SPEAKER_00: One of the truths that we see just brimming, pouring out of the pages of the gospel reading today is something that may be extremely ironic, but it's really potent.
SPEAKER_00: That is, divine love is really offensive.
SPEAKER_00: Divine love is really offensive.
SPEAKER_00: Divine, unconditioned, unconditional, indiscriminate love is offensive.
SPEAKER_00: It's offensive precisely because it goes and moves towards those people we deem undeserving of such love.
SPEAKER_00: Yet it's only in a world of the undeserving wherein we need a love, like divine love.
SPEAKER_00: It's a bit of a double bind, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00: But this is what is on full display in Jesus' eating and reclining at table with tax collectors.
SPEAKER_00: Now this word tax collectors may be lost on us and our modern ears, but in Jesus' time, a tax collector, this language is emotionally and socially and religiously charged to the extreme.
SPEAKER_00: Scholars, it's very rare that you find like New Testament scholars to like agree with each other.
SPEAKER_00: But this is a near consensus that one of the most outlandish, unbelievable, and frankly offensive aspects of Jesus' ministry in Judea was his eating and fellowshipping with tax collectors.
SPEAKER_00: It's nothing like this ever before.
SPEAKER_00: So what is a tax collector?
SPEAKER_00: I want to give some description to put some teeth on the bite of this offense of Jesus here.
SPEAKER_00: That is the offense of the love of God.
SPEAKER_00: As we all know, empires, nation states, they love and need taxes.
SPEAKER_00: And as the Roman Empire was growing, as it expanded depending on the region it was in, they would then appoint somebody from that region to be the tax representative.
SPEAKER_00: So they could pull from the people in that community the taxes that would then go to the empire.
SPEAKER_00: And often the way that Rome did this is he would actually they would actually choose people that were embedded in the community.
SPEAKER_00: So the people who were appointed with the task of collecting taxes would have, in fact, been like your first cousin or brother, your own flesh and blood.
SPEAKER_00: And the income for these tax collectors could get very exorbitant because they would demand that you give them X amount of money, and they didn't tell you how much of that was going to go to Rome, and they would take a sweep off the top, and so they were essentially, I mean, by our modern account, like thugs.
SPEAKER_00: But the only problem is that they're thugs that actually have the backing of the state.
SPEAKER_00: They're protected by Rome.
SPEAKER_00: But more than this, this tax collectors, these are people who we know sell out their own flesh and blood for money.
SPEAKER_00: They are betrayers.
SPEAKER_00: They are turncoats.
SPEAKER_00: They are compromisers.
SPEAKER_00: They're uh the people that everyone can agree to hate.
SPEAKER_00: Now this is this is an incredible achievement to have all the peasants hating you and all of the religious people hating you.
SPEAKER_00: This is quite an achievement.
SPEAKER_00: But the tax collectors did this like a functional equivalent, right?
SPEAKER_00: If you were to imagine some Machiavellian individual, maybe a narcissist, who everyone in their world is upon for their gain, for their money, their wealth.
SPEAKER_00: And they are in I'm I'm sure that you don't have to try really hard in your imagination or your newsfeed to imagine, right, folks that would inhabit this kind of space, the space of the tax the tax collector who is willing to sell out anybody and anyone for the sake of some cold hard cash.
SPEAKER_00: But these are the people, these are tax collectors, the turncoats that Jesus reclines at table with.
SPEAKER_00: Now, what does it offend?
SPEAKER_00: What in us takes offense to the way Jesus is using his table seemingly so promiscuously is to invite tax collectors.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, these are, everyone can agree, the bad guys.
SPEAKER_00: What is offended is our own delusional sense that we may not put language to, but it gets exposed as something that we actually believe internally.
SPEAKER_00: That we are the recipients of the love of God precisely because of what we've done.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus is a masterful teacher.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the embodiment of the love of the Father going into the world, right?
SPEAKER_00: First or John 3.
SPEAKER_00: God so loved the world that he gave his son.
SPEAKER_00: So the son is the expression of the love of the Father in the world.
SPEAKER_00: This is the ministry of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: This is the love of the Father coming to these turncoats, these betrayers, these compromisers, these despicable ones.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus's reclining at table with them exposes not only the love of God, but it exposes the way that we misunderstand that love, misappropriate it, uh ways that we make claims on it, as though we, in our desserts or our merits, the things that we've done, uh can be the proper recipients of this kind of love.
SPEAKER_00: Now I think what Jesus is doing is exposing and showing at the same time that the love of God that has come into your life, the love of God that has transformed you, is the love of God that reclines at table with tax collectors.
SPEAKER_00: This is the indiscriminate, unconditioned love of God.
SPEAKER_00: And so it would mean that to follow this Jesus, to follow this kind of God who is more willing to offend for the sake of love, to follow Jesus is to make up our minds to be offended.
SPEAKER_00: This is probably why Jesus uses the image of a cross as the dominant image of following him.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus will recline at table with sinners, will love the loveless.
SPEAKER_00: And in doing so, Jesus will be vulnerable to the people that he is showing and displaying the love of God to such that he will be crucified, right?
SPEAKER_00: He will die a degrading, shameful, and offensive death.
SPEAKER_00: And this is still offensive by the time you get into Paul, right?
SPEAKER_00: Christ crucified.
SPEAKER_00: It's still offensive to Jews and Greeks, according to Paul.
SPEAKER_00: But what we are invited into is that we would see the love, the tenacious love of God in Christ, that is so tender, so indiscriminate as to sit at table with a bunch of turncoats, that we would see this love, and that this love would uproot in our hearts all of the excuses that we make for the fickle love that we have, that it would rob us of any basis of withholding love from anybody, that when we see this love, the love of Christ coming to us, coming to those that we deem unworthy, that it is this Christ who sits at table with tax collectors, that is the hope of the world.
SPEAKER_00: This is our hope.
SPEAKER_00: But the love and offense of Jesus is not simply a kind of toleration or pluralism of like a liberal democratic society, right?
SPEAKER_00: We're just gonna get together and not make any kind of claims on the way we live.
SPEAKER_00: This is not the offensive love of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus's love offends as it goes out to everyone.
SPEAKER_00: And it also offends because in going out to us, going out indiscriminately, it makes a claim on us.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: This is Jesus' teaching about uh if we who have been forgiven such great a debt and we turn around and a brother or sister owes us some petty cash and we're ready to throw them in prison.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is robbing us as he's loving us.
SPEAKER_00: And this is the divine love that is so offensive.
SPEAKER_00: So I ask all of us, myself included, that we would be resolved to be offended by God, and that as we're offended by the love of God, that all the excuses we make in our heart for withholding love, for deeming people unlovable, that that is all uprooted and exposed.
SPEAKER_00: I think the point of this story is that it's only in a world of the undeserving where we need a love like this, right?
SPEAKER_00: Whereas Jesus says, it's only the sick who need a doctor, it's only orphans who need to be adopted, it's only the lost who need to come home.
SPEAKER_00: If we are not orphans, undeserving, lost, there's no hope for you.
SPEAKER_00: All your hope is that we too sit at table with Jesus with all these turncoats, that we too would find this Jesus is indeed numbered among transgressors.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.