The Boundaries of Jesus

A new year and a new series from the Low-Level Theologian

Happy New Year, friend. I hope you had a delightful Christmas season and enter this season with life, joy, and hope—I do! Below is my first theological devotional for 2025 and the start of a new series that I anticipate dedicating the next three months to fleshing out (which you’ll hear more about below). As well as offering my regularly scheduled Thursday devotionals, I will, starting this year, be posting some occasional theological pieces for paid subscribers that will include a few co-labs with some fellow theologians and Christian thinkers as well as some “best of” pieces that provide helpful lists of resources you may find helpful to the Christian life. In the meantime, welcome to the new year—and a new series I am calling “The Relational Genius of Jesus.” Thanks for inviting me into your life. Enjoy!

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“The effort to establish relation comes first—the hand of the child arched out so that what is over against him may nestle under it; second is the actual relation, a saying of Thou without words, in the state preceding the word-form; the thing, like the I, is produced late, arising after the original experiences have been split asunder and the connected partners separate. In the beginning is relation.”

Martin Buber¹ (italics mine)

These iconic words capture the heart of Martin Buber’s well-traveled and timeless text, I and Thou. “In the beginning,” the Jewish mystic famously wrote, “there is relationship.” Without relationship, nothing is possible. A child cannot learn to walk, an infant cannot speak, and life itself cannot flourish. Life comes from relationship. As does every corner of the created world.

For the Christian, Buber’s comment sums up a core of understanding the nature of God. In the beginning, Christians believe, a Creator brought created beings into existence. Yet the Father did not create alone. At the edge of creation stood the joyous relationship of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. All of creation, it seems, emerged from the unity of a divine community. Humans were created from this relationship—and this is why humans long for relationship. We desire small groups for one reason: we were made by one.

If creation is the result of the loving and authentic relationship of the Triune God, then what Jesus represents for us is entirely reframed. Jesus isn’t merely God in human flesh. Jesus is, in equal measure, the full manifestation and incarnation of what genuine relationship is supposed to be like between human beings. That is to say that while the blood of Jesus provides for us the life we need to be rescued from death, sin, and evil, the way Jesus lived his life equally provides for us a pattern of relationship that we desperately need to be rescued from the model of shallow acquaintance, self-centeredness, and isolation our world has to offer. Jesus is a relational genius in human form. I’m convinced that if we watch his life, we will see that the way he embodies relationships is the very thing that undergirds the whole universe.

Photo by Tofin Creations on Unsplash

There are most certainly more to be explored. But, over the years, I’ve repeatedly observed twelve recurring attributes of the way Jesus embodied relationships with others in the Gospels. Namely, Jesus practiced the relational habits of good boundaries, delight and enjoyment, honest truth-telling, emotional vulnerability, quality time, differentiation through self-knowledge, mercy and kindness, respect and honor, generosity, friendly affection, bodily presence, and clear communication. These are not add-ons to a toxic and busy existence. Instead, they are models and basis for vital and flourishing relationships as they were intended to be by the One who invented gravity. “I have set you an example,” Jesus says in John 13:15, “that you should do as I have done for you.” That is, Jesus tells us to relate to others as he relates to others.

We come to our first attribute of Jesus, the relational genius. First, Jesus practiced good boundaries.

The fourfold Gospel narratives give us vivid details of the relational habits of Jesus Christ. And what we find is remarkably surprising: Jesus made it a habit of disappointing people. Not that this was necessarily his goal. But, rather, it was most certainly the result of living a life that is not shaped by other people’s expectations, desires, and timetables.

For instance, both Mark (Mk. 1:35) and Luke (Lk. 5:15-16) narrate how Jesus would often be difficult to find by his closest friends. In both instances, Jesus is recorded as having left early in the morning to go into the wilderness (what Luke calls “lonely places”) to pray and be with the Father. We don’t even know what Jesus was doing during these occasions. The fact that we do not know is evidence of the fact that they actually happened. These are occasions and moments in which Jesus went dormant, quiet, and undiscoverable. In other words, the calendar of Jesus had protracted and uninterrupted time away from people.

A similar theme is observable in where Jesus went and what he said “yes” to. For instance, in Jn. 7:1-10, the brothers of Jesus try to pressure Jesus to go to the Feast of Tabernacles. They don’t just want him to go. They wanted him to make a public appearance as a kind of “coming out” of his Messiahship. These men didn’t simply want Jesus to be the Messiah. He wanted Jesus to make a splash as the Messiah. To which he refused. “My time,” Jesus disappoints them, “has not yet come” (v. 6). Ironically, Jesus would eventually go to the Feast of Tabernacles. But he would do so quietly and without fanfare. And not within the timeline his disciples wished.

Matthew records another interesting interaction: this time between Jesus and Peter. Having forewarned the disciples that he would be going to Jerusalem to die, Peter takes offense—and rejects Jesus’s claim. “Never Lord!,” he says, “this will never happen to you.” (v. 22) To which Jesus famously says: “Get behind me, Satan!...You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.” (v. 23) Jesus knew his life’s purpose. And because he was not a sycophant—coming to dance to human whim and wish—he had the audacity to do what God called him to do even when his closest friend rebuked him.

There are countless other stories that could be unpacked here, such as when Jesus responded to people not out of pressure but when he desired (Jn. 8:1-11), or when he disengaged in one place when his work there was done despite disappointing people (Lk. 4:42-44), or how he clearly understood as differentiated from his family system (Mk. 3:31-35). Jesus was no sycophant. Nor was he a people-pleaser. Jesus was a man with boundaries.

This provokes a bit of an oddity, doesn’t it? Jesus was a master at establishing good and healthy boundaries. Then why, we may wonder, do his followers often have no ability to establish them for themselves or for the communities they establish? Too often, people report that Christian communities can be prime environments for manipulation, coercion, gaslighting, and forced “yesses.” The church, in part, has failed to capture this element of the life and ministry of Jesus.

Still, I’m convinced that when the church practices good boundaries, it becomes the most healing space in the world. I’ve learned a few things about boundaries. First, people who genuinely seek to honor God carefully through obedience in their lives can become the kind of people who are comfortable disappointing others. For instance, my closest friends (and I have only a few) are people who practice a weekly day of rest called the Sabbath. I’ve often wondered: why is it that people who don’t keep a Sabbath can often disregard good boundaries? And I think that the reason is that Sabbath-keeping is a graduate-level course not only in honoring God but also in learning how to disappoint people. Good friends are only friends if they honor a “no.”

Another lesson has been that when I trespass the boundaries God has established in my life, I find that the work I do tends to leave me utterly exhausted, drained, and frustrated. And I think this is built into the miracle ministry of Jesus. Have you ever noticed that when Jesus does food miracles—multiplying fishes and loaves for crowds—that there are always leftovers? The miracles of God always have leftovers. They don’t take everything out of a person. Whereas the magic tricks of man always leave us with nothing left. One of the great ways to learn if we are “trespassing” the work of God in our life is to look at how it leaves us. Does it leave us empty? Or with leftovers?

And lastly, I’ve come to find that when the church does not practice good boundaries, it emotionally harms individuals. And, sadly, this can lead to people being pushed away or alienated. That image in Revelation 3:20 always sticks with me. Speaking to the church in Laodicea, Jesus says, “I stand at the door and knock...If anyone opens the door, I will come and eat with them.” Jesus doesn’t barge in. He knocks and waits.²

If you are anything like me, you have some reflection to do. Because Jesus, here, models something in a relationship that we are often reasonably horrible at. But there is hope. We follow Jesus. And by following Jesus, the same Spirit that lived in him now lives within us. Let us follow Jesus—not only believing in the blood of his death—but also practicing the ways of his life.

I want to follow Jesus—and have better boundaries!

1. Buber, Martin, I and Thou, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Charles Scribners’s Sons, 1958), 27.

2. To which someone once disagreed, reminding me about the time that Jesus walks through walls in his resurrection. I admit that Jesus can violate boundaries. During the Easter narrative, Jesus walks through walls to surprise the disciples. Sometimes, Jesus knocks. Sometimes he doesn’t. Karl Barth points out, “It is quite true that a [person] must open the door to Jesus. [Yet] another thing also remains unreservedly true, that the risen Christ passes through closed doors (John 20:19).” Barth, Church Dogmatics, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–75), I/1, 283. But we must also recognize that we do not have the gift of resurrection bodies that can walk through walls. We are but fleshly humans.