Perhaps due to the hardness they had to undergo, the Jewish traditions (biblical) maintained a hostility in their worldview. It was justified by their theology and cherished by spirituality. Nature was hostile, people of other nations were hostile. The other people are not of God, and so, our god hates them. God allows them to overpower Israel because of sins. These 'sins' were often the projection of unbearable hostility to one's own self. Women were unclean, inimical, and evil because they were seducers, and men were lured by foreign women. This suspicious closure was well maintained by a retributive ethics and theology. Even the salvation brought by Christ underwent an interpretative frame based on this hostility, ransom, and retribution.
Jesus did not proclaim this hostility. Instead, he showed human brokenness and vulnerability as a sacramental possibility in our everyday life. Those condemned and unclean were raised to hold the joy of the kingdom. The kingdom would sprout like a seed. Touch of grace will give new streams to our inner richness. Vulnerabilities and tears were seen as matters of condemnation and signs of God's curse. Now in the light of the gospel, they are time and space of an embrace of God, the holy ground.
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