What's a Nice God Like You Doing in a Place Like This?

It is certainly not news to read Matthew 9 and find out that Jesus hung out with sinners. Most of us are familiar with the facts presented in this passage. We know that Jesus kept company with "sinners" and tax collectors. I don't know, though, if we really understand how outrageous Jesus' behavior seemed to those who considered themselves godly.

I guess we get the problem with the sinners. It is not good to hang around with people of ill repute. "Bad company corrupts good character," we would say. We believe that truth in a figurative way. We use the phrase to suggest that evil influences good more than good influences evil. But in Jesus' day that phrase would have been taken literally. Under the law (or at least the rabbis' interpretation of it), eating with sinners caused one to participate in their sinfulness. So if you ate with a drunk, you shared in the guilt of drunkeness. If you shared a meal with a loose woman, you had spiritual corruption even if you weren't loose yourself. Back then, people viewed sins like we view colds today. It was literally contagious.

Of course, Jesus not only hung out with sinners. He also hung out with tax collectors. What could be wrong with having friends at the IRS we wonder? Remember that tax collectors worked for the enemy. For hundreds of years, Israel had been under Roman occupation. Tax collectors worked for the occupiers. They gathered revenue that helped support Israel's oppression. And to make matters worse, they were cheats. Some historical sources suggest that tax collectors did not draw a salary from the government. Tax collectors made money by collecting more tax then they had to. Whatever tax collectors collected over their quota, they got to keep. So when Jesus hung out with tax collectors, what was he doing? He was hanging out with people who cheated and swindled to keep the hated enemy in power. Jesus eating with tax collectors was sort of like us having lunch with al Qaeda operatives. Imagine how people in the church would feel about that!

I think if many of us were present in the first-century, we might have been uncomfortable with what Jesus did. We would have wondered what Jesus was doing hanging out with those sorts of people. Most of us would not hang with those sorts of people today. But Jesus did. Why? The answer is found in verse 36. Jesus had compassion. His heart was broken for the lost. Most of us don't have compassion. We have judgment. We want to condemn those who engage in public sin. We want to elevate ourselves, thinking that we are so much better because of our circumspect behavior. But when we judge others, we are only judging ourselves because we too are sinners. Jesus was without sin. He had a right to judge but He did not. He offered mercy and grace to those his society rejected. And unlike the "righteous," the "rejects" took it.

I need to open my eyes to see that there is a harvest in unlikely places. I need to get into the fields. And I need to pray that God would send others to go with me.