EAST CRAFTSBURY – In the Gospel of Luke, some Pharisees and scribes asked Jesus, “Why do you eat with sinners?” To which Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” (Luke 5:30-32)
It is no coincidence that Jesus, then, ate with the Pharisees, calling them to repentance. “Why do I eat with sinners? Well, don’t you want me to eat with you?” The elites of their society, Jesus was the spiritual doctor to those deeply infected by the status game.
When I lived in Los Angeles in my early twenties, I was chasing the entertainment industry ladder. In the comedy world, you were supposed to be selective about where you were seen and by who. Book the right people on your show and be booked by the right people, help those who can help you. You didn’t want to be really friendly with anyone unless you knew they were funny or cool. Of course, the tragedy from my perspective was that I wasn’t that cool or talented myself, and so many of the in-crowd didn’t want to be friends with me either.
It was, by all accounts, exactly that way in the ancient world. In Jesus’ time, the air they breathed and water they swam in were hierarchical relationships. One thing that always prevented genuine relationships between the poor and the rich was that gifts were always understood not as gifts, but as covert agreements. Strings were always attached for a reciprocal benefit. And so not only would the poor never be invited to the nice banquets, but the high-status would also never accept things from someone of lesser status because you knew you would be obligated to them. It wouldn’t put you on their level, it would put you under the bottom, indebted to them. For an elite, that could be catastrophic for your social life.
I’m afraid we all still do this to some extent; we want social events with people we think will be of our class or status or higher, not with people who aren’t like us. Usually, we like to put a veneer of a higher purpose behind our social hierarchical decisions.
For Rome, it might have been to help sustain the empire, stability, nobility, virtue. In the Ivy League and at hedge funds, it’s about class, an intellectual bar, an elite aura that needs to be maintained. In our churches, it might be to protect our idea of what godly people are supposed to be like, act like, speak like, think like and vote like.
And then comes Jesus. And he says no, no, no, especially to the godly people. No, take all your supposed higher value reasons and excuses as to why you maintain your social hierarchies and throw them all out the window. Take the idea that you only help people who help you, only befriend people who are cool and socially suave, tell the good jokes at the party, donate the most to the fundraisers and forget all that. In fact, because that is such a natural instinct for all of us, what we really need to do is the opposite.
Because the will of God wants the exact opposite of all our fake reasons. Does God value the stability of the empire over uplifting the poor? No.
Does God value elitism, nobility, building a successful business or career, over the values of loving your neighbor as if they were worth the exact same as you to yourself? Of course not.
Is the way of God like our human ways, only giving people things they can give back to him? That is a bigger joke than any that I ever told. We give each other things for repayment, with no such thing as a free lunch.
For God, it’s always and only a free lunch, beginning with literally a meal, bread and wine.
Jesus is telling us that to get a mere taste of the kingdom, we have to give like God gives: with absolutely no expectation or hope that we will get it back. Why? Because that is what God has done for us. With every single thing in our lives, our health (to the extent that we have it), our wealth (to the extent that we have it), our family, our very breath, our so-called right beliefs about politics and religion, it was all given to us.
God gave it to us knowing we could never pay it back. But we can do as Jesus did, in the words of scholar Joel Green, and “collapse the distance between rich and poor, insider and outsider,” treating outsiders as family, lifting up the poor, giving with no strings or calculations.
This isn’t just all about our ego and our internal life. Nothing in the Christian life is. This isn’t just about being humble, nice or how we internally see ourselves or our personal journey.
The imperative is that we take that internal posture and go outward and do something to help our neighbor.
We are called to go to the places and people that society says are least honorable, just as God took a place of least honor. God, appearing as a mere man, with a fragile human body, who could be hurt, humiliated and ultimately crucified. God himself took the lowest seat in his universe: a construction worker from Galilee.
Jesus is telling us that to be pleasing in God’s eye, and to delight in the things he delights in, to love what God loves and reject what God rejects, begins by humbling and lowering ourselves just as he humbled and lowered himself, giving in the same spirit as the grace he gives us: to those who need it the most, to those who can do nothing to repay us and in a way that means something to us.
Ah, yeah, that’s one last challenging ingredient here: we are called to give real sacrifices. A true sacrifice costs something, whether that’s your pride, your wallet, your time or something else.
Plus, Jesus tells us it’s not a true sacrifice if you give so you can be paid back. It’s a true sacrifice if you do things for people who can’t repay you. That is exactly what Christ did on the cross. He gave where it hurts, with no strings attached, knowing there is no way we could pay him back.
The devout Baptist and legendary University of North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith would not only write plays on his chalkboard for his national champion teams, but a reminder: “Do something every day for someone who can’t repay you.”
We could do a lot worse as Christians than that.
Do something every day for someone who can’t repay you. It can’t be enough to repay God, but it’s the regifting he loves; it’s regifting grace.
The Rev. Joe Welker serves the East Craftsbury Presbyterian Church. More of his writing can be found on indwelling.net.
