Eating with Sinners
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
September 12, 2004
Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28; Luke 15:1-10
Jeremiah 4
11 ¶ At that time it will be said to this people and to Jerusalem: A hot wind comes from me out of the bare heights in the desert toward my poor people, not to winnow or cleanse — 12 a wind too strong for that. Now it is I who speak in judgment against them. 22 “For my people are foolish, they do not know me; they are stupid children, they have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good.”
23 ¶ I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light. 24 I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro. 25 I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled. 26 I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the LORD, before his fierce anger.
27 ¶ For thus says the LORD: The whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end. 28 Because of this the earth shall mourn, and the heavens above grow black; for I have spoken, I have purposed; I have not relented nor will I turn back.
Luke 15
1 ¶ Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. 2 And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
3 ¶ So he told them this parable: 4 “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? 5 When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. 6 And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ 7 Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.
8 ¶ “Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? 9 When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ 10 Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
I. INTRODUCTION
Remember back in high school, when you had lunch in the cafeteria—there was always the table where the “cool kids” ate. Of the many painful lessons we all learned in high school, one of them was that social standing was often associated with who you were seen with, and often who you got to eat lunch with.
II. THE TEXT
I got to think of issues of who you eat with when reflecting on tonight’s New Testament lesson. In it we read of Jesus being criticized for welcoming sinners and “eating with them.” This story follows one in which we read of Jesus having dinner at the home of a leader of the Pharisees. Jesus had used that occasion to teach about humility and compassion, often using the imagery of a banquet or great feast.
In this story, we read of “tax collectors and sinners” coming near to listen to Jesus preaching, and of his being criticized for welcoming them and eating with them.
Perhaps we are not as scandalized as the Pharisees are because we have a somewhat diminished sense of table fellowship in our culture. In the ancient world, and still in many places today, eating with another person is an act of intimacy. A social and interpersonal experience. It’s hard for us to grasp that when most of us are accustomed to eating in such famously intimate places as McDonald’s or TDR. But to someone of Jesus’ day, sharing a meal was a sign of fellowship and of community. That’s why one of our sacraments is a meal—the communion—it is meant to build community because we all eat together. I haven’t looked into it, but I’d bet that it’s also the reason we have coffee hours and refreshments following most worship services—it’s an ancient tradition for the community to eat together.
A. Lost Sheep and Coins
In response to this criticism about his meal-partners, Jesus tells a couple of parables. The first about a lost sheep, the second about a lost coin. In each, God is portrayed as searching diligently for and rejoicing in finding the missing one, rather than the present many. The one sheep who is lost, the one coin that is missing, each provide cause for great joy more so than the presence of the remaining sheep or coins.
Jesus uses these parables to justify his welcoming of tax collectors and sinners. These are two groups we hear about a lot in the NT. In fact the phrase occurs throughout the gospels as a way of identifying the undesirable elements that Jesus seemed to attract. They get mentioned often enough that we might ask, “Who are these people?”
Tax collectors were viewed as suspicious for two reasons: one, they were often accused of skimming off the top of what they’d collected. That is, they would charge you more than you owed and they would keep the difference. The other reason, and perhaps the more crucial, was that they worked for the Romans—they were Jews working for the oppressor power that had conquered and now governed Judea and Galilee. They were cheats at best, and collaborators at worst.
One thing that often gets lost in all this is why they should be singled out as a class separate from other sinners. Cheating isn’t enough of a sin? Why does this group get separate treatment from “sinners”? Isn’t it just a subset of “sinners”?
III. “SINNERS”
Well, that bears looking at, actually. Because there’s the way we tend to read “sinners” and there’s the way it is actually being used. We tend to think of “sinners” as people like us—imperfect, trying our best, but always falling short in some way. Missing the mark.
That is how we’re accustomed to reading it—as a generic description for pretty much everybody except people like Mother Teresa and Mr. Rogers. But Biblical scholars have long puzzled over the word. Reflecting the common Christian understanding that everyone is a sinner, they wondered who this group was that was being singled out.
A. The Ritually Impure
And so they looked at who was present during the story to figure out their conclusions. Well, the Pharisees always seem to be around, so these “sinners” must have been “sinners” in the eyes of the Pharisees, and not of Jesus. That is, they must have been sinners because they did not keep the exacting standards of ritual purity that the Pharisees kept. What made these people sinners, apparently, is that they did not wash their hands before eating, or they didn’t immerse themselves in ritual baths frequently enough, or some other aspect of ritual purity. The multi-volume set of commentaries I regularly use has this interpretation. So, in this story we see another example of the difference between welcoming, all-encompassing Christianity and it’s silly, legalistic, ritualistic older sibling Judaism.
There’s just one problem with that interpretation: it’s wrong. The Pharisees did hold themselves to an exacting standard of ritual purity. They did this as a sign of piety—they held themselves in the same state of purity that the priests did who served in the Temple. It was voluntary. For the average person, ritual purity was unnecessary under the law unless you were going to the Temple. And then all you had to do was take a ritual bath and wait until the sun set.
Christians just do not understand that failing to be ritually clean was not a moral category. There was nothing wrong or sinful about being in a state of ritual impurity. Most people were. And the Pharisees would never have criticized people in the Galilee, nearly a hundred miles from Jerusalem, for being ritually unclean. Quite simply, it was not a violation of the Law. The ritually unclean were not ‘sinners’. [1]
B. The Wicked
So, the “sinners” in the New Testament were not the ritually impure. Nor were they the everyday, average person who tried their best but who, because of human failing and limitation would tend to sin. In the New Testament, those people are called “the crowds.” [2]
The term “sinners” that gets used in the New Testament—hamartoloi—is the same word that gets used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament for the word “wicked.” That is, the sinners aren’t those who like the average person, means to be good but screws up. The “sinners” are those who know what the right thing to do is and just don’t care. The wicked. The unrepentant.
It gets better.
Luke’s version of this story (Matthew and Mark also report a similar encounter) is the only one that mentions repentance. Mark says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” (Mark 2:17) Matthew has ““Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” (Matt. 9:12-13)
Jesus seems to be saying that God seeks the lost and the sinners. And whether they need to repent or not beforehand is up for debate.
Are we scandalized yet?
IV. MERCY FOR OURSELVES—JUSTICE FOR OTHERS
See, there’s a problem with this parable. It’s not warm and fuzzy. In fact, like so much of Jesus’ teaching, it can make us pretty angry.
This is not a story about how God loves us in spite of our failings. It’s about how God extends mercy to those who openly reject God. That’s a very different thing than saying this story is about the difference between ritual law and inclusiveness. This is about God’s abundant grace. And it drives us nuts.
A. Jealousy
We are jealous of God’s grace. We don’t really enjoy it when God’s mercy is extended to people we think are unworthy. There is an old Rabbinic story about a hardworking farmer who is visited by God. God says to him that he will grant him three wishes, but that whatever he wishes for, his neighbor would receive double. The farmer wishes for a hundred cattle, and receives them. His neighbor receives 200. He wishes for 100 acres of land, and gets them. His neighbor receives 200. Distraught at how much good fortune his neighbor was receiving, for his third wish he wished to be blind in one eye. And God weeps. [3]
B. Mercy for the Wicked
This story along points to something that Jesus’ parables expose: our unwillingness to share in God’s grace. We want mercy for ourselves and justice for others. We believe that we are entitled to God’s grace because we have earned it. We’ve been good Christians. God should be merciful to us. Why is God wasting time looking for people who don’t care a lick about him? Why is Jesus eating with sinners when he could be eating with us?
C. Mercy in a post-September 11th world
Yesterday was the third anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It was a time of great tragedy and sorrow for us as a nation and as a people. Feelings of sorrow intermingled with feelings of pain and rage.
I was in seminary at the time. And the only thing that made me madder than the terrorists were my classmates who kept insisting that as Christians our response ought to be forgiveness and mercy not violence and war. I think the part that made me made was not that I couldn’t believe how wrong they were—it was that I was afraid that they were probably right. But I surrounded myself with the teachings of Augustine and others about Just War and I believed that some kind of action was appropriate. And personally, I still believe that going into Afghanistan was the right thing.
I also remember that in the weeks that followed, when The Onion finally resumed publishing, it ran an article that was entitled “Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell”. It was all about how the 9/11 hijackers had expected 72 virgins but were being subjected to torments and cruel punishments alongside Hitler and a whole host of other “evildoers” throughout history. ‘Damn straight’ I thought. And the very concept of the hijackers in hell suffering punishment was enjoyable.
But did it make anything any better? My pain at seeing the scar in the sky of my beloved New York City, or the gaping wound in the Pentagon was not diminished. The sorrow and the feeling of mourning for a world that had died: a world of innocence, a world a little freer, was not diminished. All of the punishment for al-Qaeda and the Taliban, all of the drum-beating and the flag-waving. None of that could ultimately bring healing where there had been brokenness.
But I would have been outraged by the idea that God had extended mercy to those hijackers, who had perpetrated such evil. Can you imagine God extending mercy to such “sinners”?
V. CONCLUSION: GOD AS SHEPHERD
Well, I don’t know the fate of the hijackers. And neither does anyone else. But contemplating it makes me think about my understanding of God. A couple of years ago on our fall retreat, we were doing an icebreaker as we sat around the campfire. The question asked was “Other than Jesus, what person from history would you most want to meet?” One student said, “I would want to meet Hitler, just to see the depths that God’s grace could go to.” What an answer.
Most of us are jealous of God’s grace. We read a story like the one we read earlier and we identify with the “sinners” in the story, when in reality we should identify with the Pharisees, with the onlookers scandalized by the people Jesus chooses to eat with.
We are jealous because we believe we have earned God’s grace while these other people have been given it freely. But, we, too, have been beneficiaries of Grace. We could not have earned the love that God has already shown us, first in giving us life, and then in the sending of his Son to give us Eternal Life. We have no cause to be jealous, no right to be jealous of what God makes available to us.
What do we do with all this? Does it mean we have to scrap our criminal justice system or disband the army? I don’t think so. But what it does require us to do is to look at questions of justice in light of God’s mercy. Those who commit wrongful acts should be punished, but we should not rejoice in their punishment. We should recognize that they too are children of God, sheep of God’s pasture. That God is the shepherd who desires reconciliation with them as much as with us.
No one is beyond God’s grace. God’s mercy is wider than we can imagine. It is only our selfishness that seeks to limit God’s love. What Jesus teaches us, is that those who cannot rejoice in God’s love for others, cannot truly experience God’s love themselves.
