The Company Jesus Keeps

The Company Jesus Keeps--February 11, 2019

“And as he sat at dinner in Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples—for there were many who followed him.” [Mark 2:15]

One of my favorite song lyrics is a line by Jon Foreman of the band Switchfoot, who sings, “We are a beautiful letdown, painfully uncool—the church of the dropouts, the losers, the sinners, the failures, and the fools.”  I think he’s got it right about what it looks like when Jesus chooses his own company: we get a motley crew that he makes into something blessed. 

This is the thing that throws a monkey-wrench into any and all attempts to pretend that Jesus was or is a respectable teacher of religion.  He was and is neither, and by his own choosing, at that.  We all know the common-sense rule that “bad company corrupts good morals” (Paul even quotes that old chestnut in 1 Corinthians 15:33). And yet there is Jesus, deliberately choosing to surround himself with the sinners and sell-outs.  And not just to be in physical proximity with them (after all, I probably have no association at all with the people I am standing behind in line at the grocery store, and I’m right next to them.), but actually to eat with these “tax collectors and sinners” by his own choosing.  That’s a big deal in a first-century Mediterranean culture, where table fellowship was a sign of acceptance and of friendship. 

In other words, Jesus has no “plausible deniability” with this crowd. He can’t say, “Well, I’m near these people, but I didn’t know about their unacceptable lifestyle.”  He can’t issue a press-release declaring, “I’m acquainted with these people, but I don’t want to be associated with them.”  And he can’t pretend that he’s holding his nose while he sits at table with them. Jesus consciously and deliberately opens the messianic banquet table, the royal table of the Kingdom of God, to people who are unquestionably unworthy. He realizes he’s breaking not only the common-sense rule about “bad company” and “good morals,” but also all the tenets of basic religion that say you’re not supposed to hang around sinners or reward them with attention. But that’s Jesus for you—much less interested in doing what the rules and rule-givers would tell him to do, and much more interested in bringing the Reign of God to all the places is isn’t fully happening yet.

That’s bound to make a motley crew of a community—a church of, well, “dropouts, losers, sinners, failures, and fools.” Jesus knows it and is willing to live with it. In fact, these are the people he chooses to surround himself with. He doesn’t settle for sinners—he seeks us out. And yep, I said us, not them.

We are going to have to get that straight before we go any further, because it lets us see ourselves truthfully. We are the sinners and sell-outs that Jesus chose and keeps choosing to have over for dinner.  No, more than that—he comes to our houses, invites himself over, invades our space, and sets up shop in our dining rooms. He is not only willing to be seen with the likes of you and me, in all our brokenness, and not only willing to be counted as our friends by sharing a table with us, but beyond that Jesus is willing to put himself in the place of guest at Levi’s house, receiving what this shameless sell-out puts out for dinner. It’s so much more respectable, so much more a position of power, when you get to be the host, the one providing for your needy the one patronizing and putting up with them. But Jesus even lets go of that kind of position—he lets himself be the guest of these unacceptable people, making them acceptable as he does it. And, we must admit, he does the same with us.  For all of our Respectable Religious attempts to keep out "those people" (the ones we deem unacceptable and "other"), we are among the messes, stinkers, and sell-outs Jesus keeps choosing to join for supper.

That, to be utterly honest, is a better picture of what goes on every Sunday morning than most of our mental images. We often talk about going to church as a gathering of good, moral, religious people being reminded to stay good and moral and religious or else God will get a bad reputation by association.  But much more truthfully, every Sunday, Jesus bears with us all and shows up in the house of sinners and sell-outs once more, willing to be present at the Table we set despite the fact that we have broken the rules and missed the mark yet again.  Every service of worship, every celebration of Holy Communion, every gathering of Christians is the story of Levi’s house all over again, with Jesus choosing to show up at table with "those people" and surround himself with this “beautiful letdown” of a community.

Once we get over the strangeness of that and realize that our picture of church as “our-good-show-for-God” is all wrong, that turns out to be wonderful, beautiful news. It means that Jesus, our Savior and Lord, is not just willing to tolerate us “in theory”… at a distance… with his finger pinching his nose, but comes close to us--and all the people we thought were too sinful or too unacceptable or too different--in all of our messiness, with all our baggage, and despite what the rules of common-sense say. And thanks be to God for a savior like that.

Lord, help us to admit that we are "those people" you choose to surround yourself with—and praise you for it.