Thoughts on canceling, calling out and Jesus

For those daring enough to follow national news there's something on the hunt, a term that sizzles like an arrow loosed from an archer's bow. Beware, lest it strike you. The term is “cancel culture.” Defined as “a modern form of ostracism in which someone is thrust out of social or professional circles — either online on social media, in the real world, or both.” The reason being that person, that business, said or did something recently or in the past that doesn't align with the views of those doing the canceling.

Cancel culture is also known as “call-out culture.” There are times, honestly, when there are things to call out. Jesus offers an example of this in the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. She wanted some of the “living water” that He said He could give her — water “springing up to eternal life.”

But first she had to do something. Jesus told her to go call her husband. She told Him she had no husband. He said she was telling the truth — she'd had five husbands and the one she was with at the time was not her husband. Her reputation was shredded — which was why she was alone drawing water when He met up with her.

He stated all this as a matter of fact. No disdain. The woman was shocked. How did He know so much about her. She'd only just encountered Him at the well. She called the whole town to “Come, see a man who told me all the things that I have done. This is not the Christ, is it?” Jesus ended up staying two days in that village teaching about the kingdom of God, and how it brings a new way of seeing and doing and being.

The one thing Jesus did not do — though He called out the woman's lifestyle — was cancel her. Everybody's got shadow secrets. Sometimes they get found out, sometimes they don’t. But they are never hidden from God.

Jesus named hypocrisy wherever He saw it. He made the hypocrites in His day highly uncomfortable. He's caused me to squirm in my life when it shows up. But He always, always leaves the door open for people to change. To acknowledge the wrong and start living a new story. It's an old fashioned word with no expiration date — repentance.

And repentance has a mate. Forgiveness. It's what Jesus came to do on this earth. Why He gave His life — not to cancel me for “all the things that I have done,” but — when I ask — to forgive those things. The Bible says they are permanently gone — as if they never were.

God's cancel culture through Christ looks very different from what the world's got going.