Saturday 8 March 2025
St John of God
Isaiah 58:9-14. Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may be faithful in your sight – Ps 85(86):1-6. Luke 5:27-32.
We are invited to imagine ourselves anew
From the outside, I wonder how it looked, Jesus deliberately fraternising with rich social outcasts who were working with foreign occupying forces and profiting from fellow citizens. To force honest people to surrender their own money to a foreign government must have required the hardness of a mafia enforcer, and for someone to attend lavish parties with these cashed-up, traitorous rogues would not seem exactly messianic. It’s easy to see why the Pharisees were stumped. It’s also easy to scorn someone when they’re sitting behind gilded tables of ill-gotten wealth, and Jesus would have been justified condemning them. But Jesus doesn’t come with condemnation or shame but friendship. Much harder – and perhaps much holier – is to sit at that table, partake in a feast, and open the possibility of change in those everyone hates most. There’s a genius to this, one that feels especially relevant in a time when the cultural impulse is to exile transgressors and burn social bridges. Jesus doesn’t excuse the tax collectors’ actions – he invites them to imagine themselves anew.
Email this Print This Page
