“Cancel culture” is all the rage right now. Because tensions are high and tolerance is low, people are getting “cancelled” left and right.

The phrase “cancel culture” refers to the practice of withdrawing support for (or canceling) people—usually public figures—after they have done or said something destructive, distasteful, or morally disagreeable. We’ve seen this in recent years with famous people such as Mel Gibson, Lori Loughlin, Lance Armstrong, Jimmy Fallon, Michael Jackson, Taylor Swift, Kanye West, and Roseanne Barr, just to name a few.  

But these days, everybody from politicians to pastors, actors to athletes, comedians to commentators, artists to activists, and singers to statues are being socially “cancelled” based on the wrong tweet, the wrong tone, the wrong opinion, the wrong decision, the wrong word, the wrong anything. In some cases, “dirt” from twenty years ago (or two-hundred years ago!) is being dug up and re-revealed for the world to see. If you have ever screwed up in any kind of public way at any point in your life, it’s very possible that you may get “cancelled.”

And while we’ve seen this happen primarily with well-known people who have done harmful or objectionable things, we also experience it in our own lives. At some level we have all felt the pain and shame of being written-off based on things we have done or failed to do. We’ve all been “unfriended”, dismissed, rejected, cast-out. We’ve all felt cancelled by someone.

But, we’ve also cancelled others.

We tend to remember people primarily by the scandalous things they've done or the specific ways we were once hurt by them. And therefore, from our vantage point, that’s who they are fully and finally. They are beyond the scope of redemption, at least to us. They get no quarter, no clemency, no grace from us.

In “cancel culture”, any failure renders a final verdict: banned for life.  

Our countercultural Savior, however, will have none of it.

Jesus called “cancelled” people his friends. In fact, his circle of followers included a betrayer, a thief, and a prostitute, just to name a few. He was unwilling to “cancel” the worst of the worst, the baddest of the bad, and the guiltiest of the guilty. He moved toward those whom society moved away from. He befriended, loved, and touched the outcast, the misfit, the leper, the liar, the sexually deviant. He refused to dismiss those who had been dismissed, reject those who had been rejected, denounce those who had been denounced, and shame those who had been shamed. In fact, his closest friends were of such ill-repute that the religious leaders concluded Jesus must be an imposter because no self-respecting man of God would embrace the kinds of people Jesus embraced.

There is one kind of cancelling, however, that Jesus was all about. Colossians 2:14 says, “He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.”

Maybe this is the reason why Jesus himself was canceled by his culture and ours. The scandal of his promiscuous love toward those who are hated—his amazing grace to those who are guilty—is just too vulgar for a culture that has to find some solace in dealing with the uncomfortable log in their own eye by pointing out the speck in someone else’s.

That’s the big difference between Jesus and cancel culture: while our culture (including the church) cancels people who have done terrible things, Jesus cancels the terrible things that people are cancelled for. The sins and scandals that cancel culture chooses not to forget, Jesus chooses not to remember.

What he does remember, and never forgets, is that he is the friend of sinners, the brother of the outcast, the God of seventy-times-seven forgiveness, and the Lord of redemption.