From Our Archives

Debie Thomas, Love and Lostness (2022); Debie Thomas, What Lost Looks Like (2019); and Debie Thomas, Letters to Prodigals (2016).

This Week's Essay

Luke 15:2, "This man welcomes sinners."

When I was in Oxford some years ago, on Sunday morning I walked down to Saint Aldates Church on Pembroke Street in the center of town. No one knows for sure who Saint Aldates was, but the first rector, Reginald, started serving the church in 1226. As I walked into the sanctuary, the usher greeted me enthusiastically, “We welcome all sinners!" 

At first this felt a little contrived, but upon further reflection, those were just the words that I needed to hear at that time and place. More importantly, that's how Jesus himself summarizes his mission in Luke 15 for this week: ”I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” And it's precisely what angered his enemies: “The Pharisees muttered, 'This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.'”

Jesus made a lot of enemies in a short time. Broadly speaking, his detractors fell into two categories — the politically powerful of Rome, who executed him as a subversive enemy of the state, and the religiously self-righteous, who are the subject of Luke 15 this week.

The gospels describe how Jesus violated rituals of religious purity and ate with “many” sinful people, and how “there were many sinful people who followed him.” This large following of moral outcasts felt safe with Jesus. They felt sheltered rather than judged. His identification with them was a signature characteristic of the kingdom that he announced, so much so that his religious enemies dismissed him as a drunkard and a glutton.

When asked why he befriended these "dirty" people, Jesus was unapologetic: ”It's not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick."

Romare Bearden, "Return of the Prodigal Son" (1967),

There's a whole group of parables that emphasizes that God welcomes sinners. As Joachim Jeremias observes in his book The Parables of Jesus (1972), these parables have a unique characteristic — they're all addressed directly to the enemies of Jesus. These parables don't merely announce the good news, they also vindicate it. “They are a controversial weapon against the critics and foes of the Gospel," says Jeremias, "who are indignant that Jesus should declare that God cares for sinners."

Some of the parables describe what sinners are like. They're sick and needy. They are marginalized. They are vulnerable in a world that prizes power and religious righteousness. Jesus says that these immoral outsiders understand God better than the religious insiders. 

In the parable of the Two Sons, Jesus says that tax collectors and prostitutes will enter the kingdom of God before the chief priests and elders. Why? Because they know their own brokenness and thus their need for repentance. True prodigals have no pretensions. They're like a son who initially refused to obey, but then later did obey. Jesus's opponents did the opposite; they pretended to obey but really didn’t.

Similarly, in the parable of the Two Debtors, during a dinner a prostitute stood behind Jesus weeping, wiping his feet with her hair, and anointing him with perfume. In her brokenness she disregarded all social propriety in order to express her profound gratitude. 

When the host objected, Jesus told a parable about two debtors, one who owed a huge sum and another a small sum. Both were forgiven, but the former was more grateful. Then Jesus drew a sharp contrast. The immensity of the woman’s sin led to her unbounded gratitude when it was forgiven, but the self-righteous host was rebuked because he hadn't shown Jesus the least sort of grateful attention. 

Marc Chagall, “Return of the Prodigal Son” (1975).

Needy people know repentance; they're grateful when helped. The religiously righteous often don’t know much about repentance or gratitude, for they've never even imagined their own spiritual poverty.

A second group of parables invites Jesus's self righteous enemies to consider what they themselves are like. In the parable of the Two Sons they're like a child who didn't do what he promised. In the parable of the Tenants, Jesus compared his opponents to tenants who humiliated the owner of a vineyard and then murdered his heir. In the parable of the Wedding Feast he said they're like socially respectable people who reject a royal invitation with pathetic excuses. Why do they scorn sinners who do accept the invitation?

In one of his most caustic attacks in all of the gospels, Jesus strings together a series of word pictures to describe these hypocrites. His religiously righteous enemies, he said, were like blind guides, filthy cups, whitewashed tombs, unmarked graves (a source of impurity), and poisonous snakes. These loveless people are not the sort of people you would want to meet if you understood yourself as a needy and vulnerable sinner.

Third, there are the parables that describe what God is like. The stories of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son in this week's gospel were all told to those who complained that “this man welcomes sinners and eats with them." We're familiar with the Prodigal Son who shamed his family by asking for his inheritance, who squandered it all in hedonistic excess, and then found himself on skid row eating pig food.

But as we just saw, people who hit rock bottom often know quite a bit about repentance, and the lost son “came to his senses.” While the son was still far off, the father, utterly undignified for the Orient, ran to him and embraced him. Luke says that the father was "filled with compassion." 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 party.

Why does Jesus eat with sinners? Because that's what God is like. He's good and gracious. He loves without conditions or limits. He patiently waits for us and rejoices when we return. He's full of compassion for us in the midst of our brokenness. He pays a full day's wages for one hour of work.

But watch out for the religiously righteous. They can be 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.” Some people have a need to be religiously right, and to be seen as being right and righteous.

John August Swanson, "Prodigal Son" (1984).

In the epistle this week, Paul says that "God gave us this ministry of reconciliation." Do real sinners feel really welcome in our churches? Whether the cheery greeting of the usher really worked, I loved how Saint Aldates in Oxford prioritized the good news that God welcomes all sinners.

And here's a radical idea — extend this divine mercy to your own self, for that's what God has already done. 

Much of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) is characterized by darkness and despair, reflecting his lifelong interior struggles. After converting to Catholicism, which estranged him from his Anglican family, Hopkins burned much of the poetry he had written, and even stopped writing for seven years. After ordination as a Jesuit priest, an assignment in Ireland left him feeling isolated and melancholy, thus giving rise to his so-called "terrible sonnets."

But somewhere in his darkness, Hopkins felt God's light. He moved beyond self-reproach to divine acceptance. In one of my favorite poems, My Own Heart, he describes an interior conversation about accepting "God's smile" upon his life.

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
's not wrung, see you; unforseen times rather — as skies
Betweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile.

So, welcome one another. Accept God's acceptance. And be like the prodigal.

Weekly Prayer

Disgraceland

By Mary Karr

Before my first communion at 40, I clung
to doubt as Satan spider-like stalked
the orb of dark surrounding Eden
for a wormhole into paradise.

God has first formed me in the womb
small as a bite of burger.
Once my lungs were done
He sailed a soul like a lit arrow

To inflame me. Maybe that piercing
Made my howl at birth,
Or the masked creatures
Whose scalpel cut a lightning bolt to free me—

I was hoisted by the heels and swatted, fed
And hauled through rooms. Time-lapse photos show
My fingers grew past crayon outlines,
my feet came to fill spike heels.

Eventually, I lurched out to kiss the wrong mouths,
get stewed, and sulk around. Christ always stood
to one side with a glass of water.
I swatted the sap away.

When my thirst got great enough
to ask, a stream welled up inside;
some jade wave buoyed me forward;
and I found myself upright

In the instant, with a garden
inside my own ribs aflourish. There, the arbor leafs.
The vines push out plump grapes.
You are loved, someone said. Take that

and eat it.

Mary Karr (born 1955) is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University. She has published five volumes of poetry. Her three best-selling memoirs recount her “nervous breakthrough,” and “journey from blackbelt sinner and lifelong agnostic to unlikely Catholic.”

Dan Clendenin: dan@journeywithjesus.net

Image credits: (1) Buffalo AKG Art Museum; (2) On the Border of the Holy; and (3) John August Swanson Studio, Pasadena, California.