Here is something you can go and check yourself, and it takes about an afternoon.
Somebody can go through all four gospels, every word Jesus says, hunting for the word he used for people outside his group. The word that marks them as a kind. The word a person says about someone right before doing something to them.
There is no such word. He never said one.
It sounds small. It is not. Almost every group of people that has ever decided some folks are inside and some are outside has come up with a word. It is one of the most reliable things our species does. We make the word first, and the word makes the rest easier.
What a word like that is for
A word like that does one job. It turns a person into a type, and then it hands you permission.
You do not have to look at the man in front of you and decide what you owe him. You already know what he is. The word did the deciding before you got there. Everything after that stops being a choice and becomes a rule you are following.
That is why the word always comes first. Not the violence. The word.
He had every opportunity
Jesus lived inside a world full of hard walls, and he named them out loud. He says "Gentile." He says "Samaritan." He says "Roman" things and "tax collector" and he knows exactly who is standing where.
He saw those lines clearly and said so. Naming a group was never the problem, and it would be dishonest to pretend he avoided it. He named groups all the time.
The thing that is missing is the next step. The step where the name becomes a reason.
Because you are that, I may do this to you.
Go looking for that move on his lips. It is not in the four books.
And watch which direction he turned
This is the part that is hard to explain away, and it is the reason the observation holds up.
Jesus used harsh language. Really harsh. He called people hypocrites. He called them a nest of snakes. He told a group of respected men they were painted tombs, lovely on the outside and full of bones.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. (Matthew 23:27)
The people he is talking to are worth knowing. Scribes were the trained men who copied and taught the law. Pharisees were a serious religious movement, careful about keeping God's commands. These were the credentialed insiders. His own house. The people who would have been sitting in the best seats.
Every time his language got hot, it turned inward.
And the outsiders? They keep turning up as the good guy in his stories. A man gets beaten and left in a road, and two respectable religious men walk past him, and the one who stops is a Samaritan, a man from the group his listeners had been raised to look down on.
But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him. (Luke 10:33)
Ten men with a skin disease get healed, and one comes back to say thank you, and Luke makes a point of telling you which one.
And fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks: and he was a Samaritan. (Luke 17:16)
Harsh words aimed at the insiders. Hero parts handed to the outsiders. That is backwards from how it usually goes, and he does it over and over.
The hardest moment, left in
We do not skip the difficult ones here, so here is the one people bring up.
A woman from the region of Canaan comes to him about her daughter, and he answers her with a line about not taking the children's bread and throwing it to the dogs. It is a rough thing to hear. We are not going to soften it by telling you the word really means a household pet, because that softening does not hold up.
Here is what actually happens next. She argues back. She takes his own picture and turns it around on him, and says even the dogs get the crumbs that fall.
And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table. Then Jesus answered and said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. (Matthew 15:27-28)
She wins. He says so out loud. Her daughter is healed. And the word is never used that way again anywhere in the gospels.
A word that gets said once, that the person it was aimed at defeats in open argument, is not a category. Categories are the words that stay. That one did not stay.
Then the institution made one
Here is where the pattern comes back, and it is worth being exact about who brought it back, because the usual telling gets it wrong.
He left no word. Later, an institution built several.
For roughly the first three hundred years, the people who followed him were the ones being sorted and punished. They had no empire and no power to define anybody. Then the faith was taken up by rulers, and rulers need categories. Within a few centuries, men holding official positions had sorted the world into those inside the faith and those outside it, and had written the sorting into law. Not into sermons. Into law. Rules that made a person's standing depend on which side of a line they were born on. Marks people had to wear so a stranger could tell at a glance what they were. A church document in 1452 gave permission to take unbelievers and hold them as property forever, and the only thing that put a person into that category was not believing.
Not a crime. Not something a person had done. Membership.
That is the exact move. Because you are that, I may do this to you. The move that is missing from everything he said, signed by men who claimed him.
And it kept running for centuries. There were years where refusing to convert could cost a person their life. There were wars fought with the promise that dying in them would clear your account with God. There was a prayer said on the Friday before Easter, and of all the prayers in that service it was the one where the congregation did not kneel. A small thing. A gesture. But everybody in that room knew what it meant, and it stayed in the book until 1959.
None of that came from him. It is painful to read, and we are not going to soften it, because people were hurt and frightened and killed while it was happening, and every one of them was loved by somebody.
What that says, and what it does not say
It would be easy to read all that and conclude that Christianity is just one more religion that sorts people, no better than any other.
That is the wrong conclusion, and getting it right is the whole point of these teachings.
What happened was not his teaching working itself out. It was the opposite of his teaching, done by people who had his book open in front of them. The tribal habit is older than any of this. It was there before him, it is what he stood against, and when his movement got joined to a throne, the habit climbed back in and put his name on itself.
So the honest sentence is not Christians are guilty. The honest sentence is that an institution rebuilt the tribe, and it did it because power runs on categories. The first followers, the ones being hunted, are our witnesses here, not our defendants. They held the line when holding it was expensive.
And we are not going to turn now and point at anybody else's house. Partly because it would be cheap. Partly because this is the house whose documents we can actually read, in archives we can actually get to. The habit is not one religion's property. It is a human one, and it is exactly what he came to break.
That is why we teach his words on their own. Not because the record is clean, but because his words are the thing the record keeps failing to live up to.
What he did instead
He had one instruction about the people on the other side of the line, and it is not a complicated one.
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. (Matthew 5:44)
Notice he does not say the enemies are imaginary. He grants that they are real, that they curse you, that they hate you, that some of them treat you badly. He is not asking you to pretend.
He is telling you that even for those people, there is no word. There is no category you can put a human being in that changes what you owe them.
And for you
Maybe somebody has put you in a category. Maybe there is a word that gets used about people like you, and you know the feeling of walking into a room where somebody already decided what you are before you opened your mouth. That is a lonely thing to carry, and it is heavier than people who have never carried it understand. If you have been afraid in a room like that, that fear was not foolish. Somebody put it there.
He never had a word for you. Not one. Whatever you are, whatever side of whatever line you were born on, there is no name in anything he said that makes you less.
The people who made those words made them without him. He was doing the opposite the whole time, right out in the open, where anybody could check.
This is what we do here all week, going back through the old accounts and checking them honestly, including the parts where the check comes back against us. Come walk through them with us. There was never a word keeping you out.