This episode, we challenge one of the things a lot of people see as central to their faith. You've probably been told you're not "worthy" of God's love, but God loves you anyway. This is a lie and a distortion of what worthiness even means.
You will often hear Christians say, "God is love, but God is ALSO holy." But holiness is not some contrary value that is required in order to balance love out. Love does not need balancing out. Love requires no equal opposite to keep it "sensible." And love is not the Yin to some equally important Yang. In fact, love is the chief demonstration OF God's holiness. So if your idea of God's perfection is something Jesus failed to live up to... Or if your idea of holiness means you have a better grasp of God’s fulness than Jesus was able to show, you really might have a problem. And if scripture contains the charge to "Be holy, because I am holy” from God, that statement cannot mean "Be set apart and away from people, distant and removed because of how super perfect and religious you are." And if it can't mean that for us, we need to stop assuming that's what it means for the very God whose holiness we are told repeatedly to pursue and reflect.
Getting closer to something is often necessary to take us from a place of mere observation to a place of real illumination.
The "samaritan" AudioBlog reexamines the famous parable to unwrap the original scandal of it, and then draws a parallel to now, showing that Jesus' words remain as revolutionary as ever. They pose as great a challenge to Christianity as they ever did to Judaism.