Real, Not Abstract, Mercy--March 31, 2025

Real, Not Abstract, Mercy--March 31, 2025

"Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to [Jesus.] And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, 'This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them'.” (Luke 15:1-2)

Everybody loves the idea of mercy as long as it's only talked about in the abstract. The moment we start talking about kindness for real people who we really think are undeserving, or acceptance for those we really don't want to accept, or reconciliation with the actual people we have been nursing grudges again, well, then people get fussy.

You can see it playing out in this scene, the opening verses of what we call Luke 15, which many of us heard in worship this Sunday as the introduction to the story often called the Prodigal Son.  All the Respectable Religious People--"the Pharisees and the scribes," as Luke identifies them--surely knew that the God of Israel was known for being "gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love." That line, and variations on it, are woven throughout the Torah, the Prophets, and the Psalms like an ancient creed.  If you asked a sampling of random Judeans on the street to describe their God, they would tell you God is "One" (as in, there's only one God) and then they would tell you that God is merciful.  It was the sort of thing that kids memorized from their earliest years and that septuagenarian grandparents recited by heart every morning with their daily prayers.  Everybody knew that God was "merciful" in first century Judaism; that was the party line.

And as long as it didn't have to get fleshed out any further than that, there was no controversy.  As long as everyone could broadly affirm "Yes, in a broad sense, God is hypothetically merciful and kind," that could be the end of it.  But once you start asking, "Well, to whom is God's mercy available?  To whom does God show kindness, forgiveness, and grace?"  you're setting the stage for a fight.  Because as a general rule, we human beings (especially we religious human beings) tend to start from the assumption that we ourselves are pretty decent people without severe sins or excessive red marks on our permanent record.  We tend to assume that whatever mercy is out there is--of course!--available to us.  It's those OTHER people you gotta watch out for.  It's THOSE PEOPLE who are just not quite as good as us, not quite as worthy, not really proper candidates for forgiveness.  We tend to think of our sins and trespasses as minor infractions--peccadillos, really--like returning our library books late, or occasionally being stingy with the tip at lunch if we are short on cash and don't want to break a larger bill.  But OTHER people?  Well, they are a different story.  And we all have our personalized lists of people who are just beyond the reach of mercy, folks who are across the boundary that separates OUR nice, manageable, even respectable, sins, from THEIR abominable ones, which disqualify "those people" from acceptability.  The trouble is, Jesus just does not care about the lists we make or lines we draw, and he will not leave mercy inside the rigid constraints we would try to cage it in.

Jesus makes the notion of mercy real, not hypothetical.  And he does that by giving his mercy and welcome to actual people with real issues and human faces--and then inviting them to dinner with him.  Jesus doesn't treat sinners like he is quarantining pitiful patients with an incurable and contagious disease--he doesn't keep antiseptic distance or put up barriers to prevent being "tainted" by their iniquity. And neither does Jesus put up pre-conditions of "life change" or prerequisite rituals of repentance before he shares a table with "THOSE PEOPLE." He eats with them--and in the ancient Near Eastern context, table fellowship implies acceptance and friendship between those who break bread together--without insisting that tax collectors quit their jobs and without demanding that the "sinners" get clean and give six months' worth of good behavior before he'll put the kettle on or set the table.

This, I think, is really what upsets the Respectable Religious crew in this story.  See, it's not just that Jesus refuses to condemn or zap the sinners around him.  It's that he actively welcomes them as they are without requiring they clean themselves up, turn over a new leaf, or change their ways first.  To be sure, we might say, being in Jesus' company will change us in profound ways--he will remake us in the image of his likeness and his love, the more we are around him.  But the horse and the cart have to be in the right order.  Jesus doesn't insist on "sinners" stopping being "sinners" before they come to him, like he's got an acute sin allergy and will break out in hives if he's around crooks and gamblers.  It's the other way around: Jesus draws people to himself as they are, declaring them his companions at the table and extending them his friendship, and that has a way of transforming us.  And of course, since Jesus keeps claiming that he is bringing with him the very Reign of God, he's saying that none other than God welcomes the "tax collectors and sinners" as they are.  And for those who wanted to keep mercy as an abstract concept for hypothetical people, that's just a bridge too far.

Jesus, of course, is well aware of their objections, their worries, and their perception that he is too "soft on sin," or even "encouraging abominable behavior" with his welcome.  He just doesn't let it stop him from setting a wide table and crossing the boundaries between "righteous" and "unrighteous" folks for his guest list.

Maybe today that's enough for us to hold onto and let simmer in our souls.  We have probably sung a song or two about how "amazing" God's grace is and how "wide" God's mercy is, but we have probably also kept ourselves from having to picture faces when we do.  Today it might be worth asking ourselves, "Who have I been assuming is outside the line and beyond the reach of God's mercy--and what does Jesus really think about those faces?"  It might be worth asking, "Where have I been saying the right words about God's love and kindness without having to take seriously just how wide a welcome that means?"  And it might be worth it--even if it makes us squirm to do it--to ask who we would have a hard time imagining at the dinner party with Jesus, and what we will do when it turns out that Jesus has already set a place for them?

Lord Jesus, enable us to see the real faces of the real people whom you love, and remembering it includes us as well, even in our stingiest and most hard-hearted moments.