in her promise to the frog. But we know something the princess does not know: namely, that the frog is actually a prince in the shape of a frog. That, the princess does not know. To her the frog is merely a frog. The thought of the little beast eating off the same plate with her causes each bite of food to stick in her throat; the thought of having to share the clean linen on her bed with the cold creature throws her into spasms of repulsion.
Who of us, had we known only what the princess knew, would have reacted differently? It is hard to embrace the unlovely: not simply a frog, but perhaps a spouse in an ugly mood, or a defiant child, or a work associate who opposes us—let alone the dirty, the sick, and the dying of our world.
One cannot help being impressed in reading the Gospels that Jesus responded differently to the unlovely than we normally do. Rather than avoidance or condemnation, Jesus accepted—indeed, embraced—the unlovely. Such embraces not only broke dramatically with the people of his day, but they contributed in no small measure to his sentence of death.
Jesus And Children
The Gospels reveal three such embraces of Jesus. The first was his embrace of children, and it represents Jesus’ concern for those who had not yet “arrived” in Jewish society. A second was his embrace of a leper. This embrace represents Jesus’ solidarity not simply with those who had not yet arrived, but those who could never arrive. This embrace included all who were either disinherited or outcast, ranging from women and Geniles to the sick and lame, sinners and tax collectors, and even the leprous. Finally, Jesus embraced a cross, and in so doing he embraced the sins of the world, the very ugliness that separates us from God himself. Consider, first of all, Jesus’ embrace of children.
“And they were bringing children to him, that he might touch them; and the disciples rebuked them. But when Jesus saw it he was indignant, and said to them, ‘Let the children come to me, do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.’ And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands upon them” (Mark 10:13–16).
What, we might ask, was so unusual about Jesus putting his arms around children? And why did his disciples attempt to prevent the little ones from coming to him? Is not the maternal instinct a universal instinct of sorts, compelling us to show tenderness to children? Do not human relief organizations appeal to this instinct by showing the pitiful faces of starving children? Do not political candidates secure our votes by kissing the heads of babies?
We would be quite mistaken if we assumed that the society of Jesus’ day viewed children with the same affection ours does. In her book A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman says that in the Middle Ages no element of society received less attention than children. And for good reason: with an infant mortality rate of 50 percent, adults could scarcely afford an excessive emotional involvement with the young. When a child of seven was considered a miniature adult and expected to perform a full day’s work, sentimentality over children had little chance to blossom.
So it was in Jesus’ day. The rabbis considered children, like women, to be members of the people of God by virtue of their association with adult male members of the family. True, a newborn boy of eight days was circumcised as a sign of this covenant relationship, but it was not until he was 13 that he was considered to have reached an age of religious maturity and granted full status in the synagogue. One would have to search long and hard in ancient Jewish society to find any benevolence toward the young comparable to Jesus’ embracing and blessing of children. W. C. Fields is said to have once remarked sarcastically, “Anyone who hates children and dogs can’t be all bad.” Presumably, people in Jesus’ day would have found little, if anything, humorous or objectionable about that quip. In Jewish society a child reached maturity when he could understand and assent to the Torah. Jesus, on the other hand, embraced the children. More than that, he declared them models of the kingdom of God—precisely because they had nothing to show for themselves and were most likely to receive God’s kingdom as a gift of grace.
Jesus And Outcasts
“And a leper came to him beseeching him, and kneeling said to him, ‘If you will, you can make me clean.’ Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I will; be clean.’ And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean” (Mark 1:40–42).
We live in a society that institutionalizes the insane, deformed, and seriously crippled, and as a consequence, we may find it difficult to conceive of the vast social contrasts of Jesus’ day. Much as in many Third World countries today, the rich and poor, the fit and deformed, the clean and dirty in Jewish society lived in close proximity.
But proximity did not necessarily lead to contact or community; instead, it often led to increased separation among the various social classes. In the case of leprosy, the Old Testament prescribed the following regulations: “The leper who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry, ‘Unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean; he shall dwell alone in the habitation outside the camp” (Lev. 13:45–46).
As if this condition were not humiliating enough, Josephus and some of the rabbis intensified the plight of the leper, referring to him as a “living corpse,” whose cure was difficult as resurrection from the dead (see Num. 12:12).
In Mark’s story, the leper compounded his offensiveness: not only did he embody a dread contagion (so it was thought), but, so great was his longing to be healed, he broke through the prescribed zone of separation between himself and others and came right up to Jesus. In a sense, Jesus’ response was offensive also. Rather than countering this social blunder with spit, stones, or curses, Jesus reached out and touched him, saying, “Be clean.” That touch did more than heal a physical ailment. It made it possible for one who had had to abandon his clothes, home, hygiene, family and friends, and even his relationship with the people of God—in short, one who had been banished to nonexistence—to return to himself, to human society, and to God.
Jesus And The Cross
Finally, Jesus’ strangest embrace was that of a cross.
“So they took Jesus, and he went out, bearing his cross, to the place called the place of a skull, which is called in Hebrew Golgotha. There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them.” (John 19:17–18).
There is no record in antiquity of a nobleman suffering the penalty of death by crucifixion. On the contrary, crucifixion was reserved for the most despised elements of society—rebellious foreigners, violent criminals, and especially slaves. It was a barbaric form of execution of the utmost cruelty, and was practiced by the Romans especially as a deterrent against slave uprisings. Appian, a Roman writer, informs us that when Crassus quashed the slave revolt of Spartacus in 71 B.C. he crucified 6,000 slaves along the Via Appia from Rome to Capua, a distance of well over 100 miles. With this in mind, one can scarcely escape Paul’s striking contrast when he spoke of Christ’s preexistent glory compared with his earthly humility: “He was in the form of God … but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant … and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6–8).
The Gospels tell us that Jesus predicted he would go to Jerusalem to die on a cross, and that, in fact, he spent his dying breath crucified between two criminals on the Hill of the Skull. Why did Jesus embrace a cross? He embraced a cross for the same reason he embraced children, women, the poor, sick, and outcast: out of love for the unlovely. In truth, it was not his cross but ours that he bore. Peter says, “He bore our sins in his body on the cross, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by his wounds you were healed” (1 Peter 2:24).
Embraces Of A Real God
The strange embraces of Jesus! Each shares something in common with the others. Each is an embrace of those who, in the words of the Beatitudes, are “poor in spirit” (Matt. 5:3). Each is an attempt to “seek and save the lost” (Luke 19:10). And each is what may be called an “ultimate embrace”—that is, either God or nothing. With each embrace Jesus conveyed the same thing, that everything can be expected from God where all hopes have been exhausted from man.
It is not surprising that the people of Jesus’ day found such embraces hard to accept, for they had rejected the strange embraces of God before. Hosea writes, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me; … Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms; but they did not know that I healed them” (Hos. 11:1–3).
There is, indeed, an attitude that disdains the tangible overtures of God in human life. The elder brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son had such an attitude: his father should not have embraced such a worthless son. Once the Jews had shunned God’s embrace of themselves, they found it harder to tolerate his embracing of others. In the history of religion, especially “enlightened religion,” one sometimes meets the view that God is above our troubled world and too holy to condescend to real life. Helmut Thielicke has this to say in his book, I Believe:
“Tell me how lofty God is for you, and I’ll tell you how little he means to you.… It is certainly remarkable, but it is true. God has become of concern to me only because he has made himself smaller than the Milky Way, only because he is present in my little sickroom when I gasp for breath, or understands the little cares I cast on him, or takes seriously the request of a child for a scooter with balloon tires.… If God has no significance for the tiny mosaic-pieces of my little life, for the things that concern me, then he doesn’t concern me at all.”
The strange embraces of Jesus reach out for the needy, the forgotten, and the forsaken of each generation. They extend to those whose problems surpass human abilities to solve. The embraces of Jesus encompass both our personal and global inpoverishment, if only we come, like the children or the leper, knowing our need of them. His embraces demonstrate that God is a real God, committed to the needs of a real world.
Tim Stafford is a free-lance writer living in Santa Rosa, California. He is a distinguished contributor to several magazines. His latest book is Do You Sometimes Feel Like a Nobody? (Zondervan, 1980).
