When I was a teenager, there were people with certain diseases whom everyone was scared to get near, and in every generation, there are people who are hated because of what they do for a living, what they believe, or where they come from. Last week, we saw how Jesus dealt with the hated Samaritans, and this week we are going to talk about Princess Diana and Mother Theresa–two ladies who reached out to people whom others hated.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.
Last week’s teaching would have been shocking to most of the Jewish people in Jesus’s day because they had been taught all of their lives to hate the Samaritans and that hatred went back like eight hundred years to when God sent the Assyrians to the Northern Kingdom of Israel to kick them out of His Land. Remember that God promised it to Abraham and His descendants, but He also told them that if they didn’t treat Him, their neighbors, and the Land like He wanted that He could send them away. And He has on multiple occasions. The Land belongs to God and He loans it out or grants it to His people to use, but they weren’t allowed to sell it or be oppressive on it. That means that when Solomon made slaves out of God’s people to build all the stuff he wanted to build, God wasn’t happy about it. God rescues slaves, and Solomon forgot about that I suppose. Solomon also married a ton of women from other countries who didn’t want to worship our God and Solomon had his Hebrew slaves build them a bunch of temples so they could worship whomever they wanted. The Kingdom of Israel split once King Solomon died and the northern Kingdom started building idols almost immediately, and the southern Kingdom of Judah, where Solomon had lived and died, already had been building idols and temples because of Solomon’s wives. It was mostly downhill from there, with a few good kings sprinkled here and there. But once God had enough—and He was patient for hundreds of years—and the people began killing the prophets He sent them to warn them, God sent in armies to war against them and they were mostly all taken far away to live in other countries like Babylonia and Assyria. It was like, “Hey, you want other gods? Go for it, you will get sick of them really quick. I am treating you to a fake god buffet!”
The Assyrians moved the Israelites out of the Land, sent new people into the northern Kingdom of Israel and, along with the poor people they left behind as farmers in the land, they became the Samaritans because their capital city was Samaria. At first, wild animals were eating the people because God wasn’t holding them back anymore. The Assyrians sent Israelite priests back into the Land to teach the people how to worship but the problem was that those priests were already used to doing things the absolute wrong way. They had changed the place where God was worshiped, but it looks like they did well enough in teaching the people how to serve God that the animals stopped eating them. They didn’t know they weren’t doing it right because that’s the way it had been for hundreds of years. I guess God appreciated the fact that they were at least trying. Because of rivalries over the five hundred years before Jesus was born, because of nasty stuff done on both sides actually, they were bitter enemies when Jesus talked to that Samaritan woman. But Jesus was respectful and kind, which surprised her. I suppose that’s what Jesus was talking about when He told us to bless our enemies. If He had been mean then she would have gotten her water and gone back home—or maybe she would have just gone home. Because He was good and kind to her and was willing to drink out of her bucket, He was also invited to preach to her neighbors and was able to win them over. Not only that, but right before Jesus went back to God in the book of Acts, He told His followers to preach the story of His Kingdom to the Samaritans too!!! Wow! He was saying, “the time for hating these people is OVER. I want them to follow me the same as you do.”
It’s important to understand that, because the Samaritans were foreigners. They lived between the Galilee, where Jesus grew up, and Judah, where Jesus was born. They were neighbors who didn’t want to act like neighbors but Jesus made sure everyone knew that things needed to change, starting with Him! You know what? People hated that message, and they still do. It was ten years before anyone went out to preach to the Romans—they thought preaching to Samaritans was bad enough, even though when Philip came to teach them, they listened and believed and were very happy. So, we see how Jesus treats outsiders and enemies who are foreigners. How will He treat people who are enemies and outsiders but are still Jews? This week we’ll talk about lepers and tax collectors—two very different groups of Jews in the first century.
Lepers were people who had a certain mystery skin condition. We have no idea what it was because the way it is described doesn’t look much like what we call leprosy today. Lepers in Jesus’s time looked more like zombies with ashy white skin that made them look dead. But of course, they weren’t zombies, they were ordinary people who had skin diseases. In Hebrew, it is called tsara’at (t-sah-rah-aht). People with leprosy had to stay outside of their towns and if people came near them, they would have to cover their faces and shout, “unclean, unclean!” What a terrible life! God gave Moses’s sister Miriam leprosy when she was being mean to Moses about his wife. And Aaron was doing the same thing too—being mean to Moses. They were all like, “Hey, God talks to us too, dude. We give people messages from God, too!” God got pretty darned angry and told them to all come stand before the Tent of Meeting and He said to them, “Yeah, I talk to you guys in dreams and visions but when I talk to Moses, it’s real talk, face to face. No riddles for Moses! So why do you think I am just going to put up with you bad-mouthing him?” When God went away, Miriam was all covered with white skin that her brother Aaron described as being ‘half-eaten away.’ Moses begged God to forgive them and although God healed her, she still had to stay outside of the camp until she was clean again. Yikes. Oh, and why didn’t Aaron get leprosy? Because he was high priest and that couldn’t happen to him. Kinda unfair but it wasn’t God playing favorites. Aaron got lucky because a high priest can’t be defiled like that or he can’t ever be high priest again! Another person in the Bible had leprosy too, and he was healed by God when he took seven baths in the Jordan River. But being healed wasn’t normal, which is why what Jesus did was so cool.
In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we see Jesus healing people who were lepers—meaning they had leprosy. In Matthew, right after teaching His most famous lesson, a man with leprosy came up to Him, knelt down on the ground, and said, “Lord, if you want to, you can make me clean!” Jesus was like, “Of course I want to!” He touched the man and said, “Be clean!” And all of a sudden the man was better and Jesus told him to go to the Temple, to the priests, and to make the offerings for being clean to show the priests that something amazing was happening! But He told the man not to go blabbing to everyone about what Jesus had done—just to the priests. Mark and Luke tell the same story, but they also mention that the man did go all around blabbing about what Jesus had done and it got so bad that Jesus couldn’t go anywhere without being mobbed by people wanting to be healed. Jesus loved healing people but He came to tell people about the Kingdom of Heaven—which He couldn’t do if everyone was surrounding Him begging to be healed.
In Luke, we have two interesting stories. In one, we see Jesus and His followers on their way to Jerusalem so they had to go by Samaria and ten men ran up to Him, begging for mercy. Jesus looked at them and said, “Go show yourselves to the priests,” and they walked away. As they obeyed and walked toward Jerusalem, they found out that they were healed. Just one of the ten men turned around, returned to Jesus and praised God. Jesus was surprised that only one of the ten men came back to thank Him, and the one who did it was a Samaritan! Before all of this, near the beginning of Luke, Jesus was teaching from the Hebrew Bible in His hometown of Nazareth. The synagogue leader handed Him the huge Isaiah scroll and Jesus unrolled it until He came to the part talking about Him, the Messiah: The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has chosen me to preach and teach about God’s good news to the people who are poor. He has sent me to set the captives free and to tell the blind that they will see again, to set free the people who are being hurt by the rich and powerful, and to tell everyone about the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18-19) But what does all that mean? It means that God is setting wrong things right, and we know that He is doing that through Jesus, who taught that the people who are poor, hurting, and all of that are actually the blessed ones in His Kingdom, and the rich and powerful people who are hurting them aren’t gonna be really happy because they are getting all the good stuff now and won’t later. Our “now” lives here aren’t all that long compared to our “forever” lives when Jesus comes back here as King. It’s really sad to live ninety years enjoying life here while being a total gooberhead to other people when you could live forever with God, right? Jesus said this a lot, “People like that already have everything they are gonna get.” You remember, like the Rich Man who was mean to Lazarus.
And the people of Nazareth, who weren’t rich, were amazed and loved His teachings, until…Jesus got really real with them. He said, “Lemme guess, you are going to tell me that you want to see all the miracles I did in Capernaum? Well, no prophet of God is going to be popular in the town where He grew up. But, during the famine in the time of Elijah, there were so many starving widows but Elijah only fed the one in Tsidon (where the wicked Jezebel came from), and there were a whole lot of lepers in the time of Elisha, but the only one who ever got cured of it was Namaan from the Assyrians.” And that was when they decided they wanted to kill Him by throwing Him off the hill their town was built on. But why? Wasn’t it good that God had mercy on those people? Well, those people were the enemies of Israel and it made Jesus’s neighbors angry to hear that God ignored them and healed and fed foreigners instead. It makes people angry when they hear that God loves the people they don’t want Him to love. That widow and her son felt hunger the exact same way as everyone else did, so why shouldn’t God be kind to them? And the Syrian commander suffered from leprosy just as much as anyone else did. And they knew all this from the Bible because they hear it in the synagogues and in school. But when Jesus put it like that, saying that on those two occasions, God only blessed outsiders, it was too much for them to bear. They got so angry that they forgot how amazed they were at what He taught a few minutes earlier. People do that today too, and especially on social media and even in church. Jesus wasn’t wrong about the Bible, of course, but what the Bible said made them angry and they wanted to take it out on Him. These were people who had played with Him as a kid and everything.
Jesus often touched people that no one thought He should touch. But Jesus wasn’t scared to touch people. Jesus knew that people need to be touched—like how He was hugging those little kids even though His disciples were trying to get rid of them. Whenever Jesus touches us, it is always a good touch. The best touch! And like we talked about last week, Jesus wasn’t a big fan of the social rules that weren’t very loving. Jesus came to show us what God is like and God is love. God isn’t afraid to come near to us, just like Jesus came near all those lepers and demon possessed people. Back in the 1990’s, there were two amazing women who died on the same day—they changed the way people felt about touching the people who needed to be touched. The first was Mother Teresa, a Catholic Nun who worked in Calcutta, India, and touched and fed people who the rest of the country thought of as “untouchable” not because they did anything wrong but because they were born into families who were considered to be the lowest of the low. They did the jobs no one else could or would do. No one cared at all about them. They were hated. But Mother Teresa taught the whole world that loving them is what Jesus would do. The second woman is Princess Diana, who hugged a small child with AIDS back when we thought that was too dangerous to do. And it was in all of the newspapers. I remember how shocking that was, that this beautiful princess would hug a child with a disease lots of people were dying from and everyone was terrified of getting. It wasn’t like COVID, it was way worse but not as many people were getting it. The people who were touched by Mother Teresa and Princess Diana were like lepers, and I remember when I was in college they were talking about putting all of the AIDS patients in their own city with a cage around it—no matter if they were young or old. I am super glad we didn’t do that. We were just super scared and didn’t know much yet, but scared people can be really dangerous—just like angry people can and especially if they want to throw you off a hill like they tried to with Jesus when He told them that God blesses who He blesses and that is that!
Another group that Jesus would hang around with was the rich tax collectors and the sinful people who would party with them. Tax collectors weren’t like IRS agents in my country. They didn’t have accountants figuring out how much you owed. Instead, people who were already wealthy bought themselves a job collecting money to give to the Roman government. And they took that money from farmers, fishermen, etc. If they couldn’t pay their taxes, then they had to sell their land and if they were lucky, they got to keep working that land as tenants so at least they wouldn’t starve to death. But most of what they grew went to the tax collectors and to the new landowners. Now, if the tax collectors only took as much as Rome told them to, it would be bad enough, but the way these guys really made money was by taking more than they were supposed to and putting the extra into their own pockets. The only way for tax collectors to get richer was to steal money from others. And when we look at the stories in the Bible about tax collectors, we see them spending that money on expensive dinner parties with the only kinds of people who would hang out with them—other sinners. Those sinners were people who the Pharisees would certainly never be caught dead partying with. Or even saying hello to!
So, when Jesus started hanging around with Matthew and Zaccheus and their sinner friends, everyone was very surprised. Some people said, “If He was really from God, no way would He eat with these people. “ Others asked Jesus’s disciples, “Why does your teacher hang around with those sinners?” But when Jesus ate with them, something amazing happened—they started following God again and one even became one of Jesus’s twelve closest disciples, named Matthew. After all, these people were all Jews or at least most probably were and so they knew about the God of Israel but for one reason or another, they got caught up living really terrible lives. But when Jesus talked about the Kingdom of Heaven and told them that the ways they were living was destroying them, but that God just wants them to repent and come back to Him, well it was probably the first time some of them had ever even been spoken to by a man of God. Remember how we have talked about hospitality in the ancient world? Eating at the same table with someone else was like sharing your toothbrush. If you ate with someone else, it was like you were saying, “These people are alright in my book!” When Jesus invited Himself over to the house of Zaccheus, no one could believe it and especially not Zaccheus but by the time the feast was over, Zaccheus was promising to be an honest man and wanted to pay back the people he took too much money from. When the Pharisees asked why Jesus was eating with Matthew and his friends, Jesus said that sick people are the only ones who needed doctors and not healthy people, and then He said that they needed to learn what it meant when the Bible said that God would rather have mercy instead of sacrifices. In other words, God wants us to be compassionate and kind and gentle with one another a whole lot more than He wants people performing rituals at the Temple. Boy howdy, those rituals are a whole lot easier than being kind when we want to be nasty, right? I bet the Pharisees didn’t like that any more than the people in Nazareth liked what Jesus had to say about the poor widow and the leper.
Now, some people will say that Jesus was in there yelling at them and ranting and being mean but I have a question about that. Don’t you think that if Jesus was yelling at them, that the Pharisees wouldn’t have complained about it? I figure they would have been outside making happy noises every time Jesus insulted one of those sinners. I know that, even though religious people have often been very mean to me, God never has. Neither has Jesus. Now, sometimes they tell me that I am out of line and need to go apologize, which I hate, but they haven’t ever been mean about it. For a long time, I assumed they were always angry with me and yelling about me, but then one night as I was praying, I heard God ask me, “Have I ever been mean to you?” And I thought about it and realized He never had. That was what I assumed because of how humans treated me when they were annoyed or I did something wrong or even just made a mistake. Knowing that God isn’t always mad at me made it a lot easier for me to trust Him and to be completely honest with Him. I think that’s how the tax collectors and other sinners felt when they sat and ate with Jesus, probably for the first time in their lives. Although they didn’t know it, they were eating with God’s own son who created them and loved them and wanted them to learn to live better lives. Love goes a lot farther than anger and yelling. Usually, the only sorts of people who stop doing bad stuff when they are yelled at are the people who don’t do so much really bad stuff. When you yell at someone who is really awful, they mostly don’t care, right? The thing about God is that He is absolutely wise and He knows exactly how to get through to each of us so that we can hear Him, understand Him, and even want to change. That’s what eating with Jesus must have been like, like He was speaking each person’s language in just the perfect way. Jesus often treated sinners better than He treated the religious leaders.
When He was with the Pharisees and scribes, the religious experts and Bible experts, He held them to a higher standard because they knew their Bibles and they were richer than most of the Jews and had more time to learn to do things right. But people like that can sometimes get busy making really difficult social rules that they expected everyone else to follow. Last week, we learned about the difference between Bible commandments and social rules—social rules aren’t in the Bible but they are the way groups of people agree to live with each other. Social rules tell people who does and doesn’t belong in the group and so when a bunch of rich guys who could read and write when most everyone else couldn’t, it’s very easy for them to make rules that are easy for themselves to keep but harder for normal people. They wouldn’t even eat a meal at someone else’s house unless they were absolutely positive that those people were tithing on their food crops perfectly. They judged people as worthy or unworthy based upon obeying their extra rules and no one should do such a thing and especially to people who weren’t rich and spent so much time working that they had no time for Bible study and didn’t even have Bibles anyway and most couldn’t read even if they did. The Rabbis would later call them the “people of the land,” or Am Ha’aretz—and it wasn’t a compliment. It meant they were too ignorant to know how to live according to the rules they had set up. They even claimed that their rules came straight from Moses even though they weren’t written in the Bible at all. But they aren’t alone because people all over the world will tell us that what they are doing is the way it should be done and always has been done when mostly they don’t know.
If you ever read something from Wiccans, or neo-pagans or whatever other group is out there, they will tell you that their religion is older than anything the Jews and Christians do but they aren’t telling the truth. They probably think they are but very few people are educated about ancient religion and so they look at what they are doing and don’t realize that their special days and rituals are only a few hundred years old and were taken out of fictional books. It’s like they are playing pretend, and when they say that their religion is older than Judaism or Christianity, they are just repeating what other people have told them. But more and more people who call themselves pagans and believe they are serving mother goddesses and magic and all of that are becoming educated as historians and are writing about the truth. It has almost nothing to do with what the Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Druids were doing. Hopefully that will help some of them look at Jesus, because He came to us before any of their religions came to be.
I love you. I am praying for you. I want you to spend some time thinking about who you would be more merciful to if you were more like Jesus, and who you would expect a lot more from. All that being said, I don’t want you going alone to dinner parties without your parents, okay? That’s not generally a good idea. Jesus was a grown man and He could work miracles, I want you to be safe and smart until you are old enough to make those kinds of decisions for yourselves.