A friend of sinners

There’s a lot less in the Bible than you think there is. Or at least, there is a lot less of what you think there is in there than there actually is, and a lot more of all sorts of other stuff you never for one minute imagined was in there but is. And also quite a lot of stuff that you once heard and have now forgotten. And stuff that somebody once wrote two thousand years ago and everybody has now forgotten. Because for most of us our main interface with the Scriptures is what we hear read in Church during a service, we only ever experience a small part of what’s between the covers of the good book. Sometimes we’re having to take the kids to football or preparing for a visiting relative or recovering from the night before or off on a cruise or working shifts: because all the myriad ways modern life barges into our Sunday time, we keep missing that week when they read out the bit about unicorns, rainbows, glitter and whatnot (actually I think I’m the only person who’s ever here for that reading). We miss a lot. 

On the flip side, there’s a lot less in the Bible of what you would think there would be featured in it if you’d got your idea of the contents of Holy writ from a lifetime of listening to Christians talking about their faith.

All sorts of things we take for granted, all sorts of things we know are gospel truth: not there. Here’s a small selection. Adam’s apple (the type of fruit isn’t specified, but I reckon it was a mango). The three wise men (never been that many in the whole history of the world, certainly not on the same camel). Jonah’s whale (it was a less eco-friendly big fish). Statements like “This too shall pass.”Or “God works in mysterious ways”. ‘Be in the world but not of the world’. ‘God will not give you more than you can handle.’ ‘Money is the root of all evil.’ ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ ‘You can’t take it with you when you die.’ ‘Marriage is one man and one woman for life.’ ‘Only Christians can be saved.’ ‘Salvation by faith alone.’ ‘Accept Jesus into your heart as your personal Lord and Saviour.’ ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin’. 

All the above. Not there.

There are also things that you thought were scriptural that are in the Bible but not nearly in the quantity you’d have thought given their prominence in Christian thinking. The flimsiest of scriptural fig leaves can be found in no particular order preserving the modesty of: The Holy Trinity; Guardian angels; angels of any description; Satan; Hell; husband-wife-2.2 children families; Prayers for the departed; Mary; Bishops, priests and deacons; and sinners.

For any but the newest of churchgoers, some of the entries on that list will be a surprise, and none more so than ‘sinners.’

Now humans like to categorise and dichotomise; to split ourselves into groups, tribes and opposing factions. Rich and poor, North and South, in and  out. As religious people are also humans (though that might not always be easy to see) when we think about faith we love to cram each other into in/out boxes: believers and infidels, catholics and protestants, orthodox and heretics,  and most fundamental of all, good and bad, aka saints and sinners usually shortened for convenience sake to us and sinners.

Clearly the concept of sin and its practitioners– somebody called a ‘sinner’– is not unheard of in the scrolls of scripture. But it’s nowhere near as prominent or as clearcut in/out as a couple of thousand years of our religious practice has made it. There are, of course sins (lots of them), and people who  commit them (lots of them too), but how that all works through into salvation is complex and nuanced. When salvation history reaches its culmination– in the person of Jesus– the whole coherence of the ‘us and them’ system crumbles. If the Gospels are to believed- as they should be- Jesus spoke and behaved as though the human category known as ‘sinners’ did not exist. Dive into the jottings of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and it’s crystal clear that Jesus’ world view doesn’t really contain that group. “Sinner’ is a religious label, an abusive judgement, a stereotype, a way of defining a person according to real or perceived transgressions against a religious code, a way of assigning a person to an out group of the impure to be shunned, avoided and in some cases punished. There’s a pretty good working definition of a sinner. But when Jesus comes along, the people who tick those boxes… are his friends. The people he eats with and consorts with, moves among and talks with, the ones he encourages to follow him. Once Jesus gets going, the whole saints and sinners business is a lot more complicated than we might have initially thought, a lot less comfortable than it might have been.

So rather rail against tax collectors, sabbath breakers, sex workers and adulterers in Mark and Matthew’s gospels Jesus only really talks about other people as sinners when he refers to the religious authorities: ‘See the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners’. In John’s gospel you can find ‘sinner’ in its native habitat: used by the religious authorities to describe Jesus when they are interrogating the man born blind, outraged at him having been healed on the sabbath. More sinners turn up in the parables of Luke. However, rather than being affronts to be kept at arm’s length, they are the people that Heaven opens its arms to welcome. They are the people God uses not for exemplary punishment pour encourager les autres,  but to shine a light on the hypocrisies of the upright and the pious, to highlight the depredations of the finger waggers and the stone throwers. 

A way of categorising people that includes everybody is pretty much useless, except perhaps to highlight our commonality. Such is the case with the category ‘sinner’. 

Jesus comes to call those who are lost. Not because they are the most terrible of all sinners, but as a wake up call to those who think that they are not lost. Hint: we’re all lost.

The gospels are full of accounts of individuals meeting Jesus- Nicodemus, the woman at the well, Zacchaeus, PIlate; the man born blind, the woman with the haemorrhage, the Syro-Phoenecian woman, the Gerasene demoniac. Jesus talks and teaches, listens and heals; one to one, upfront and personal. It would be easy then to deduce that Christianity is all about the individual and their response to Jesus, a personal faith. But looked at not as each individual interaction but at the sum of the encounters it’s clear that Jesus’ goal is to change society, not to ‘fix’ individual members so the existing system can run more smoothly.

If then, we want to hear as Jesus heard, if we want to hear the Word in the world, we must listen for the voices of those our world says are broken, and listen for cries of those for whom our world is broken.

If we want to see as Jesus sees, we must learn to see Christ’s features, however distorted,  in every human face; we must learn to see Christ’s beloved siblings in those we call sinners.

Then our hearts will be pulled ever closer to the Sacred Heart of the Divine.