PENTECOST XVII

Lost Coin  Domenico Fetti (1588-1633)

• Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28 and Psalm 14 •
• Exodus 32:7-14 and Psalm 51:1-10 •
• 1 Timothy 1:12-17 •
• Luke 15:1-10

In the Gospel for this Sunday, the Pharisees and scribes complain that Jesus is regularly found in the company of sinners. When Christians read this, they rather too readily assume a position of moral superiority over the benighted Pharisees, and rather too complacently identify themselves with what they perceive to be the non-judgmental attitude that they think Jesus exemplifies. In reality, of course, they are themselves necessarily ‘judgmental’ of ‘sinners’. And rightly so. Who wants to rub along with child abusers, wife beaters, racists, rapists or people who exploit the weak and vulnerable, and overlook the kind of lives they lead? To understand this passage properly, we need to call the right kind of sinner to mind.

These examples make the denunciations of Jeremiah and the Psalmists in the Old Testament lessons more understandable. They addressed the ancient world, of course, but there are plenty of modern contexts to which their words apply –  ‘foolish’ adults who act like ‘stupid children’ and have no real understanding, or people have simply ‘gone astray’, and are ‘perverse’, or worse, people who are ‘skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good’.

Mount Sinai  El Greco

While Moses is up on Mount Sinai, his people go badly off the rails. ‘Go down at once!’ God tells him. ‘Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely’. And so it proves to be. Yet Moses, though offered the chance to abandon the evildoers and find his own way to glory, pleads with God to be merciful. Appropriately, the reading that follows this passage is Psalm 51, a powerful expression of repentance. It helpfully alerts us to the Gospel’s emphasis on the essential role of penitence. Jesus is not motivated by a preference for sinners, or an indifference to their sin, as perhaps the complaints of the Pharisees imply. Full acknowledgement of their sinfulness, however, does not diminish his hope for them – ‘there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents’.