(Column for the North Huron newspaper The Citizen, March 18 2021 edition.)
Are you quick to form opinions about
people? It’s easy to jump to conclusions about others, to judge a book by its
cover, to form prejudices based on very limited evidence. A lady visiting New
York for the first time was being led to her hotel by the bellboy. As she
walked through the door she became indignant and snapped at the man, “I tell
you that I won’t have this room. I'm not paying my good money for this cramped
cubbyhole with a tiny folding bed not fit to sleep on. And there's no TV, no
phone, and I suppose you expect me to walk down the hall to use the...” The
bellboy cut her short: “Ma’am, this isn’t your room, this is the elevator.”
It’s all too easy to jump to
conclusions in forming our judgments!
As Jesus’ ministry started picking
up speed, His miracles earned quite a name for Him; He began to attract a large
following. Yet people never would have dreamed Jesus might pick a tax collector
to be one of His closest followers. But He called Levi (also referred to as
Matthew) from his tax collector’s booth. (Mark 2:14) The tax collection system
in Palestine under Roman occupation had become kind of a mash-up between civic
duty and organized crime. Tax collectors constituted a despised profession in
Palestine: such people were viewed as traitors, having bought tax franchises
from the Roman overlords. Subsequently, skimming off a large surplus over what
they were required to remit, many tax collectors became wealthy at the expense
of their fellow-citizens. When Jesus called Levi, the collector could have been
“set for life” in a prime location. We find out from the context he probably
had a fine house, of good size that could host a banquet with numerous guests.
Christ just says two words - “Follow
Me” - and it’s enough. Levi gets up and follows Him. Had his conscience been
bothering him, collecting over and above what was really due? Had the sneers
and abuse from Levi’s fellow Jews been eating away at the satisfaction of
seeing his nest egg accumulate? For whatever reason, something deep inside Levi
prompts him to respond, to get up and get moving with Jesus. As a result we
have the first book of the New Testament, the Gospel according to Matthew [aka
Levi]. Levi was obviously a careful recordkeeper, good at his job – but he
chose to give all that away to follow this mysterious Messiah. Not depending on
money, or income, or the power of the government to back the fleecing of his
fellow Judeans... Levi turned his back on all that and committed his future
into Jesus’ hands.
He felt so good about this decision,
he decided to throw a banquet and celebrate. When Jesus was having dinner at
Levi’s house, we are told they were joined by “many tax collectors and other
disreputable sinners. (There were many people of this kind among Jesus’
followers.)” (Mark 2:15, New Living Translation)
Are we talking about those people?
Did your parents fill you in on those people while you were growing up?
I used to think my parents were pretty unprejudiced, but we did pick up also by
osmosis some of their attitudes toward people they didn’t really have a very
good opinion about.
There was that family up the road,
who had more kids and seemed to keep on having more kids, who didn’t really
seem to have a regular job, whose children dressed not as nicely as we did and
used bad words, the kids who sometimes seemed to steal from us when items went
missing. I’m guessing the parents drank some, and we didn’t. Those people.
There were the indigenous people we
never met but Dad had stories about; a man who when he was growing up in the
1920s had walked right into their home as if he owned the place, took what he
wanted to eat, and left again. That sort of story prompts you to form an
opinion about a whole group of people. Those people.
There were the Catholics who
inhabited the north half of the township and attended the big imposing Catholic
church in Dublin. The Protestants in the south half preferred not to have much
to do with the north half. Almost as if there was an invisible dividing line
halfway across the township, and the two groups just avoided each other. Those
people. Little did I realize I would be in close partnership years later
with Frere Armand, a Catholic lay brother from France who taught Braille and
other classes at the newly-formed National Institute for the Blind in Congo. I
actually got to know him and appreciate him, one time going for a meal with his
other lay brothers in their little community.
Do you have any of those people
in your acquaintance? What measures did your parents use to induce you to put
up invisible barriers that would seal you off safe from those people
that might influence you, that you were better off not having too much to do
with? Who for you are those people today, that you’d rather not meet
coming down the street?
As for Jesus, He seems to have been
surprisingly at home with those people. Teachers of the law complained
to Jesus’ disciples, “Why does He eat with such scum?” (Mk.2:16) You can
almost hear the sneer in their voice! To eat with someone in the Middle East
implies acceptance, even approval, if you break bread together.
Yet, Jesus is not pressured or
manipulated into leaving the feast of the so-called ‘sinners’. Jesus responded,
“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call
the righteous, but sinners.” Christ came to call sinners, those who know
they’ve fallen short, those who realize they’re not able to stand on their own
feet before a holy God, those who are ready to submit their attitudes and
priorities and mindset because they’re just not working to give the meaning and
relationships life ought to have. Jesus came to treat the morally sick, to
inoculate them with this vaccine called ‘the Kingdom of God’, to help them
re-think their whole approach to life oriented around what God most wants.
You’ve got to be ready to have your worldview turned upside down to discover
how God really looks at things. You don’t need a do-over on the surface, you
need a heart transplant!
Only those who recognize they are
spiritually sick, that they are not healthy, are the ones Doctor Jesus can
help. They are the ones He came to save: not the righteous, but sinners – those
who have reached the end of their rope and realize there is no way they are
ever going to impress God.
The recent military
coup in Myanmar has brought many protesters to the end of their rope. Sister
Ann Rose Nu Tawng is a nun in Myanmar who knelt in front of police that had
been shooting student protesters. The students ran for safety to a clinic where
she was working; she knelt pleading for the police to stop the killing, and
even to take her life instead of the students’. (Thankfully, it worked – the
police relented.) That is like Jesus coming to give His own life in the stead
of sinners, to be a doctor healing those who are spiritually sick and calling
out for help.
