Jesus Is Awkwardly Exclusive, Radically Inclusive, and Stubbornly Objective

A Diagnosis

If you pick up a Bible and start to read the New Testament, the first book you’ll read is Matthew’s Gospel. If you get as far as chapter 9, you’ll come to the part where Matthew shares how he met Jesus. Like Jesus, Matthew was Jewish. But unlike Jesus, Matthew was a tax collector, working for the Roman overlords to gather taxes from his fellow Jews. The tax collectors were hated by their fellow countrymen. They profited from the exploitation of their own people and typically extorted extra cash to line their own pockets, so they were shunned by other Jews. But strangely, Jesus called Matthew to be one of his core followers, and even more strangely, Matthew left his tax collector booth and followed Jesus.

When Jesus went to dinner at Matthew’s house, “many tax collectors and sinners” came to the dinner too (Matt. 9:10). A group of ardently religious Jews known as the Pharisees were horrified. They asked Jesus’s disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” (Matt. 9:11). It was a fair question. Jesus was supposed to have been sent by God. And here he was surrounded by the most notoriously sinful people of his day. In our terms, it would be like a famous pastor walking straight into the sketchiest casino in Las Vegas.

Jesus’s response to the Pharisees’ critique is striking: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick [need one]. Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt. 9:12–13). Jesus has a point. It’s when we’re struck with cancer that we need a doctor, not when we’re well. If Jesus is the spiritual doctor sent by God, he didn’t come for people who are good but for the morally diseased. The tax collectors were the spiritual lepers of their day: their sickness was on show for all to see. But Jesus’s comment about mercy leaves us with a nagging question, What about the Pharisees?

How Church Could (Literally) Save Your Life

Rebecca McLaughlin

Rebecca McLaughlin presents scientific evidence that weekly church attendance guards against depression, increases mental and physical well-being, and extends life expectancy. Most importantly, it gives people the chance to meet the Great Physician, who alone offers eternal life.

I wonder where you see yourself in Matthew’s story. I don’t know whether you believe there’s a God who made the universe or not. But if we imagine for a moment that there is, I wonder if you think that God would see you as a “righteous” or “good” person? Not perfect, certainly. But maybe (like the Pharisees) you see yourself as good enough to be on the right side of God.

Or maybe you identify more with the tax collectors. Perhaps you have a sneaking fear that if there’s a God who judges human lives, you might be in his bad books. That was how my best friend, Rachel, felt when she first became convinced that God exists. She was an undergrad at Yale University, and an atheist. But one day, as Rachel sat reading a book about Christianity in the library, she suddenly became convinced that God is real. It was a terrifying moment. She knew that she was sinful. She was greedy, selfish, mean, deceitful, irreligious, and sexually immoral—she’d even stolen the book on Christianity that she was reading! Rachel was a straight-up tax collector. But if you read through Matthew’s Gospel—or the other three biographies of Jesus’s life included in the Bible— you’ll find that Jesus’s diagnosis of our spiritual state is bad news not just for the tax collector types like Rachel but also for the most clean-living, seemingly religious citizens. Alarmingly, like a sophisticated imaging device that sees through all our outer layers, Jesus diagnoses spiritual cancer deep in all our hearts (Mark 7:20–23).

You may be thinking, Listen, I’m not perfect. But I’m not a spiritual cancer case! I get why murderers, rapists, and people like that might face God’s judgment. But I’m not like them. According to Jesus, however, you and I aren’t as unlike the murderers as we might think. “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder,’” Jesus declared. “But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment” (Matt. 5:21–22). We may not express our anger with the violent extreme of murder. But when you hear the stories of the kinds of people who do kill, you begin to entertain the uncomfortable thought that if you’d lived their life, you might have chosen murder too. The global bestseller The Secret History tells the story of a group of college students who conspire in cold blood to murder one of their best friends. The narrator (one of the same students) tells us he doesn’t think of himself as a bad person, and as we walk step-by-step with him toward the murder, we see how he got there and wonder if we would’ve trod that path as well.

Likewise, we may hear about harmful sexual behavior and think, I’m not like that. But Jesus says that if we take an honest look inside our hearts, we’ll find we’re not so different. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ ” Jesus told his first disciples. “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:27–28). If there’s a God who sees what happens in my heart—the selfishness, meanness, greed, shameful desires, petty jealousies, and lack of care for others’ suffering—it’s not surprising that he diagnoses me as spiritually sick. But instead of just discarding me as not worth salvaging, Jesus claims he’s the doctor who has come from God to help the most diseased.

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According to the Bible, our greatest danger isn’t that we’ll die in some horrific accident or from a crippling disease. It’s that we’ll face the righteous judgment of the God who made the universe. Our greatest need isn’t for health and wellness in this life so we can stave off death as long as possible. It’s for a Savior who can take God’s judgment for our sin upon himself and walk us right through death to everlasting life and love beyond the grave.

You may be thinking, Stop right there. You can’t expect me to believe there is a God who made the universe! Some famous scientists claim that science has disproved creation. “There is no God,” wrote Stephen Hawking in his final book. “No one created the universe and no one directs our fate.”¹ But for every famous scientist who espouses atheism, I could point you to another world-class scientist in the same field who is a follower of Jesus. For instance, one of Hawking’s closest collaborators at Cambridge, Paul Shellard, is a convinced Christian. As another Cambridge physics professor, Russell Cowburn, explains, “Understanding more of science doesn’t make God smaller. It allows us to see his creative activity in more detail.”²

If we look back at history, we’ll find that what we now call science was first developed by people who believed in the God revealed in the Bible. Just as our deep belief in universal human value is best grounded by belief in the God who gave us moral laws, so the existence of one God who made the universe according to consistent laws is the first and best foundation for the scientific method.

Some people think that because scientists seek natural (rather than supernatural) causes for natural phenomena, this means science is a signpost to atheism. But as Princeton philosopher of science Hans Halvorson explains, the project of science is to figure out the laws and principles on which the universe runs—like working out the blueprint of a house. If you managed to reconstruct the architectural design on which your house was built, you wouldn’t expect to see the outline of the architect in the design, nor would you think the absence of that outline disproved the existence of the architect.³ The architect is the creator of the blueprint, not part of the building!

So let’s imagine for a moment that there’s a God who made the universe. How can we say that Jesus is the one true revelation of that God? Many people think that (unlike scientific truths) religious claims are more like tastes. Just as different cultures enjoy different foods, the thinking goes, so Jesus can be “true for me but not for you.” But Jesus is too awkwardly exclusive, too radically inclusive, and too stubbornly objective for this approach to work.

First, Jesus is awkwardly exclusive. He claims not just that he is one way to a relationship with God but that he is the only way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). If you believe that Jesus is just one of many paths to God, you’re flatly contradicting Jesus. Like an awkward dinner guest, the Jesus of the Gospels won’t take his equal place at the religious table. He’ll stop storms, heal the sick, raise the dead, and eat with sinners. But he won’t fit in with modern platitudes about all world religions being one.

Second, Jesus is too radically inclusive. Instead of being tied to a particular culture or ethnicity, Jesus has billions of followers spread across the world—in Asia, Africa, North and South America, Europe, and Australia. The Christian church is both the world’s largest and its most diverse religious group, cutting across all barriers of race, geography, and culture.⁴ So Jesus’s claims can’t be limited to just one people group or quadrant of the world, because the Christian movement has been multicultural and multiethnic from the first. I know multiple professors at world-class universities who were raised with different religious backgrounds—Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist—but are now convinced Jesus is the only way to be made right with God. To say all religions teach the same thing isn’t respectful of the followers of different world religions. It’s ultimately disrespectful because it depends on not taking the distinct claims of any world religion seriously.

If Jesus is the spiritual doctor sent by God, he didn’t come for people who are good but for the morally diseased.

Third, the claims of Christianity are stubbornly objective. The truth of Christianity depends on a historical event: the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead. You may think it’s impossible for modern educated people to believe someone rose from death two thousand years ago. But it isn’t. In the summer of 2022, history professor and journalist Molly Worthen became a Christian. She’d been challenged by a pastor she interviewed to investigate the evidence for Jesus’s resurrection. After many months of reading books and checking footnotes, Worthen came to the conclusion that the resurrection makes the best sense of the evidence. She also realized that if this is true, it changes everything. She couldn’t just sit on the sidelines. If Jesus had defeated death, he’d also won the right to her allegiance.

Don’t get me wrong. It certainly takes faith to recognize that a first-century Jewish rabbi broke through death and is the rightful Lord of all the universe. But it isn’t a faith untethered from the evidence. Right now, I’m flying in a plane to California. When I got on this plane, it was an act of faith. I’m trusting my life to the pilot and the engineers who built the plane. My faith could be misplaced. We just had some major turbulence, and my daughter (who is traveling with me) was scared the plane would crash. I reassured her it wouldn’t. But sometimes planes do fall out of the sky. It’s possible I’m wrong to reassure her. But I have ample evidence to believe we’re safe in this metallic tube with wings and that it will get us from Boston to Los Angeles. If I went back two thousand years, however, and asked someone to sit inside a massive, hollow lump of metal with the expectation that it would take off and fly above the clouds, they’d have thought I was insane—or counting on a miracle. Today you’d think me a little odd to not believe planes can fly.

Some people think Jesus’s claims have become less and less believable with time. Sure, people in the ancient world could buy the story of a human who was also God and who rose from the dead, but we know better. In fact, if anything, the claims of Jesus have become more credible since he first made them.

When Jesus died on a Roman cross, he had just a few dozen followers. He’d claimed he was the great King whom God had promised to send to the Jewish people. But instead of being crowned, he’d been killed. A reasonable observer might have thought this little Jewish sect would fizzle out—extinguished like a cigarette by Rome. But it didn’t. Jesus never ruled an empire, raised an army, or even wrote a book. Most of his followers were poor. They weren’t the power brokers of their day. And yet, the Christian movement spread like wildfire after Jesus’s death, and it’s been growing ever since.

Today, almost a third of humans all across the globe claim to be Christians. Jesus’s teachings have shaped what even many who identify as atheist believe about morality and universal human worth. His followers birthed modern science. His four first-century biographies and the letters written by his first disciples have become the bestselling books of all time. His claim that anyone who wants to follow him must care for those in need has led to more provision and protection for the poor, oppressed, and suffering than any other influence. At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells his followers, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matt. 28:18). Two thousand years later, that claim looks, if anything, more plausible.

This article is adapted from How Church Could (Literally) Save Your Life by Rebecca McLaughlin.

Rebecca McLaughlin (PhD, Cambridge University) is the author of Confronting Christianity, named Christianity Today’s 2020 Beautiful Orthodoxy Book of the Year. Her subsequent works include 10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask (and Answer) about Christianity; The Secular Creed; and Jesus through the Eyes of Women. Rebecca is the host of the Confronting Christianity podcast.

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