He Suffered Outside the Gate

I work with homeless populations and I'm aware that Jesus would be homeless now - he'd be outside the gates, excluded from the centers of power and comfort. The crucifixion wasn't a respectable death in a temple. It was on a garbage heap.

The author's making a point about where God actually shows up. Not in the institutions and buildings and respectable places - in the margins, with the excluded people, outside the gate where it's shameful and painful and real.

That changes where I look for God. Not in grand religious structures but in the faces of people society has thrown away. And I'm called to go out to him there, to share in the shame, to find God's presence precisely in the places respectability says are empty.