Eating with Sinners 

A Sermon by Revd Simon Aston 
15 September 2019 13 after Trinity
Luke 15.1-10

 
This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them. So the Pharisees sneered at Jesus. They sneered because Jesus sought out, dwelt with, sat amongst, welcomed the unholy, the unclean, those who disobeyed the Law. They sneered because they, the Pharisees, had a general classification for those who did not keep the Law. They called them ‘the people of the land’, and there was an immovable social barrier between the Pharisees and the people of the land. To give a daughter in marriage to one of them was like exposing her bound and helpless to a lion. The pharisaic regulations laid it down, when a man is one of the people of the land, entrust no money to him, take no testimony from him, trust him with no secret, do not appoint him guardian of an orphan, do not make him custodian of charitable funds, do not accompany him on a journey.

The Pharisee was forbidden to be the guest any such man. He was forbidden to have any business dealings with any such man. It was the deliberate aim of every Pharisee to avoid every contact with such people; that is with those who did not observe the details of the Law. It is a view of others that condemns them for not measuring up, it is a view of God as a stern judge and policeman the world, wagging His eternal finger in righteous condemnation of what He sees and walking by on the other side of the universe; so as to do all he can to avoid the people of the land.

And yet here is Jesus Christ, who proved His divinity by rising on the third day, is seeking out, sitting and dwelling with the unclean, with the unrighteous, with the sinful people of the land. What a terrible mismatch there is between a pharisaic view of God and that we see in Jesus of Nazareth as He walks across the pages of the Gospels.

The Shepherd in Judaea had a hard and dangerous task. Pasture was scarce, the narrow central plateau was only a few miles wide, before it plunged down to the wild cliffs and terrible devastation of the desert beyond. There were no restraining walls and sheep would wander. One commentator writes, ‘on some high moor across which at night hyenas howl you might meet him, sleepless, farsighted, weather-beaten, leaning on his staff and looking out over his scattered sheep, every one of those sheep engraved into the depths of his heart, and you understand why the Shepherd of Judaea sprang forth as an image for God’s providential care, and why Jesus of Nazareth, as here, took the image upon Himself to describe His love for humanity’. The Shepherd was personally responsible for the sheep. The Shepherd was an expert in tracking and could follow the straying sheep’s footprints for miles across the hills. There was not a shepherd for whom it was not ‘all in a day’s work’ to risk his life for his sheep. Many of the flocks were communal, belonging not to individuals but to villages. Those whose flocks that were safe would arrive home on time and bring news that one shepherd was still out on the mountain side searching for a sheep that was lost. The whole village would be upon watch, and when, in the distance, they saw the shepherd striding home with the lost sheep across his shoulders, there would rise from the whole community a shout of joy and thanksgiving.

The Pharisees twitch the first century equivalent of curtains, they tut and tut, as Jesus mixes with the people of the land. But Jesus pictures Himself as a shepherd, a shepherd who gets down into the harsh messy realities of life, a shepherd who has come not to avoid those who are struggling, or those who are lost, but to seek them out.

The coin in the parable was a drachma, worth one or 2p to you and I, it would not be difficult to lose a coin in a Palestinian peasant’s house, and it might take a long search to find it. The houses were very dark, or they were lit by only one little circular window not much more than 18 inches across, the floor of broken earth was covered with dried reeds and rushes, and to look for a coin on the floor like that really was like looking for the proverbial needle in haystack. Yet the woman in the parable swept the floor in the hope she might see the coin glint, or perhaps hear a tinkle as it moved. Perhaps she searched out of sheer necessity, living so much on the edge of things that very little stood between her and a real hunger. Perhaps she may have had a more romantic reason. The mark of a married woman was a headdress made of 10 silver coins linked together by silver chain. Perhaps it was one of these coins that was lost, we are not told. But the point is this, in either case, it is easy to think of the joy of the woman, when at last, she saw the glint of the elusive coin, or heard its tinkle and when she held it in her hand again. The picture our Lord is giving us here is that He searches like that for us, that He experiences that joy when at last He cradles a lost man or woman or child, in His hands. God in Jesus Christ did not sneer at sinners but came to be with us, to search for us, and not to walk by on the other side of the universe.

Amen.