Those People

In the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Luke, the Pharisees and scribes complain to the disciples about the behavior of their leader, Jesus. They point out that Jesus eats with "tax collectors and sinners," something that his self-righteous inquisitors would never condescend to do. Overhearing the challenge, Jesus responds that it is the sick and struggling who need him most and who he has come to call to a new life.

There is something important about this passage that is easy to miss, and it is easy to miss because it is an omission. The narrative leaves out a critical detail. And we may notice it only if we read this passage in the context of the many other gospel passages where Jesus offers guidance to those around him.

The gospels describe numerous instances where Jesus spoke to assembled crowds--and the gospels tell us exactly what he said to them. The gospels recount many conversations between Jesus and his beloved disciples--and, again, the gospels give us specifics about how Jesus instructed, corrected, and sometimes even rebuked them. Over and over again, the gospels tell us exactly what Jesus said--to a mob, to his persecutors, to his parents, to his followers, even to Satan himself.

But here, Luke tells us nothing about what Jesus said to those "tax collectors and sinners" when he sat and broke bread with them. In this respect, the story differs dramatically from what the gospels say about the Sermon on the Mount or the Last Supper or even the Crucifixion. Here, the gospels tell us that Jesus joined in the company of those people but are oddly silent about what he said to them--if he said anything at all.

In the course of human history there may have been no better storyteller than Luke and it is a safe bet always to assume that he knew what he was doing. So I want to put aside the possibility that this omission was an oversight or an error. To the contrary, I think that Luke fully understood the significance of leaving out these details. And I t think that, through this omission, Luke intended to convey two messages to us--loud and clear in their silence.

The first message is that what Jesus said to those people mattered much less than that he welcomed the opportunity to sit and eat with them. Through this simple act of grace and compassion, Jesus transformed "those people" into "his people." We can imagine a variation on the moment when his parents found the young Jesus, who had gone astray, teaching at the Temple: "Where else would you expect to find me?" he might ask here, too. Where else but where love is needed most?

And the second message is this: we are among "those people." We are, each and all of us, in desperate need of the sacred presence of forgiveness and acceptance. We are, each and all of us, fighting an urgent battle against the demons around us, within us, before us, behind us. Part of the power of Luke's story here comes from the bristling unease we feel if we align ourselves with the Pharisees and scribes: for those among us who are willing to do the hard work of looking into our own hearts, the very act of saying "I am better than those people" unsettles the possibility that it is so.

The brilliant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr gets at the essential point here in a famous sermon called "The Providence of God." Niebuhr writes: "[Our faith] believes that within and beyond the tragedies and contradictions of history we have laid hold upon a loving heart, the proof of whose love is first impartiality toward all of his children, and secondly a mercy which transcends good and evil." Exactly.

By breaking bread with "those people," Jesus reminds us of his central message--that we must be quick to love and slow to judge. In these, our troubled and divided times, we have become accomplished at getting this formula exactly backward. And we will persist in this tragic error--and will continue in our relentless persecution and sacrifice of love--until we awaken to the fact that "those people," in whatever way we mean that, are his people, are our people, are us.

Amen.