Photo of John Astin and Carolyn Jones as Gomez and Morticia Addams from The Addams Family. (Public Domain)
Everyone carries baggage from their growing up years. No family is perfect, some are hideous, and all have their oddities. It’s like everyone grows up in the Addams family.
For some people I have known, the Addams family would have been a great improvement. Morticia was a doting mother and Gomez was an affectionate father. Even the children, Pugsley and Wednesday, were well behaved and kind to each other. Fester was, admittedly, a little strange, but doesn’t everyone have a weird uncle?
In the Addams family, dad and mom always supported their kids. They cheered their every accomplishment. Sadly, the same cannot be said for all our families. As a pastor, I’ve met many who would have done better to grow up on Cemetery Lane.
John’s dad was a career Navy man, who was often stationed in far-away places. Whenever he came home, he reasserted himself as family commander. Once, when John misbehaved, his dad picked up a two by four, swung it, and hit him across the back. Even as an adult, John did not recognize his dad’s behavior as inappropriate. He said, “I probably deserved it.”
Susan grew up with a dad who sexually abused her. After her mom and dad divorced, mom routinely brought men home with her at night, and left them there when she went to work in the morning. Susan was repeatedly molested. What scarred her more deeply than the horrific sexual abuse was her mom’s disregard for her. The only thing her mom ever taught her was that she was trash. She told me once that she was a garbage can, filled with rotting things.
James grew up with a dad and a mom and a stepdad and a stepmom. In fact, dad had kids by four different women. It was the Family Circus, without the laughs. James could never figure out where he fit, which led him to the nagging suspicion that he didn’t fit anywhere.
I’ve changed names to protect the identity of these men and this woman. Protecting their identity is something their parents never bothered to do. How much better it would have been for them to grow up with the Addams’s.
Identity – the way people understand themselves – is crucial to success in life and progress in faith. Yet everyone carries an internal identity that contains inaccuracies. No one sees themselves as they really are. Only God does.
How a person sees himself or herself will determine the way they act. Marcus Aurelius was right: “Character is destiny,” but it is not only actual character but also perceived character that influences destiny. Humans were created in such a way that their beliefs (including their beliefs about themselves) determine their actions, which shapes their character, which governs their beliefs, which determine their actions, which shapes their character, and so on.
What we think about ourselves – that is, how we view our identity – inevitably influences our actions though, for the most part, we are unaware of it. We still weigh pros and cons and make the choices it seems incumbent upon us to make, but we make those choices because we see ‘us’ in a certain way. That is true of all people, everywhere, no matter what their race, ethnicity, or religion.
Christians believe that people can receive an identity “update.” St. Paul, after listing the previous identities of some of his converts – for example, adulterers, drunkards, slanderers, and swindlers – adds, “that is what some of you were.” The implication is clear: they were so no longer. Their identity had changed.
St. Paul characterized this change – it’s one of the beautiful things in Christian doctrine – as being from Adam’s (not Addams’s) family’s dysfunction to God’s family’s love. With faith in Christ comes a new identity: child of God, productive family member, and temple of God’s Spirit.
A Christian psychologist once summed this up by describing the Christian’s core identity as “the beloved.” If identity influences character and character is destiny, then an identity like this promises a destiny that is incomparable.
Jesus said that he came that people like us might have life. He claims that his life directs people by giving them light.[1] His life satisfies[2]; it is what human beings were made for. His life is indestructible: it goes on forever. We need his life, and that is just why he came: to give it for us so that he could give it to us.
So what does that mean in our situation? Two things. If you do not have this life, you may wonder why things don’t seem to be quite right for you. The problem is that you are trying to do life with only half the original equipment supplied by the manufacturer. You have biological life (which is winding down all the time), but you lack spiritual life.
Years ago, I had a van with over 200,000 miles and it was running really rough. It was backfiring and stalling. I thought we would have to make an appointment for a tune-up. But before I did that, I opened the hood and there, right in front of me, was a spark plug wire hanging loose. The engine was running on only five of its six cylinders. As soon as I put the wire back on, it ran fine (or as fine as a van with about a quarter million miles can be expected to run).
If you lack spiritual life, you are running on only one of two cylinders. You were not designed for that. You need life – the life of the spirit. And the only place to go for it is Jesus. He is the gate, the way in, the “way, the truth and the life.” By trusting him with yourself, you will experience an added dimension – another cylinder – to life. If you don’t know how to trust your life to him, find someone who has already done it, and ask them how you can do it to. If you really don’t know anyone like that, email me at the address below for some initial instructions. There is a new kind of life available – don’t miss out on it.
If you have already received that life, but it is not running right, you may need to check for contaminates or occlusions. Something may be blocking the flow of Christ’s life in you. It may be a sin or a selfish attitude. Ask God to search you for whatever it is, so that you can clear away the blockage. In all probability, you already know what it is. Don’t fool around: deal with it head-on and get back to the business of living with, and for, Jesus.
If you and I were to type in the same search term or phrase on Google, we would likely get different results. Let’s say we search for “Fun things to do.” Our Google search will be personalized by our location – which is good; knowing fun things to do in New Orleans, where you live won’t be of much use to me in Michigan.
We will also get different results based on our search histories. Google utilizes 6 months of your search history in ranking search results. So, if you have searched repeatedly for art museums and galleries, you are liable to see search results related to art classes and exhibits near the top of your list. If I have searched for fishing lures and boat motors, I’ll find lakes and fishing lodges.
It gets more interesting when it comes to current affairs. If I regularly read stories from The Washington Examiner and Fox News, the results I get from searching for “Delta” may vary widely from the ones you, who read The Washington Post and watch CNBC, receive. The diversity of results will be even greater if we type in “Donald Trump, 2024.”
So, search engines feed us what some algorithm has concluded we want. I keep getting fishing, you keep getting art. I get conservative viewpoints and you get liberal ones. And almost all the evidence supplied by our searches supports the beliefs we already hold. Neither of us can understand how the other can possibly think differently when the truth is so obvious.
The term “silo mentality,” which emerged from the business world, has application to social life. We are liable to get stuck in our silos with people who have the same goals, absorb the same news, and come from the same background. Everyone we know thinks about things the same way we do. We’ve heard that there are others out there who see things differently, but they are obviously mistaken and, we can’t help but suspect, willfully deluded.
In the divisive climate we now occupy, “silo mentality” may not be as good a description as “bunker mentality.” We choose our bunker with the people who are like us. We repeat the talking points that comprise our group’s orthodoxy and convince ourselves that all the smart people – and the good people too – are on our side.
It’s not that we have thought carefully about an issue and have reached a conclusion. We’ve accepted someone else’s conclusion, moved into our bunker, and now spend our time justifying our opinions and delegitimizing those of others. We are in danger of becoming like the people St. Paul disparaged: “They want to be teachers … but they do not know what they are talking about or what they so confidently affirm.”
All those Google searches, helpful in so in many ways, have not helped us here. They have, instead, given us tools to dig our bunkers a little deeper. To borrow again from the apostle, our search engines enable us to be “always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.”
And it is not just Google searches that lead to bunkers of belief. A Bible concordance can lead to the same place if we are not careful. Having pastored for a long time, I’ve noticed how church people can bunker up with people who think just like they do. The Catholics have their bunker, decorated with pictures of saints. The Reformed crowd has their bunker – is that a portrait of John Calvin on the wall? The Fundamentalists’ bunker is cluttered with booklets on the essentials of the faith. The liberals have copies of Niebuhr’s, The Irony of American History and Robertson’s Honest to God strewn around the room.
I heard a professor of Christian Education once say that reading the Bible does not lead to spiritual transformation for many people because they only see in the Bible what they have seen before. Rather than transforming them, it transfixes them. This kind of thing happens when we read the Bible to prove our point rather than improve our person, which is not all that different from what happens in our Google searches.
In John 10, Jesus used a figure of speech while he was teaching and, verse six, people did not get it. That is a comfort to me, a preacher, for there have been times when I was speaking that I realized people weren’t “getting it.” I am a very imperfect teacher, but just knowing that Jesus, the perfect teacher, experienced the same thing is helpful. He knows. Whether people get it or not, he gets me.
When the perfect teacher realized his hearers weren’t getting it, he did not chastise them; he simply changed his approach and gave them a different way of looking at it. Verse seven: “I tell you the truth, I am the gate for the sheep. All who ever came before me were thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. He will come in and go out, and find pasture.”
How can Jesus says that “all who came before him were thieves and robbers”? Is he referring to the prophets? No. The context makes that clear. This teaching comes in the wake of what had just happened: the religious leaders – the false shepherds – had tried to use a man (the one born blind but healed by Jesus) to advance their schemes and, when he would not cooperate, they excommunicated him. In the light of that action, Jesus speaks about strangers and thieves and robbers.
The Greek bears out this conclusion. For some reason, the NIV translates, “All who ever came before me were thieves and robbers,” but the original language clearly reads, “Are thieves and robbers.” Jesus is talking about those who are presently on the scene. Some, no doubt, in this very crowd.
One of the key words in this section is the word, “gate” or, as is could be translated, “door.” It is used in verses 1, 2, 3, 7 and 9. In verses 7 and 9 Jesus changes the image and says that he is the door and claims that “whoever enters through me will be saved” (verse 9). Jesus saw himself as the means of entrance into salvation.
This is a compelling claim, especially when taken together with the other claims Jesus made: that he is the bread of heaven who gives life to the world;[1] that whoever eats this bread will live forever;[2] that he is the source of living water;[3] that he is the light of the world;[4] that whoever does not believe in him will die in his or her sins.[5]
Here he claims to be the gate. In a similar passage in John 14, Jesus claims to be the way to the Father. St. Peter heard that, and later said, “There is no other name (a Hebraism for “no one else”) under heaven, given among men, whereby we must be saved.”[6] He is the only Door, the one Way in.
Now, we come to the verse in which Jesus tells us why he came. Verse 10: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” The thief comes to steal. . . You see, the thief – the false shepherd – cannot get the sheep to follow him, so he steals them. He uses deception. (This, by the way, is one of the dangers of making religious programming on television your church. Because you cannot see how the TV preacher lives his life, the possibility of deception is always present).
Remember that Jesus had just witnessed these religious leaders’ attempt to use a man for their own gain. We have the story in the previous chapter. Those leaders were not looking out for the man’s interests, but their own. And when they couldn’t use him, they cast him aside like trash. The thief comes to kill and destroy. The false shepherd eats the sheep, while the Good Shepherd feeds them. The thief desires to live off of the sheep, while the shepherd is willing to die for the sheep. Think of Paul, who was willing to forego a salary in order to serve the Corinthian Church. He did not think of his interests, but theirs. Jesus says in verse 11: “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” When you find a preacher or ministry leader who seems more concerned about his plans than about God’s people, or more committed to “the ministry” than he is to those to whom he ministers, something is very wrong. Watch out for any teacher who is prepared to sacrifice the sheep but not himself. That is not the way of Christ.
Christ came, not to live off the sheep, but to give them life. There are several things to notice. First, Jesus does not say, “I have come that they might have life at some date in the future, after their bodies die.” The verb is present tense. “That they may have life – now.”
It seems that in God’s original design, humans were to be born with two kinds of life: one biological and one spiritual. They were a kind of hybrid: Like angels, but unlike animals, they had spiritual life. Like animals, but unlike angels, they had biological life. But then came the Great Rebellion – chronicled in Genesis three – when humankind deserted God. Humans continued to enter the world with biological life (though even that seems to have been diminished), but without spiritual life. That is important because the spirit is the nexus between man and God. Jesus came to restore that life. “He came that we might have life.”
And he came that we might have it to the full. The Greek says, “that they may have life and to excess (or “to a surplus”; or, “to an abundance”) may have it.” The common picture of the Christian life as a dull affair or an endless list of rules was certainly not what Jesus had in mind. It took later generations to come up with that one. The life he gives is coursing and vigorous. It is not restrained by the confining bonds of sin, nor even by the inevitable boundary of death. His life not only leads us into safety (verse 9); it leads us out to service. It is life as life was meant to be.
Back in the 1980s, a congressional panel, led by Claude Pepper, revealed that thousands of Americans might be receiving treatment from doctors who lied on their medical school loan applications, and then used the money not to go to school but to pay a broker for fake documents signifying the completion of school and training.
The one-time dean of admissions for the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology admitted that she had lied on her resume and had never received even an undergraduate degree. The person responsible for admitting some students to advanced degree programs, and turning others away, had falsified her own degree.
There are false doctors and false academics and false lawyers. But the Bible never speaks about them. It does, however, have a good deal to say about false teachers and pastors. We have seen our share of them in the last few years. Jesus saw his share of them, too.
John chapter 10 chronicles a time in Jesus’ ministry when hostility had increased. In chapter eight we see people calling Jesus names and coming to the point of physical violence. In chapter nine we learn that those who administered the synagogues had voted to excommunicate all the followers of Jesus. By the end of chapter 10, people actually tried to kill Jesus.
If you think that would subdue him, or tone down his teaching, or cause him to be more cautious, you don’t know Jesus. He continued to tell the truth, even when it was unpopular. He spoke out against false teachers and pastors in no uncertain terms.
We see that in chapter 10. By means of two analogies (or proverbs) Jesus compares and contrasts himself to the religious leaders of the time. He talks about their motives and his, their character and his and, what is of central importance to us, why they came and why he came.
He did not come, as he once he said, to bring peace. Many people assume that is why he came: to bring them peace and everything that goes along with it – comfort, security, prosperity – but Jesus refused to be received on those terms.
Nor did Jesus come to abolish the law. His intent was to fulfill it. He utterly rejected the idea that his followers have some kind of diplomatic immunity from righteous living. He came in order that the law might be fulfilled in us, who live according to the Spirit.
So, there are two reasons why Jesus did not come: to bring peace and to abolish the law. John 10 gives us a reason he did come. Look at verse 10: “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” More in a moment.
Jesus uses what verse 6 calls a “figure of speech” (or, as the Greek reads, a “dark saying”), one that requires insight to understand the point. We may miss that point, perhaps not from lack of insight, but from lack of cultural familiarity. Jesus’ teaching here is clothed in a figure of speech, but it was very familiar clothing to Jewish people of the first century; it is not to us.
For one thing, it is about sheep, and everyone there and then – unlike here and now – knew something about sheep. For another, Jesus talks about shepherds, and not only did everyone know about shepherds, the Old Testament often used the word shepherd to refer to teachers and national and religious leaders. In this figure of speech, the sheep represent people like us, the robbers represent the religious leaders of the day, and the Good Shepherd represents Jesus.
I would rather be classified among the sheep than the robbers. It is not, however, a compliment to be compared to a sheep. I remember an old truck driver telling me that sheep are about the most stupid animals he had ever hauled. If allowed, he said, the sheep will congregate so tightly in a corner of the truck trailer that some of them will be suffocated.
The old Scot preacher, Andrew Bonar, once told how sheep in the Scottish Highlands wander off into the rocks and get into places from which they cannot escape. The grass on those mountains was sweet and the sheep would sometimes jump down ten or twelve feet to reach it, and then be unable to get back out. They would stay there until they had eaten all the grass. Then the shepherd would hear them bleating in distress. But he would have to wait until they were so faint that they could not stand, and then he would put a rope around himself, and go down and pull the sheep up out of the jaws of death.
Someone asked, “Why don’t they go down when the sheep first gets stuck?” And Bonar answered, “The sheep are so foolish they would dash right over the precipice and be killed!”[1]
Being compared to a sheep is not a compliment, and yet, are we not like them? How often people won’t go to God until they have lost everything and have no friends left. Before he can bring us back to himself, the Good Shepherd must wait until we have given up trying to save ourselves and are finally willing to let Him save us in His own way.
Jesus opens this teaching with an analogy. The man who sneaks into the sheep pen is a thief (the Greek word is klepths), while the man who comes by the designated way – through the gate – is the shepherd of the sheep. Jesus came by the way designated, promised in the Old Testament. He, verse 11, is the Shepherd.
Notice that the sheep, verse 3, listen to (or hear) his voice. They know his voice, verse 4. But they do not recognize a stranger’s voice.
My wife and I frequently walk down our road. A couple of our neighbors have German Shepherds, and one of them is sometimes outside without a leash. Her name is Dakota. Dakota will come rushing at us, barking and growling as if she wanted Looper for lunch. When she does, I say something like, “Dakota, stop! You go back home.” She never listens to me. She doesn’t know my voice.
But when her owner says, “Dakota!” she pulls right up. She knows his voice. She follows his voice.
Jesus says that his sheep know and follow his voice. And note that word follow in verses four and five. The shepherd does not merely speak to us: he leads us. He is going somewhere, and he wants us to go with him. We may think that the Good Shepherd only speaks to us while we are sitting stationary in church. Certainly, he may speak to us then, but his intent is that we follow him into the world, into action, into service and noble sacrifice. He does not call us to vegetate in comfort but to follow in obedience.
For years, I went to sleep repeating the alphabet and finding a characteristic of God for each letter. Sometimes it is a stretch – especially at 2 am!
Many times, I have used the same exercise on a half-day of prayer, beginning my prayer time by praising God and running through the alphabet for traits to applaud.
Below is a list of words I have used. Perhaps you would like to experiment with the practice – it can be very rewarding! What words can you add to the list? Why do you praise God for a particular trait – what is it about that trait that moves you to adoration? Perhaps you will want to comment below, which will give readers and me a richer repository of praise for our God.
2 Samuel 7 has been called “one of the most important chapters in the Bible.” Here we explore its importance to the biblical story of Jesus and to our lives.
Americans have a problem with feeling entitled. Almost anyone you ask will tell you. But they’ll tell you it is some other group that feels entitled.
White people think that black people feel entitled because they are black. Black people believe that white people feel entitled because they are white. Religious people accuse the irreligious of flashing the entitlement card, but the irreligious aren’t listening. They are busy accusing religious people of the same thing.
It goes on and on. Poor people think someone else should pay their way—at least, that’s what the resentful taxpayer believes! And, of course, everyone knows that wealthy people feel entitled, driving around in their BMWs and Mercedes as if they own the road.
I was standing in line recently, and the people in front of me were complaining about immigrants. One of them asked, “Who are they that they should come here and act like we owe them something?” They were convinced that immigrants “expect us to bend over backwards to give them whatever they want.”
Yes, Americans are upset by the entitlement thinking of people from different racial, national, and ethnic backgrounds. But not only that; they accuse members of their own race and ethnicity of having an entitlement mindset when they belong to a different generation. Older Americans complain that “These kids today think that everything – healthcare, education, even income – should be handed to them on a silver platter.”
But it’s the older people who feel entitled, say younger Americans. Older people have no idea how hard it is today. When they got out of school, they had good-paying jobs waiting for them. And they didn’t have a hundred-thousand-dollar school debt hanging over their heads. Life was a cakewalk back then; today it is a minefield.
The reality is that an entitlement mindset can be found in people from every generation, race, and ethnicity. We can find it anywhere, in slums and in mansions, in prisons and in university halls. We can even find it in ourselves.
An entitlement mindset does not look good on anyone, but it is positively hideous on a Christian who claims to be “saved by grace.” Entitlement is the antithesis of grace. The mindsets that go with each are incompatible.
Christians are taught that life itself and the blessings that accompany it are gifts. The Teacher said in the Book of Ecclesiastes: “When God gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work—this is a gift of God.” That health and wealth are God’s gifts is a recurring theme in Scripture. To recognize them as such is a safeguard against an attitude of entitlement.
The Apostle Paul strongly opposed the entitlement mindset. In his Second Letter to the Thessalonians, one of the earliest documents in the Pauline corpus, he wrote, “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.” Paul himself worked two jobs to support himself and his ministry. He instructed Christians to work hard so that they could help others and “not be dependent on anyone.”
No one better exemplifies the anti-entitlement attitude characteristic of Christians than Christ himself. An early hymn to Christ puts it this way: “…though he was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”
The way Christians see it, the one person who truly is entitled – since “all things were created through him and for him” – is the one person who carries no sense of entitlement. Quite the opposite: he willingly relinquished his own prerogatives and “gave himself” for the good of others.
Anger towards those who have an entitlement mindset is frequently fueled by the fear that some good to which we are entitled will be taken from us. How subtle is this attitude of entitlement and how difficult to escape! The way out is not political or social but theological. The way out is the way of Christ.
(This is a follow-up to this week’s posts – a sermon I preached several years ago that was part of a series on how Jesus thought of God.)
Party at My House – God
(August 2013)
Luke 15:11-32: Jesus continued: “There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them. “Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything. “When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.’ So he got up and went to his father. “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
In our first week of this series, we saw that salvation is the principal theme of Luke’s Gospel. He wants his readers to know God’s salvation has been brought by his Son Jesus to all people, including the least, the last and the lost. We’ve seen how this has worked out in practice, as Jesus exercised God’s saving power for Gentiles, Samaritans and prostitutes; for the irreligious and even, as we saw last week, for the despised tax collectors.
These were people that society intentionally excluded, and they believed it was morally incumbent upon them to do so. But Jesus welcomed them, and that left some people puzzled and others scornful. This was particularly true of other religious leaders, who considered Jesus’s chumminess with such people to be evidence of a morally defective character. They publicly criticized him and tried to use the issue to defame and marginalize him. Reputable folk avoided contact with such people whenever possible so that they wouldn’t be contaminated. Any contact was risky, but certain kinds of contact were worse than others, chief of which was eating or drinking with them – and especially sharing their utensils or dinnerware.
So what does Jesus do? He goes off to be the guest of honor at the first annual Sinners and Tax Collectors Banquet. Was he ever criticized for that! What else did he do? He asked a Samaritan woman to give him a drink – from her cup! Even the disciples found that shocking.
Do you remember when news of the AIDS virus first broke? No one knew how far the disease might spread, but crazy theories about the disease were spreading everywhere. Since it was a virus, and viruses are capable of mutating, people were wondering if the virus could mutate in such a way that it might be transmitted through simple contact, like sharing a cup. Churches that used a common cup for the Lord’s Supper were changing their communion practices because of it. Everyone was on edge.
One day I met a couple who both had AIDS and had several children at home with the disease. This was in the early to mid-80s. I visited them at their home, and they told me about how people in the pharmacy that week had turned and almost ran the other way when they saw them. They told me how people at work didn’t want anything to do with them. Everyone was afraid that they would give them the virus.
That’s when they asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee, and offered me an old stained, chipped cup. I accepted, but as I sat looking around at their unclean, messy kitchen, I wondered if that cup had even been washed. The idea that the virus might mutate crossed my mind. I drank their coffee, but I wondered if I was putting myself at risk.
We know now there was nothing to worry about, but at the time it seemed like a risky thing to do. Well, in the first century, that’s how people felt about eating and drinking with people who were not Jews, or were not following ritual practices, or who were living sinful lives. Being around them might very well contaminate you. It is hard to overstate how universal and how powerful this idea was. And yet Jesus welcomed these people and whenever they invited him over for a meal, he went.
By doing so, he was showing them – and everyone else – what God is like. Jesus intentionally challenged the traditions of his day because those traditions obscured the love God has for everyone – even the least, the last and the lost. But he did so without ever obscuring God’s righteousness. He welcomed people joyfully, but he did so without giving them the impression that the way they lived their lives didn’t matter. In fact, he repeatedly told people, “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15).
Jesus was born into a culture that catalogued people according to social groupings. He grew up in a society where even little children could recognize a Pharisee from a block away, where the respectable were distinguished from the disrespectable, and where everyone was assigned worth on the basis of their classification. Yet he utterly disregarded those distinctions. He welcomed people gladly, while other religious leaders did just the opposite: they ignored and excluded people, and felt completely justified in doing so. Why was that? What could account for the very different ways they thought about people and acted towards them?
It’s important to understand that thoughts and actions flow out of beliefs, and the religious leaders’ beliefs about others and, more importantly, about God were radically different from Jesus’s. The Pharisees sincerely believed that God did not want these people; that he didn’t like them. They thought that God himself considered them to be a kind of infection. But Jesus believed that God did want these people, that he loved them and considered them to be a kind of treasure.
Look at verse 1: “Now the tax collectors and “sinners” were all gathering around to hear him.” “Were gathering” reflects an imperfect tense in the original language, which implies repetition. It had become their habit to “draw near” Jesus, as the Greek puts it.
“But” (verse 2) “the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.’” That he welcomed them was bad enough, but that he ate with them was indefensible. Eating together was that culture’s most powerful way of signaling mutual acceptance.
Now we need to understand that these Pharisees and teachers of the law didn’t act this way because they were terrible people. They acted this way because they sincerely believed something that wasn’t true. They thought that welcoming and accepting people was tantamount to approving their sinful behavior. They thought that acceptance would remove any motivation for them to change. They thought the only leverage they had over them was rejection.
But Jesus knew that people don’t get better or holier because you reject them. Only contact with God can make that happen. The religious leaders were waiting for people to clean themselves up and become worthy of salvation. But God doesn’t wait. He doesn’t withhold his affection and love until people meet a certain standard. He loves people and wants them to be with him, which is another way of saying that he wants them to be all they can be. But the religious leaders couldn’t see that, and they criticized Jesus for it.
In response to their criticism – criticism that would have made sense to many of Jesus’s followers – Jesus told three stories. The stories were meant to help people reorient their lives and their relationships around the will and character of God; that is, around his kingdom and his righteousness.
Each story is about something lost – a sheep, a coin and a son; lost, but still valuable. The sinners that the Pharisees and teachers of the law despised were like that: lost, but still valuable. Now I said the stories are about a sheep, a coin and a son, but they are really about a shepherd who seeks his lost sheep, a woman who searches for her lost coin and a father who longs for his lost son. But on a deeper level, they are about the God who never gives up. We often refer to the third and most famous of these stories as the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but it is really the Parable of the Loving Father. It, and the other two, are stories about the God who never gives up, who keeps looking and waiting for his lost people.
In the first story, a shepherd loses one of the hundred sheep he owns, and immediately goes in search of that one sheep. Even though it is only one of a hundred, he still wants it and does everything he can to find it. In the second story a peasant woman loses one of the ten coins she possesses. In that society each coin amounted to a day’s wages, so we are talking about one tenth of this peasant woman’s savings. So the stakes have risen from the first story, where it was one out of a hundred; here it is one out of ten.
The stakes are even higher in the third story, where we are no longer thinking about a coin or a sheep, but a son. And not one of a hundred sons (like King David might have had), or one of ten (like some of Jesus’s hearers might have had) but one of two sons.
The shepherd searched for the sheep until he found it. The woman swept up a storm until she found her coin. But the father could not use the same technique. His son was not a sheep or a coin, but a person. He would go to the ends of the earth to find him, if it would help. But finding him wouldn’t be enough, because he would only have his body and not what he really wanted: his heart. So he waits and watches, and longs for his son to return.
Jesus wanted to help the Pharisees and teachers of the law to realize something about God that had escaped them. He wanted them to see that God is like the shepherd who looks for his lost sheep, even though he has plenty of others. And he is like the woman, who looks for her lost coin, and he’s like the father, who watches for his lost son. And God doesn’t look for his lost ones so that he can avoid them, like the Pharisees did, but so that he can restore them.
These stories are tied together by the repeated use of the same terminology. For example, the word “lost” (or “to lose”) is used in verses 4 (twice), 6, 8, 9, 17, 24, and 32. The word “sinner” is used in verses 1, 2, 7, 10. The word “rejoice” (or “joy”) is used in 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10 (along with the words “celebrate” in 23, 29 and 32, and “be glad” in 32). And the word “call together” is found in verses 6 and 9.
In each story the picture is this: something is lost, and the one to whom it belongs is determined to get it back. He or she searches for what is lost until it is restored, and is then so happy that he or she calls everybody together to have a party.
I’ve just said that the word “lost” is used eight times in this chapter. Jesus would have agreed with the Pharisees and teachers of the law that sinners are lost – and desperately so. They are disoriented – that is, their lives are oriented in the wrong direction, around the wrong markers and leading to the wrong place, where irretrievable loss is the result – the Bible calls it “hell.” Though they are lost they are still valuable – just as my car keys are still valuable even when they are lost. Valuable but, for all practical purposes, useless, until they are found.
Unfortunately, the Pharisees’ response to lost people was totally different from Jesus’s. They thought, “God doesn’t need them. He has plenty of others – ourselves included – so why would he bother with these sinners, who got lost through their own doing?” But Jesus knew that God cares about sinners. They may be lost, but they are his lost.
Another of the words that is repeated in these stories is the word “rejoice.” Every time the lost thing is found, there is a party. The shepherd calls his buddies and says, “I found that sheep I lost. Come on over. Everybody’s getting together to celebrate.” The peasant woman calls her peasant friends and says, “I’m throwing a party because I finally found that coin I lost. We’re all meeting at my house tonight; it’s going to fun.”
When the lost son – and lost by his own choice, by the way – is found, the father posts an invite on Facebook: “The boy’s back! Party at my house tonight. Bring a friend; we’re going to celebrate.”
Now look at verse 7: “I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.” Verse 10: “I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” Heaven breaks into a party every time a sinner repents; every time someone who has been lost is found.
Jesus pictures God as someone who is just itching to throw a party. He texts all his friends and says, “Found another one! Party at my house tonight.” Heaven is a perpetual party. And why? Because God seeks the lost … and he is really good at finding them.
This idea is radically different from the one people usually hold – from the one the Pharisees held – about God. There was a rabbinic quote that said in effect, “God rejoices over the downfall of the godless.” When the Pharisees heard that, they solemnly nodded their heads in agreement, but Jesus emphatically shook his in disagreement. That is not what his Father is like.
The parable of the lost son (or better, the loving Father) makes that abundantly clear. You know the story: the younger of the two sons breaks his father’s heart by demanding his inheritance while his dad is still alive, cashes it out, and leaves home as fast as his feet will take him. He wastes all his money, sinks lower and lower and brings shame on his family. Then, when he has totally ruined everything and hates his own life, he decides to go back to his dad for help. He figures his dad won’t want him back, and so he works out a plan he hopes his dad will accept: to hire him as a low-level employee, a grunt in his dad’s business.
You know what happens next. He heads home, rehearsing his apology and figuring out how best to ask for a job. But his dad is out watching for him, waiting for him, longing for his son to come home. He runs to him. (Remember, in that culture it was considered extremely undignified for an older man to run, but he doesn’t care; this is his son!) The son may have thought he was running toward him to accost him and drive him away but instead he hugs and kisses him. The father is overjoyed to have his son back.
So what does the father do then? What else? He throws a party. But remember that there were two sons. The younger one left home, the older one stayed and worked. When the older one found out that younger one was back – and that his dad had thrown him a party – he was so angry that he wouldn’t go in. His brother was an irresponsible, self-centered jerk, and fathers shouldn’t throw parties for irresponsible, self-centered jerks. If his brother was lost, it was his own fault. He shouldn’t be rewarded for it.
I wonder if the Pharisees saw themselves in that older brother. I wonder if we do.
And he wasn’t just angry at his brother. He was angry at his dad. And so he sat outside, pouting – or fuming, which is more like it. When his dad learned that he was outside, refusing to come in, what did he do? He went looking for him, because that is what a father does when his son is lost.
But this wasn’t the son that was lost, was it? This son had stayed home and worked. And yet he was lost – and profoundly so. He was more deeply lost in the thickets of self-centeredness than was his brother. He just didn’t know it. He had remained present in body, but his heart was a thousand miles away, and it was his heart that his father wanted. His heart had wandered even further than his little brother’s. The older son was lost.
But he was not just lost; he was a slave. His younger brother had hired himself out to do slave work for a Gentile, but the older brother was just as much a slave as he was – and perhaps more, because he thought of himself as a slave. Look at verse 29: “All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders.” Is this a son talking, one who loved his father, loved his work, and loved the estate and cared for it? No, these are the words of a slave. At least the younger brother had, verse 17, “Come to himself” (Greek); the older brother had still not come to himself; that is, he had still not become himself. Instead of being the son of a wonderful father he had trapped himself in the role of a slave.
Now let me wrap this up. First of all, I summarized this entire passage rather than taking a smaller part of it verse by verse because I didn’t want us to miss the main point in the many wonderful details. The main point is about God and what he is like. He is the kind of person who never stops caring. No matter how much a person has messed up his life, he doesn’t give up on him. He cares for the profligate, the drug addict, the sex addict, the money addict and the fool. But he also cares about the stuffed shirt, the hypocrite, the person whose religion has made him bitter and not better. God loves the lost, in whatever woods they’ve managed to lose themselves.
This is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! He is so full of joy that he is always ready to throw a party. He is so full of love that he is never ready to throw in the towel. Every bad thing you’ve ever heard about him – usually from the mouth of someone like the older brother – is a lie. Every good thing you’ve ever heard about him is an understatement of infinite proportions. The truth is better than you can even begin to imagine.
I said earlier that if it would help, the father would go to the ends of the earth to find his son. But God went further than that to find you: he went to the cross. It is from the height of the cross that he sees his lost children, and it is by looking at the cross – and only by looking at the cross – that they can truly see him.
One more thing: no matter what mistakes you’ve made, no matter what sins you’ve committed, God still wants you. God wants you He does not want you because of what you can do for him; he doesn’t want you because of your great potential. He wants you because you are his, the way a loving father wants his child.
You may be thinking, “Well he doesn’t want me.” But you say that because you are looking at yourself, not at Jesus. Look at him, nailed to a cross, and tell me that he doesn’t want you! You’re believing in the God of the Pharisees, not in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Stop looking at yourself and all your faults, and look at him and all his love.
A man who lost his dog posted signs all around the neighborhood, describing the dog and offering a big reward. The description went like this: “He’s has three legs, he’s blind in the left eye, he’s missing his right ear, his tail has been broken off, and he answers to the name ‘Lucky.’”
He doesn’t sound lucky, does he? He apparently got himself into one mess after another. And yet he was lucky to have an owner who totally loved him and wanted him back. And you – no matter what you’ve got yourself into, and no matter how much of it was your own fault – have a God who totally loves you and wants you back.[1]
[1]Philip Griffin, from the sermon “A God Who Redeems.”
The Way Home 