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.

The Gospel in (Very) Brief

By the late part of the nineteenth century, Leo Tolstoy had secured his place as a titan of world literature. He had come out of a stunningly productive period of writing and his masterpieces War and Peace and Ann Karenina were behind him. Despite this success, Tolstoy found himself in an acute emotional and spiritual crisis.

In an effort to pull himself up from this downward spiral he set about the process of translating the gospels. He recognized that he lacked the scholarly background for such an ambitious task and joked about the absurdity of "an artillery lieutenant [deciding] to translate a Greek book for himself." He also confessed a decided disinterest in the supernatural dimensions of the gospels, including the miracles attributed to Jesus and even the resurrection. "The questions important to me," he declared, "are: What should I do? How should I live?"

One of the products of these efforts is a short book called The Gospel in Brief. In the Preface to the book, Tolstoy writes "The task must be to understand the essence of [the] teaching [of Jesus], this teaching that became so high and precious for people that they recognized the messenger of it as a God. I have tried to do this very thing; for myself at least, I have done it. And now I am offering it to my brothers."

One of the improbable brothers who many years later stumbled upon the book was the towering twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He found the book in a shop in southern Poland while he was serving with the Austrian army at the end of World War I. Wittgenstein was a hard-edged skeptic and the story goes that he bought the book because it was the only one left in the shop. He carried it with him throughout the war, memorizing portions of it, and became known among his fellow soldiers as "the man with the gospels." In later years, Wittgenstein insisted that the book had on numerous occasions saved him from despair and suicide.

The book is not for everyone. Tolstoy takes liberties with his translation of certain passages. He makes some curious editorial decisions in his combining of the gospels. And the absence of the miracles and the resurrection will strike some believers as impossibly critical omissions. It is important to remember, however, that Tolstoy did not exclude those stories because he did not believe them. Rather, he left them out because he did not think they helped him answer basic questions about how he should live.

What remains, as Wittgenstein recognized, is a simple text of amazingly powerful moral authority. Much of that power comes from the simplicity of the message. There is perhaps no better example of this than a single sentence that Jesus utters in the chapter that Tolstoy calls "The Farewell Conversation."

Of course, Jesus says many things to his disciples on the night before his crucifixion. But the text comes to a dramatic pause when he makes a brief statement that summarizes all of the pages that have come before and all of those that will follow. Perhaps, in that lone sentence, we can all find the answer to our questions about how we should live:

"The entire teaching," Jesus says, "is nothing more than loving one another."

Amen. And Amen.