This past Sunday, I preached the first lesson in a Relationship series on Assertiveness. The part of the Bible the teaching came from was Matthew 18:15-20 where Jesus is teaching his followers how to get along with each other and navigate relationships through difficult moments.

Right in the middle of the text Jesus drops a bomb that I neglected to mention during the sermon.  Jesus says when you’ve gone through all of the steps of trying to reset a right and restored relationship with someone who has done you or someone else wrong, and the wrong-committing person won’t even listen to the whole community of the church, then, “Treat them as you would treat an ungodly person or a tax collector.”

Yikes!  Sounds awful!  It certainly isn’t nice (See Niceness VS Kindness).  It sounds like Jesus is telling his followers to treat unrepentant wrong-doers like what old Icelandic people would call a Skoggarman .

Skoggarman literally means “forest men.”  In Icelandic tribal societies it was someone who was sent to live outside the life and protection of their tribe and community because they broke the law, customs, or traditions of their people.  It is to become a nothing belonging to no one.

Is this what Jesus was telling his followers to do?

The picture is incomplete without looking at just how Jesus lived and taught his disciples to treat the skoggarman.

Over and over again through the life Jesus lived, the stories he told, and the instructions he gave we see that Jesus’ – and God’s – heart is bent toward the skoggarman, the outcast.

In Matthew 9:9-10 Jesus invites a tax collector (people seen as traitors and criminals) to be one of his closest followers and then goes to a dinner party full of tax collectors and sinners (and it isn’t the last time either).

In Matthew 11:19 Jesus is called a friend of tax collectors and sinners.

In Mark 2:17 Jesus tells people that are surprised that he is hanging out with sinners and tax collectors that it is for those people, the skoggarman, that he came.

In Luke 15 Jesus tells three stories of what God’s heart is like – a shepherd who leaves the flock (the tribe) and goes after the lost (“skoggarmaned”) sheep, a similar story about a woman and a lost coin, and lastly a father whose eyes never stopped watching out for and longing for the son who had skoggarmaned himself.

There are all sorts of ways people can become skoggarman, or outcasts, in this life, but for Jesus and his followers, they’re the reason we’re here.