Have you ever heard of the idea of the repugnant cultural other? This was new to me a couple years back. I was reading this book called How to Think, and the author of that book, Alan Jacobs, introduces us to a longtime anthropology professor at UC Santa Cruz named Susan Friend Harding. And this lady sounds like she's absolutely brilliant and very brave academically. One of the things that she decided she wanted to do all the way back when she was a graduate student was an ethnography, that is an ethnic study, a cultural study on a minority group that does life a little differently than most people. She wanted to do a study like that on fundamentalist Christians. What an interesting thing. And even the premise of that is interesting because what she's saying is that this is a group worthy of being studied in this way because they really are very different, even though they live right next door in the same community. Now, look, I know there's some of you who are like, well, I'm kind of a fundamentalist Christian. What the heck is going on here? No judgment, I'm not making any statement one way or another about who does Christianity right or wrong, or how many rules there should be, or how you should dress. I don't know any of that. I don't know. You just do whatever you want, think whatever you want. What I'm saying is that to most people in Western civilization, fundamentalist Christianity with tremendous conservatism and a little bit more orientation toward particular social and behavioral norms within the community is different. It is other to most of us. But Harding recounts running into opposition from her advisors and her professors and everything, and she sensed that they would be fine with her doing an ethnography on some barely contacted tribe in the Amazon, Ecuador or something, or some group in rural Africa, or people in the outback of Australia. But there was tremendous discomfort about the fundamentalist Christian thing. She even felt kind of criticized for considering doing it. And that was the thing that prompted her to process why we find some people groups repugnant and other people groups that maybe do things that are even more foreign to us not so repugnant. Now, if you really look at some of the very unique small human communities around the world, a lot of those groups do stuff that you find way off-putting. Like, like if you were in the grocery store and you ran into somebody who was living and speaking and communicating in the way that maybe somebody in a cannibalistic tribe in Papua New Guinea behaves, you would be mortified. Like, what in the world? But at such a great distance, separated by a giant ocean or two, that's more of a curiosity. Something to be preserved and nurtured and analyzed, it gives us wisdom and insight about humanity. But if you take that same thing and you put it next door to you, you're like, I do not like the neighbors that eat each other. That is really, really gross and unacceptable, and you would not be so tolerant of it. And so what Harding postulates is that the way the human brain and human social stuff works is that what we find most off-putting is stuff that is a little bit different from what we do, but that is very close in terms of geographic proximity. We are not as troubled by really out there things that happen far, far away. Now, she offers all kinds of theories as to why this might be. I mean, our need to feel superior, the threat of something very far, far away that seems weird to us is very low, like they're probably not going to come here and make us do their things, but the threat of your neighbor doing things that are just enough different, enough off, that's really off-putting. So then if we go and run with this repugnant cultural other idea or RCO idea that Harding has, and we start thinking about that for ourselves, we're like, whoa, like that holds up, right? Like think about it for you. Who is your repugnant cultural other? Who is that individual who is just the most appalling to you? The person who's like, I just, oh, I cannot stand those ideas. I cannot stand that approach. And I'm not talking about like racism, I don't know, maybe that's your thing. I hope not. Gross. But I think in a lot of ways, racism is fueled by the same human, mental, social phenomenon that fuels this repugnant cultural other idea. This impulse to want to be better than somebody in society, this impulse to be threatened and angry by people who do it differently, this impulse to desire to control the people who refuse to play along with the way that you do things and most people do things, this impulse to say, all the rest of us are following the rules, but that person isn't following the rules. Therefore, I'm angry at that person. Whether the rules make any sense or not, I don't want to think about that. I want to think about their bad behavior. And so, in a lot of ways, the RCO plays kind of a dangerously therapeutic role in the human mind and in a culture, because we've always got to have that person there so that we don't really have to evaluate ourselves and we can feel superior to somebody. Maybe I'm reading into that a little bit too much, but let's focus on the repugnant part of this. And this is definitely going somewhere, and there's a reason we're taking all this time on this concept. I love that she picked the word repugnant because it describes that visceral revulsion that we feel at that thing that we just cannot abide. That cannot be allowed to stand in our society, in our neighborhood, and our culture, whatever it might be. There's this irrational revulsion or taboo and unwillingness to engage with the ideas that happens when someone feels that repugnant cultural other impulse. And that, here's the connection, is exactly how people would have felt about the gentleman who wrote the book that you and I are working through right now in the Bible. Matthew, Levi, this tax collector, was a repugnant cultural other because he was very close to his Jewish brothers and sisters. But in their mind, and I think justifiably so, he was viewed as a sellout, a stooge, a stool pigeon, somebody who chose the oppressors over his brothers and sisters, who became an agent of the oppressor to extract money in the dirtiest of ways from his people, as a snitch and a goon, and he probably would have been thought of it to some degree as a sociopath for choosing to side with Rome, knowing full well what the social consequences would be anytime he walked down the street, anytime anybody saw him, anytime anybody did business with him, he was going to be utterly reviled for picking what he picked. I'm gonna break down more about what it is that he actually picked here in a little bit. This is the passage that we're looking at here in Matthew chapter 9. So once again, Jesus just got done healing the guy who is a paralytic, and we talked a whole bunch about forgiveness and all of this stuff, and people are kind of confused as to what is up and what is down now, because the teachers of the law just got embarrassed and they look like they're against forgiveness, and Jesus supernaturally affirms that he has the ability and authority to forgive, and real quietly everybody would have been like, um, only God really has the authority to initiate forgiveness in that way, and then he just healed that guy to demonstrate that he had that kind of authority. Who are we dealing with here again? And once again, the demons from the previous passage already had that question nailed. That's who the text holds out Jesus as being. So when we get to this next passage here, this is not happening in a vacuum. Capernaum is a buzz. There is stuff going on in the minds of people. People can feel the winds of change blowing, and the guy who's responsible for these winds of change, I mean, up is down, down is up, left is right, right is left, he's still walking around in town and interacting with people and doing things. And so we get the impression from Matthew that in Matthew 9, verse 9, this happens right after the healing of the paralytic and the exchange about forgiveness that we just finished with, because it says, as Jesus went on from there, so maybe that's immediate, maybe this means he went down the road just a little bit, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at a tax collector's booth. Follow me, he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. And while Jesus was having dinner at Matthew's house, many tax collectors and quote sinners, unquote, came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? On hearing this, Jesus said, It's not the healthy you need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means. I desire mercy, not sacrifice, for I haven't come to call the righteous, but sinners. Obviously, there is a tremendous amount to break down here. We need to look at what on earth was going on with this meal. I mean, what a crazy collection of people to get together. We need to look more closely at the opposition that for the second passage in a row seems to be ramping up. You got all this beautiful stuff going on with this beautiful Sermon on the Mount, these beautiful healings, this beautiful forgiveness. How could anybody be against this? Oh, but the people across the lake, they weren't really up for it. They were like, could you just leave now, please? We really like those pigs. Could you go away, please? Uh, we don't really care as much about the guy that just got healed. That's great and all, but the pigs, you need to go. And then, well, there's more opposition in the very next passage with people being like, ah, forgiveness and healing, and that's great and everything, but uh, we don't really like you. And then so we run into more resistance in this passage, so we need to consider that. And then we also need to consider Jesus' answer, obviously. This whole, it's not the healthy, you need a doctor, but the sick. What are the implications of that? What does that mean now? But what I want to cover, looking at the time tomorrow, is who actually is Matthew, and how much does the original audience's awareness that he is the repugnant cultural other of repugnant cultural others factor into how we read the text? Now, I'm gonna argue that it factors in a ton, that everybody in that original Jewish audience would have cringed at this guy. It would have raised emotions the same way Westboro Baptist Church protesting a funeral raises emotions for you. I'm trying to think of things that it's kind of safe and fair game for me to call them the repugnant cultural other. I don't know, I better tread carefully. Pick your repugnant cultural other that you think is obvious to everyone, everyone you know, everyone in this culture, and that is who I think Matthew was to these people. But I want to flesh that out a little bit more. I want to consider what his job looked like because I think the success story of Jesus going to this repugnant cultural outsider and saying, follow me, and him saying, okay, and then not just following him, but taking copious notes for the rest of his life and then penning the document we looked at, I think the consequences to that are pretty huge. And I think we will miss all of those grand implications if we don't really dig into how RCO Matthew was when this calling happened. So we got a whole bunch more coming on Matthew 9 verses 9 through 13 over the next few days. And on the way out the door here, I haven't said thanks to the patrons for a while. So thank you everybody who supports the program at patreon.com/slash the tmbh podcast. I think you guys are pretty internet smart, and I think you know how this works, but there's like one set of stuff that you can say if you just go out and fund a podcast or a YouTube channel with any sponsor who will come along. There are constraints that come with that. You can't be honest about certain things, you have to say things a certain way just to try to make the most people happy at once. And as you know, right now, people are sometimes looking for excuses from all areas of the political spectrum to be mad about things and not really necessarily always wanting to think in goodwill. But then there are a whole bunch of people who do want to think in goodwill, and where are we supposed to go? 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All right, back to Matthew 9 tomorrow talking about the repugnant cultural other who is the guy who wrote the book that we're looking at. I'm Matt. Also Matt. This is a 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Do this again soon.