A woman I know says that she married her husband before she saw what he was like during football season. His interest in the prospects for his team turned out to be what seemed to her an obsession that crowded out lesser concerns, making her wonder where the man she thought she knew had gone. He spent hours studying the news about his team and regarded missing one of their games as unthinkable. When the team did well, he was thrilled; when they did badly, he suffered. Not everyone is fanatical about a sports team, but all of us know what it means to get vicarious satisfaction from identifying with particular groups.

So, whose side are church people on? Are they more like the defenders of their own religious status who opposed Jesus or more like this prophetic disrupter of the system who says that God’s love extends to everyone? When you go into the average church, are you more likely to hear words of judgment against those with different beliefs or ways of living or expressions of love for them? Are Christians more like the Pharisees in thinking that God should punish the wicked severely or more like Jesus in thinking that everyone should receive mercy and forgiveness?

If you start thinking you’re one of the good guys, the problem may not be that you brag about it, but that the real truth is much less clear than this simplistic portrayal. If we think it is clear, we probably lack a significant degree of self-awareness. The Pharisee is in many respects a great guy, one of the best. But he’s just too sure about where he comes out in the scale of goodness. On the other hand, it’s blindingly obvious to the tax collector that he’s not one of the good guys. But in his self-awareness is the potential for something better.

His [Jesus’s] message has been described as a “great reversal” in which those who are benefitting from privileged status lose their benefits and those who are weak and vulnerable are elevated. In this “upside down” kingdom Jesus announces that one achieves greatness not by advancing to the top of the social hierarchy, but by acts of service to the community. Given this kind of message, it is not surprising that the wealthy and privileged of Jewish society opposed Jesus and ultimately killed him. He was a danger to a social order in which they were deeply invested and wanted to preserve. While his message might have been good news to those at the bottom, it was not good news for them.

The earliest critics of Christianity saw this movement as a threat to the established order. Central to that threat was the way Christians insisted on affirming that all persons have great worth, regardless of their social class, ethnic heritage, or gender. Underlying Christian thinking was a belief that even those at the lowest levels of society can be full participants in a new humanity in which they share in the divine nature through Christ.

For many years I have been in churches that reject the idea of female subordination. In these churches there are two general approaches to dealing with biblical texts that might suggest otherwise. One is to argue that the hierarchical way of understanding things misconstrues what biblical authors were saying. Another is to claim that while biblical authors sometimes gave instructions that involved cultural assumptions about the place of women that reflected standard ways of thinking of the time, those assumptions should not be taken as divine requirements for us.

Robert Brownson was a professor of New Testament who had taken what he calls a “moderate traditional position” on biblical teaching about same-sex sexuality. But his thinking on the topic was challenged when his eighteen-year-old son revealed that he thought he was gay. As Brownson considered his previous views in relation to a person he knew very well, those views came to seem to him shallow and unhelpful. In the end he wrote a book in which he did a major rethinking of biblical teaching about gender and sexuality.