I occasionally wonder if I had met Jesus would I have liked him. I know it sounds almost blasphemous, but the more I read the Gospels the more I suspect I would not have liked to meet him especially before breakfast. Jesus was not always agreeable and accommodating but frequently challenging. He challenged almost everything the religious people of his day felt was sacred. He also challenged the powerful and the affluent. And that pretty well describes me and many Christians today, we are religious, powerful and affluent.
For centuries Christians have enjoyed, with a sense of superiority, Jesus’ criticisms of the Pharisees. Their vices seem so obvious but I suspect we share in a number of them even if a little more subtly.
This came home to me recently when I reread sections of Eamonn Bredin’s, Disturbing the Peace: the way of disciples. He reinforced a belief I have been developing over the years, namely that the greatest danger to our spiritual lives is often our virtue. We have put such an effort into being virtuous. It is important to us and we can resent God looking graciously on people who are far less worthy and have put in little effort. Bredin points out that the main objection the Jews had to Jesus was his unrestricted table fellowship. Jews did not eat with people who were not on their level of society or share their vision of God and religious practice.
They felt that it was sacrilegious to invoke God’s blessing on notorious sinners. Nothing and no one sinful could be included in holiness. Yet Jesus dined with prostitutes and tax collectors and sent his disciples out into the highways to find the most unworthy guests. Jesus was telling the Pharisees that these sinners were just as loved by God as they were. They understood what his meals meant and they never forgave him.
The religious people of Jesus’ day were not impressed with him. Right up till the cross they were asking him to work a God-sized miracle to prove he was God. They found it hard to believe that the Kingdom had come in this uneducated Galilean who was such a careless observer of the law and was accompanied by his poor marginalised followers and a few dubious exorcisms and miracles.
Religious people, myself included, often rely on our own efforts to become holy and so render God’s grace and mercy largely unnecessary. Implicit in this approach to religion is that we need sinners who are not as good as us to be assured of our worth before God. Compared to less worthy others we have achieved something and so can feel pleased with ourselves and a little self-righteous.
This is why Pope Francis is challenging us to become a church that is “a place of mercy freely given where everyone can feel welcome, loved, forgiven, and encouraged to live the Gospel”. [EG 114] We need more “sinners” in the church. Not just for their sake but for ours. We need to be close to the “obvious sinners” so that we can learn our own need for mercy. The real challenge in the Year of Mercy is not for us to show mercy but to learn to receive it graciously.
In the Gospels, it is the sick, the poor, the sinners and the abandoned that especially loved Jesus. Mainly because their need was great and they had no defences against his mercy. He loved them and wanted to show them that God was especially with those who were suffering. The sick and the sinners no longer felt alone and he awakened previously unrecognised energy in them. He revolutionised their understanding of God and of themselves. They learnt to live.
They clearly liked Jesus and enjoyed being with him.
Fr Noel Connolly SSC is a Columban missionary priest. He is a member of the Columban Mission Institute in North Sydney and a lecturer in Missiology at both the Broken Bay Institute and the Catholic Institute of Sydney.