This Man Welcomes Sinners

For the Week of June 21, 2004

Last fall I spent two weeks in Oxford doing some writing, and one Sunday attended Saint Aldates Church. No one knows for certain who Saint Aldates was, but their first rector, Reginald, started serving the church in 1226. As I walked through the church doors, the greeter flashed a big smile and enthusiastically exclaimed, “We welcome all sinners!”

When you read through the Gospels, one of the unnerving aspects that you discover about Jesus is that he made a lot enemies. As early as Mark 3:6 we read that people were tying to kill him. There are a number of reasons for making so many enemies so quickly, but one in particular stands out among the rest. We know that Jesus ate with “many” sinful people, for “there were many who followed him.” Clearly, Jesus attracted a large following of morally undesirable people like whores and tax collectors. His identification with these degenerate and religiously unrighteous people was a central rather than a peripheral characteristic about the kingdom he was announcing, so much so that some of his enemies dismissed him as a drunkard and a glutton.

When questioned about why he associated with such people, Jesus was entirely unapologetic: ”It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:15-17). When his enemies saw Jesus associate with the immoral and the impure, and then heard this explanation, they became enraged rather than enlightened. And make no mistake about it, these angry opponents were the religiously scrupulous vanguard of their day.

There is an entire group of parables that elucidates this good news, that Jesus came to love sinners, but as Joachim Jeremias observes, this group of parables has a unique characteristic—they are all addressed directly to the enemies of Jesus. In a sense, then, these parables do not merely announce the good news, they also vindicate it. “They are a controversial weapon against the critics and foes of the Gospel who are indignant that Jesus should declare that God cares for sinners.”¹ This group of parables defends God’s generous love of sinners in three ways.

Just what are these sinners like? In short, they are downtrodden and need help. Because of their moral maladies they are sick, needy and vulnerable. In a world that prizes strength, self-sufficiency and power, people like this are outcasts, but somehow they have a better understanding of the kingdom of God than the religiously righteous. In the parable of the Two Sons told to the Sanhedrin (Matthew 21:28-32), Jesus says that tax collectors and whores will enter the kingdom of God before the chief priests and elders. Why? Outwardly, we often imagine that sinners like this are far from repentance, but Jesus says that just the opposite is true. Fully in touch with the breadth and depth of their neediness, these sinners know from the heart the meaning of repentance. They are like a son who initially refused to obey, but then later did in fact obey. The Sanhedrin opponents were just the opposite; they pretended to obey but really didn’t. Sinners know about repentance.

The parable of the Two Debtors (Luke 7:41-43) was told to Simon the Pharisee who had invited Jesus to dinner. During the dinner a harlot stood behind Jesus weeping, wiping his feet with her hair, and anointing him with perfume. In her deep brokenness and vulnerability she disregarded any sense of social propriety in order to express her profound gratitude. Simon was outraged: surely Jesus knew she was sinful! In response Jesus told the parable about two debtors, one who owed a huge sum and another a small sum. Both were forgiven, but clearly the former would be more grateful. Then Jesus made a sharp contrast or reversal. The immensity of the woman’s sin led to unbounded gratitude when it was forgiven, but the righteous Simon was rebuked because he did not show Jesus the least sort of grateful attention. Needy, sick sinners know about repentance; they also know about gratitude for sins forgiven. Sometimes, says Jesus, and tragically, the religiously righteous don’t know much about either of these, for they have never plumbed the depths of their own poverty of spirit.

In a second cluster of parables Jesus invites his self righteous detractors to consider what they themselves are like. We just saw that in the parable of the Two Sons they are like a child who did not fulfill what he promised. In the parable of the Tenants (Matthew 21:33-41= Mark 12:1-9 = Luke 22:9-16), Jesus likened his opponents to tenants who shamed and humiliated the owner of a vineyard, and who even murdered his heir. In the parable of the Wedding Feast (Matthew 22:1-10) he compared them to socially respectable people who rudely rejected a king’s dinner invitation with pathetic excuses. Why do they scorn sinners who do accept the invitation?! Finally, in one of his most caustic attacks in all of the Gospels (Matthew 23:1-39) Jesus strings together a series of word pictures for this sort of religious hypocrisy. His enemies, he said, were like blind guides, filthy cups, whitewashed tombs, unmarked graves (ie, a source of impurity), and poisonous snakes. These loveless people are not the sort of people you would want to meet if you understand yourself as a sick, needy and vulnerable sinner.

Finally, in response to his opponents Jesus turns from describing what sinners are like and what the religious hypocrites are like to what God Himself is like. The Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) was told to those who complained that “this man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” (Luke 15:2).²

We know this story of a son who shamed his family by asking for his inheritance, who burned through all his money in hedonistic excess, then found himself on skid row longing to eat the garbage of pigs. But as we learned above, sinners often know quite a bit about repentance, and this man “came to his senses” (Luke 15:17). While the son was still far off, the father, utterly undignified for the Orient, ran to him and embraced him. Instead of treating him as a hired hand, as the son had requested, he celebrated him as an honored guest--with a robe, a ring and a rousing party.³

To backtrack to our original question, why does Jesus eat with sinners? Because that is what God is like, good and gracious, loving us without conditions or limits, full of compassion for us in the midst of our despair and hopelessness. But beware. Many people are not like this, especially religious people. They are like the elder brother who resented his father’s lavish grace, or like Jonah who complained when the Ninevites repented and God forgave them. Many people, Jesus warns us in another parable, are “confident of their own righteousness and look down on everybody else” (Luke 18:9).
These critics, said Jesus, were “envious because I am generous” (Matthew 20:15).

Our compassionate God is so very different. He welomes sinners who despair and rejects the self-righteous who remain blind to their own poverty. In the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) Jesus describes some people who worked for twelve hours in the heat of the day, and some people who worked for only one hour. Just one! They all received the same pay. From a human perspective this is clearly not fair; but it is unfair only if the metric is one of merit. Thank God that the kingdom that Jesus announced is not one of merit but of mercy. A normal human father would never give his child a stone if he asked for bread, and we can be sure that if we struggling parents long to give good gifts to our children, “how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him” (Matthew 7:9-12).

¹ Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (New York: Charles Scribners, 1972), p. 124. This entire essay follows Jeremias, pp. 124-146.

² To eat with a person signaled mutual acceptance. On the religious system of ritual purity and Jesus’s attack upon it, especially in his practice of eating with sinners, see Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (San Francisco: Harper, 1994), pp. 46-68.

³ See Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son (New York: Doubleday, 1992).