The school playground can be a cruel place. Everybody wants to be friends with the best-looking and most intelligent kids; no-one wants to be friends with the kids who are ugly or less academically gifted. Some kids get to be the centre of attention and are invited to all the parties; others are ignored. The discrimination continues into adulthood. We like to fly with the eagles and hang round with winners; no-one wants to waste time flapping round with the turkeys.
It wasn’t like that for Jesus. Each person that Jesus met mattered to him, regardless of their status in the estimation of the rest of the world. Chapter 5 of Mark’s account of the Good News describes Jesus’s encounter with a wild man who was possessed by demons and an outcast from society. Other people saw him as a wild and scary man, someone to be feared and avoided; Jesus saw him as someone important, created in the image of God and loved by him.
How different would life be if we made a greater effort to engage with people we find scarey, unattractive, different from us, and unlikely to be “useful” to us? What if we stopped hanging round exclusively with people that we want to get something from – status, or business contacts, or even love – and started hanging around with people who have nothing to give us? Maybe we would end up being less popular and poorer, but we would certainly be richer in the only way that counts.