One of my favorite cartoons has several variations on the
same theme. My very favorite is an old New Yorker cartoon. The setting is a living room, with the
outline of a person, who can only be Jesus, hiding behind the drapes. A woman has just opened the front door, where
two men in white shirt and tie are standing on the porch. They ask her, “Have you found Jesus?”
The setting is a street corner, and a man is passing out
pamphlets to passers-by and shouting, “Have you found Jesus? Have you found Jesus?” A guy stops, scans the pamphlet and replies,
“I didn’t realize he was lost.” In
another version, people keep ignoring the man on the street corner, as he cries
out in an increasingly frantic tone, “Have you found Jesus?” Until a kind woman
finally stops, places her hands on his shoulders and says consolingly, “Don’t
worry, we’ll find him.”
Clearly, these cartoonists have read Luke’s Gospel. They get the absurdity of “finding Jesus.” We do not have to anxiously search for
God. It is God who seeks us out. The question is not, “Will you find God,” but
rather, “How will you respond to God when She finds you?”
Putting the question in this way undermines all our attempts
to make God into an object over which we have some purchase. God can’t be made into a project, another
item on our to do list, or some kind of cosmic game of hide and seek. The initiative is all on God’s side.
God is like grits with breakfast in a Southern
restaurant. You don’t have to order
it. It just comes. This is what Jesus tries to make clear to
folks. God’s kingdom is always already
at hand, within you and around you.
You’ve been found! That is what
the mercy of God is like. God just shows
up for no good reason; at least, none for which you can claim credit. Now what are you going to do about it?
This finding God – this God who finds us – completely destabilizes
the comforting categories we construct to distinguish between those who have
found God (righteous people) and those who have not (sinners). Luke’s Gospel makes a big deal out this
destabilization. Jesus, who is God-coming-to-find-us, confuses these categories
all the time: usually over dinner. He
seems a bit dense about the difference between “Pharisees and scribes” (righteous
people) and “tax collectors and sinners” (notorious, public sinners, just to be
clear).
Jesus addresses tax collectors like Levi[1]
and Zaccheus[2]
and even eats with them at their homes.
Once, while dining at the home of a Pharisee, a sinful woman crashed the
party and started massaging Jesus’ feet.
He didn’t even blink and eye.[3] Jesus tells a parable about two men who go up
to the Temple to pray. One, a Pharisee
says, “Thank God I’m not like these other people here!” The other, a tax collector, beats his breast
and begs, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”[4]
One thinks he has found God.
The other thinks he is lost.
Jesus knows that God has found them both, and demonstrates this by
sharing table fellowship indiscriminately.
God’s mercy just comes.
Of course, this lack of distinction, this destabilization of
boundaries between righteous and sinner, could make a person angry: Especially if that person has worked awfully
hard to find God, only to discover that God just comes and finds us. So we are told that the Pharisees and scribes
are grumbling, because Jesus welcomes sinners and eats with them. Jesus, in his defense, tells three parables
to illustrate that he is only doing what God does. God finds us: like a stray sheep, a lost
coin, or a wayward son.[5] God’s property is always to have mercy.
Please notice something about these parables. They do not focus on the distinction between
righteous and sinners. They turn our
attention away from preoccupation with what we have done or not done, whether
we are worthy or unworthy, and toward the God who delights in finding us and
bringing us home. All three parables end
with a meal – a party – a celebration of the reunion of the lost that restores
wholeness, makes complete, and fosters sheer joy.
These are crazy stories.
Nobody in his right mind leave 99 sheep in the wilderness to find one
lost lamb. Really, risk all the rest
just to recover one? The cost/benefit
just doesn’t make any sense! Why turn
the whole house upside down to find one coin, just to spend it on throwing a
party to celebrate finding it? Is it
really fair to treat your deadbeat son the same as your dutiful son? How does that promote good character?
Well, God is a little crazy.
Crazy enough to realize that the other sheep, the set of coins, the
entire family is incomplete, missing something vital, until She finds the lost
and brings them home. She does it for
the sheer joy of finding them. Rejoicing
with one sinner who repents is way more fun that hanging out with the righteous
people who don’t even realize how incomplete they are without the “sinner” –
both the sinner who is one of “those people,” and the sinner within who is
despised and denied.
God is a little crazy about this finding business. We have all, already, been found. God just comes. The distinction isn’t between righteous
people and sinners. They distinction is
between those who know they’ve been found, and those who think they are the
finders: between the sinner who repents and the righteous who need no
repentance. The distinction is not
between two types of people, but rather between two different responses to
being found.
As Andrew Prior notes,
Luke is pointing us toward a
fundamental mind shift in our understanding of God. Although we say God is a God of love, we tend
to make that love conditional. It is
conditional on our repentance; it depends on our keeping the rules, rules which
are too often somewhat arbitrary habits that support our local prejudices. We use the rules to bolster our status and
position.
This sense of conditional love leads us
towards, or allows us to live in, a mindset of disapproval. Fundamentally, we think, God disapproves of
us and loves us only when we fit in with what we imagine to be God’s
expectations; expectations that have an alarming correlation with our own
social expectations of what is acceptable.
Our imagining of God determines the way we treat others.[6]
Jesus gives us these parables to disrupt our usual way of
thinking about God. It really isn’t
about whether we are worthy or unworthy.
It really isn’t about whether we deserve mercy. God just comes. You already have been found. God has found you, and you, and you – all of
you! She already is rejoicing. She has set a table, prepared a banquet,
invited everybody: including those who think they are “somebody” and those who
think they are “nobody.”
You haven’t just been invited to the party. You are the reason for the party. It can’t really get started without you. Once you understand that, everything
changes. The scales fall from your eyes
and you discover mercy flowing everywhere.
The God you’ve been looking for was there all along. She found you before you even knew you were
lost. And She will never let you go.
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