Soon we will gather as a church to hear about what God is doing throughout Half the World in India and China. Having spent extensive time in China from 1996-2001 and 10 profound days in India in 2013, I await this World Missions Conference with enthusiasm and hope.
It is in this segment of the Indian population that Jesus is working powerfully – touching the untouchable, lifting the lowly, and lowering the exalted.
During my most recent trip to India, I was struck by how clear it is that Christ is India’s only hope for redemption. The caste system is India’s way of social stratification. This system is a ladder of inequality and injustice that contravenes God’s truth concerning human dignity. Below the bottom of the ladder are the untouchables, the Dalits. They are outside the caste system in their lowliness – literally, outcasts. Their name means “ground down” or “broken up.” These “broken people” make up 16% of India’s population.
And it is in this segment of the Indian population that Jesus is working powerfully – touching the untouchable, lifting the lowly, and lowering the exalted. In the New Testament, Jesus boldly and clearly violates the boundaries of shame by speaking with the Samaritan woman at the well, receiving anointing from the “filthy,” dining with tax collectors, touching lepers, and restoring and clothing the Gerasene demoniac. He is doing these things in India today.
One story that resonated with me as I walked along the railway slums, sat on garbage heaps where children’s Bible clubs are thriving, and heard stories of violent injustice, was the story from Mark 5 in which Jesus heals both Jairus’s daughter and the bleeding woman. Jairus, a ruler and leader, would have been at the top of the Indian caste system, and yet he is at the end of his rope. This person of influence is unable to influence his circumstances and heal his beloved daughter. Alongside him in the narrative is a bleeding woman – nameless, powerless, and unclean. She has spent everything she has, and she has only gotten worse. With her physical condition and destitute position she would be the lowest of the low in the Indian social system.
And yet Jesus stops and stoops for both the desperate influencer and the destitute nobody. He stops to hear Jairus’s need and sets out to heal the dying girl in the home. But along the way he stoops for the hemorrhaging woman. Can you imagine the shock inside the influencer with an urgent crisis, as Jesus stoops for this nobody on the way? This lowly lady has endured 12 long years of bleeding ALONE – no husband, no friends, no comforter – no one could come near her. When this broken and bleeding woman sees Jesus pass by, she reaches out and touches him in hope. And Jesus consciously stops, compassionately stoops, and hears her whole story before setting her free. Rising from liberating an untouchable, he receives news of death. Jairus’s girl is dead. And he moves toward another untouchable – a dead girl. With tenderness, he touches and instructs this little girl to arise.
Two untouchables liberated, healed, and set free. One influential leader humbled and set free to worship the only worthy one. At the foot of the cross, the ground is level. This is the hope for India with a social system that stratifies unjustly and harshly. The hope is Jesus, the one from heaven who entered the slum of a broken world so that the untouchables would be renewed and the broken made whole.
Stories like these are currently being written and told throughout India! You will hear them at our conference. May we respond like those in Mark – completely astonished and prepared for active mission.