The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C, 2016 – Jeremiah 4:11-12,22-28; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10
All the tax collectors and sinners were drawing near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and scribes began to grumble, saying “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
The Pharisees and scribes are grumbling again. We are used to the Pharisees’ grumbling, and we are quick to write them off. Hypocrites and sinners: we know who they are. But that ought to raise a red flag—because that is what the Pharisees do to the tax collectors today. There is a grace in Jesus’ words today that is greater than the Pharisees know. But in order to see it they have to see also who the sinners are. In order to see it, WE have to see who the sinners are.
It may help us to see, both the sin and the grace, if we put ourselves for a moment in the Pharisees’ shoes.
The Pharisees are objecting to the problem of sin in the midst of the holy people of God. Israel is called to be holy as the people of God, as a witness to the nations, because they are the people among whom God dwells. If they refuse holiness, the prophets of Israel declare, God may refuse to dwell in their midst.
Jesus claims to be God’s Messiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” Jesus announces, “for he has anointed me (to bring good news to the poor).” Anointed one, Messiah. This is Jesus’ claim.
But Jesus surrounds himself with sinners. How then can he be the anointed one of the most Holy God? The problem the Pharisees have is real and legitimate.
But they do not understand the scope of sin—and so they are blind to the scope of God’s grace. The Pharisees are not wrong about the polluting power of sin. They are just wrong about who the sinners are. For the tax collectors are not the only ones who turn away from the holy God.
The Pharisees complain, Luke says. Diegonguzon. And when they complain, they take us back to another time, to another place, to the whole people of God, Israel, in the wilderness. Again and again, in the wilderness, at the entrance to the promised land, the Israelites complain. Barely through the Red Sea, in the wilderness called Sin, they object to the hard way in which the Lord is leading them.
Israel came to the wilderness of Sin,” Exodus tells us. “The whole congregation of the Israelites complained—diegonguzen—against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the fleshpots of Egypt.” Here we are in this desert, and we have no food. Why have you brought us out of slavery in Egypt to kill this whole assembly with hunger? (Exod 16:1-3)
God rains down manna from heaven upon them, and in the very next chapter they do it again. The people thirsted there for water, and the people complained (diegonguzen) against the Lord. (Exod 17:3)
And in Numbers, at the entrance to the promised land, at the sight of the mighty enemy arrayed against them:
Then all the congregation raised a loud cry and the people wept that night. And all the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron and said to them, “Would that we had died in the land of Egypt! Or would that we had died in this wilderness! 3 Why is the LORD bringing us into this land to fall by the sword?”
Let us choose another captain, they say, and go back to Egypt.
When the Pharisees complain, they link themselves to this whole history of the people of God who do not trust, who cannot see the way in which God is leading them. In the face of the wilderness, in the face of the forces of the world that does not know God, they fail to believe they are strong enough, with only God’s word behind them.
By the time of Jeremiah, when the kingdom of Judah faces the truly terrifying power of the great kingdom of Babylon, this failure of faith is endemic. The people turn to other gods to seek their salvation; they turn to other kingdoms. “Let us go back to Egypt,” Israel says in the face of the mighty Canaanites at the entrance to the promised land. And when the armies of Babylon stand at the gate, it is to Egypt that the King of Judah turns.
My people are foolish, The Lord cries through the mouth of the prophet Jeremiah.
They do not know me. They turn away, in the pressure of a nation that is hostile to God, to other kingdoms, other gods. But this way, the prophet says, desolation lies.
Because of this the earth shall mourn,
And the heavens above grow black.
What is sin? It is the failure to hold to the word of God in the face a hostile world.
It is not just the tax collectors who are sinners. It is the whole people who have turned away. The tax collectors and obvious sinners are just the symptom. Yes, they have failed to be true to God’s word, to its call to holiness. But in that failure of faith they are no different than the righteous Pharisees who complain. The tax collectors are the sign on the surface of the body of the unholiness, the failure of faith in the holy God, that lies deep and pervasively within a whole people.
Sin is not a singular problem only. It is corporate too. It is Israel; it is the Pharisees; it is the church. There is no one who is righteous, the psalmist says: no, not one. It is difficult to trust in the Word we have been given when all around us people cry Shame! God calls us to come out with Israel, from the fleshpots of Egypt. In the beauty of Scripture, in the cry of the prophets, in the witness of the saints and the worship of the Church, he says, Follow me!
And when God’s people do not follow, when they cannot believe, when they complain because the way is surely too hard or because they cannot see—he comes to walk with them.
In Christ he leaves everything and comes to find us, comes into the midst of our places of anguish, into the wilderness of Sin. Like the shepherd he seeks us in Christ with the love that is anguish and in Christ he finds us and takes us on his shoulders and lifts us up, there on his shoulders, into heaven. He is with us when the heavens grow black. He is with us on the cross we have made, that place of our God-forsakenness. It is there that he finds us and brings us home.
O love, how deep, how broad, how high. It fills the heart with ecstasy. It is such a beautiful hymn. Here is God’s love, in the life of Jesus the Christ, the life lived with us in every part, the life given for us, Jesus holding out his hands to us here in the life where we are lost. Where we do not know we are lost. Where we believe, like the Pharisees, that we are surely righteous. That all we are and all we seek and all we do is good. Here in the midst of the people who are lost, who complain and turn away.
We are God’s people and the sheep of his pasture. Sometimes we are the lost sheep. So much depends upon our knowing this. For when we are lost, God is the shepherd who gives up everything, even his own life, to find us.
Alleluia. Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.
Therefore let us come to his table and eat. Let us keep the feast.
AMEN.
