What doesn’t often make it into the pages of People Magazine and other year-end lists of what’s hot and what’s not are philosophers and one-hundred-year-old schools of psychology. But in 2014 in Japan, that very thing happened. Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga published a book on the psychology of Alfred Adler, a somewhat less well-known colleague and rival of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

The book The Courage to Be Disliked introduces Adlerian psychology and its focus on community, self-awareness, and the reframing of trauma. It was a massive hit in Japan and has since become a bestseller in Korea and the United States.

One of the issues the book highlights centers on what Adler called “tasks.” Tasks refer to individual responsibilities and goals that each person must confront in their own life. Adler argued that problems arise when someone intrudes on or attempts to take over the task of others, interfering with personal development and responsibility.

Determining what my own tasks are is the first step to establishing self-understanding and healthy relationships with good boundaries. I can’t be responsible for your tasks, and you can’t be responsible for mine.

What does that mean in practice?

One of the things it means is that I have no control over what others think of me—nor even any right to know what that might be. And others have no control over what I think of them. We can and should desire the best for each other, but each person’s task is to determine what that “best” is for themselves. It’s not my task, as much as I might like it to be, to determine the shape and direction of your life’s goals and responsibilities.

In practice, that means that you can’t live your life preoccupied with what I or others think of you—or your career trajectory, your choice of mate, your kid’s ADHD, your parent’s dreams for you to become a doctor, your hairstyle, or the fact that you’re obsessed with The Great British Bake Off.

How others feel about your choice is their task, not yours.

Did you ever get the feeling that people you care about don’t appreciate the choices you’ve made with your life?

I used to be fairly well-liked by the people I grew up with … until Facebook came along. Turns out, a lot of those folks and I are no longer in sync, either theologically or politically. Most of my best friends have unfriended me, hoping, I think, to let me know that they no longer want anything to do with me. I can hear the conversations in my absence: “I don’t get it. He was such a nice boy.”

After we made the decision about no longer signing marriage licenses until marriage equality was available to everyone, one of my former seminary professors started trolling me online. After graduating with his Ph.D. from Notre Dame and getting hired at the seminary, I was his first thesis student. We were friends. We played flag football together. But something happened, and I became a project for him, someone he needed to steer in the right direction. At first, I tried to be nice, assuming that if I could just talk to him, we’d figure things out.

Eventually, after the Sandy Hook shooting, when I’d written a prayer decrying the senselessness of gun violence, he got on Facebook and told me that I probably just needed to shut up. At that point, I figured I’d tried hard enough to figure out a workable relationship with someone with whom I obviously disagreed on some substantive issues. So, I blocked him.

Anything like that ever happen to you?

People you love, people who love you, come to the conclusion that you’ve made bad choices in your life. Somewhere along the line, you steered your Hummer into the ditch, and they’re pretty sure it’s their job to rescue you and put you back on the right path. You didn’t ask for their help and don’t especially want it. But there they are, having convinced themselves that what you need is to be saved from your own shabby thinking and neglected morals.

Sound familiar?

That’s the dynamic Jesus faces in our text this morning. In chapter two, after having recently been baptized, undergone the temptations in the wilderness, and kicked off his ministry in his native Galilee, Jesus scandalized the local religious gentry. He healed a paralytic after having forgiven the man.

“Just who does this Jesus think he is anyway? Forgiveness comes from God, and we’re the only ones who have the keys to that particular cupboard.”

Next, after calling Levi the tax collector to be his disciple, Jesus eats supper at Levi’s house with a whole bunch of other “tax collectors and sinners.” It’s important to stop at this point and observe that to first-century Jews, even saying “tax collectors and sinners” was redundant. Once you’ve said the former, everybody already knows you’re talking about the latter. Tax collectors were the collaborating hooligans who did the bidding of the Romans and the Temple elite by scraping the last little bit of ice cream off the bottom of the carton of the peasants’ livelihoods. And if that weren’t bad enough, the tax collectors got rich off the whole arrangement.

So, by this point in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus has infuriated the religious authorities and annoyed the peasants with whom he’d grown up.

But that’s not enough because Mark tells us that Jesus got into it again with the religious big wheels by not requiring his disciples to fast and further announcing that the Sabbath is important, but that human beings are more important. God created the Sabbath to protect humans from overzealous employers who might work the peasants to death without having a day off; the Sabbath wasn’t created by God just to give people more rules to follow.