And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? (Matthew 5:47 ESV) You can’t enlarge your network, if you are doing the same things over and over with the same exact people. You can’t expand your experiences, if you ignore everybody else in the room that you don’t know and cling to the people and things that you do know. Jesus, in his famous Sermon on the Mount, says some of the most difficult and counter-intuitive cultural things one can say, and then expects us to live them out. He says, “Love the enemy who is trying to kill you,” and also, “Pray for your persecutors.” In other words, he’s saying that it’s time to greet people you don’t know: go beyond your traditional set of friends, go out of your way for people who wouldn’t really fit into your crowd of people, and love these people more than others would. You have to do more than others do, to love them. Specifically, you have to do more than people who are not known to be friendly, and be friendly to people who don’t necessarily know to love you just yet. Jesus tells a bunch of Jewish people in the first century that they are no different than everybody else in the world, and inserts the haunting question: if they are no different, then are they really called as God’s people, who are set apart? Likewise, if we are Christians and called out from ordinary, mundane lives and into a new life, awaiting inheritance as a child of God, then shouldn’t we be doing more in terms of expanding our greetings to people outside of our circles? The answer is: absolutely, yes. We need to do more to be love, to people who need love. How can you show love today?
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