The Ambulance Gospel--February 28, 2020
And as [Jesus] sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" But when he heard this, he said, "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'." [Matthew 9:10-13]
If you want to learn about grace, watch an ambulance crew showing up on scene. Their mission is always crystal clear. It's never about worthiness or unworthiness. It is always about restoring life.
And if you are clear that your calling, your purpose, is simply bringing people to life as fully as possible, a lot of distracting issues simply fall away from consideration. The EMTs who show up when someone has been in a car accident, or who get called in response to a drug overdose, or who show up on site when fire engulfs an apartment building all know that their work is focused simply on saving life. They don't need to evaluate whose life is "worth" saving, or whether the person got into the trouble they're in by their own fault or someone else's. They simply know their job is to restore life, wherever and whenever life is threatened.
Part of that is simply because of the urgent nature of being a first responder. If someone has had a heart attack or been trapped in a smoke-filled room, you don't have time to ask, "Well, have you been a good person?" or "Did you start this fire because you weren't paying attention to the stove like you should have been?" The emergent nature of the need calls for a policy of "save-first-ask-questions-later." But there's also simply an assumption we make as a society that life is worth preserving, regardless of what messes we have made with our lives. The ambulance crew responds to save the Eagle Scout and the deadbeat dad alike, just like they would treat the bank robber as well as the victims of the heist. There are other consequences, for sure, for the bank robber or the deadbeat dad, but there is no question about whether they are "worth" saving or not. When you are a first responder, your mission is clear: restore life.
I get the sense that Jesus had that same urgent clarity to his own mission as well. As the gospels tell it, he is far less concerned with questions of "worthiness" than all the Respectable Religious folks around him are. It's not even that Jesus judges some worthy and others unworthy, but then helps the second group after telling them they're his charity case. He doesn't approach the folks looked down on as "sinners" by saying, "Well, you know, you don't deserve my help, but because I'm feeling nice today, I'll throw you a little pity." The categories of "deserving" or "undeserving" aren't there--he only sees folks in need of being brought more fully to life. That's what lets him spend time with religious leaders like Nicodemus, crooked sell-outs like the Roman sub-contracted tax collector Zacchaeus, and everybody in between. Jesus just doesn't see the world in categories of "white-hat-wearing good guys" and "black-hat-wearing bad guys." Jesus only sees a world full of us trapped in different kinds of death, and like a good EMT, he goes right to work restoring us to life in whatever ways we need it. All of us.
Like Robert Farrar Capon put it so clearly, "Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to teach the teachable; he did not come to improve the improvable; he did not come to reform the reformable. None of those things works." Unless that is true, Jesus would have had to go around triaging the people he helped based on moral rectitude. He would have had to do background checks and get personal references before inviting himself over to someone's house (like a tax collector's dinner party) to break bread and share supper. He would have had to check if you were going to be a worthwhile investment before bestowing any healing on you. But he never does... because resurrection, like grace, does not ask about worthiness. It only asks, "Do you need to be brought to life?"
So much of the time, we church folk water down the power of the Gospel's good news by thinking we have to pre-screen the ones we speak of God's love to. So often, we act as though our job is to decide who is worthy of acceptance, or who has shown enough potential to receive mercy. So often, we settle for the damnable logic of transactional thinking that says, "There's only a place for you if you are going to have something valuable enough to contribute, and there's only help for you if you are going to pay it back in some measurable way." So we employ trite little mottos like, "Charity begins at home," or "We have to take care of our own," or "We don't want to attract the wrong type of people here."
Well, Jesus is only ever interested, apparently, in the "wrong type of people."
Or maybe, better yet, Jesus just doesn't care about what other folks think are the "right type of people." Like physicians are meant to help the sick, without regard for who "deserves" it (or whose insurance company thinks you are "worthy" of approval), Jesus has come to raise what is dead in us, all of us, without regard for deserving or not.
A young and budding theologian I know (who is almost thirteen) recently put it in words I haven't been able to get out of my head lately. She says, "But some can't accept that all will be loved, so he died on a cross." Jesus' refusal to consider the opinions of the Respectable Religious Crowd about who was acceptable upset them so much they called for his death. His insistence that God's great messianic banquet included sellouts and outcasts and mess-ups and failures and troublemakers and crooks was downright scandalous to the Guardians of Piety. And yet even if they couldn't accept it, Jesus still insisted: all will be loved.
Maybe today our calling is to see the world with the clarity of an EMT crew--to know that our work is simply to bring life to folks, regardless of whether we, or anybody else, thinks they are "worthy." Maybe it is enough simply to love people prodigally. Maybe it would fill a lifetime and more just to invite everyone you meet to God's grand and raucous dinner party, without ever getting around to screening them at the door. Maybe the world needs our radical belief that, indeed, all will be loved.
After all, when you know your calling is simply to bring people to life, it has a way of making all the other side issues fall by the wayside.
Lord Jesus, let us dare to give life to others as tenaciously as you do...and as you have already first given it to us.
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