Reflection - Focus

By Steve Hall

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/030621.cfm
Micah 7:14-15, 18-20
Luke15:1-3, 11-32

“The Pharisees and scribes began to complain, saying, ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.’”

Matthew, Mark and Luke all present these same people objecting to the same thing in one form or another. We’ve heard the line often enough and we possibly take some secret pleasure knowing that these Pharisees and Scribes will quickly be put in their place. But it would be appropriate to ask if and how we hear this sentiment still reverberating in society today, sort of like a noxious bell that should have been silenced long ago. Consider a few remarks I have heard and then you might want to add a few of your own.

• How can I attend church when I know so many Christians who are obvious hypocrites?
• The clerical pedophile scandal has alienated me from the institutional church.
• The church is a male dominated institution. I can’t be part of it.

These comments, and others like them, are not hard to find when the subject of church attendance comes up. I hear them, and the words come across as a modern translation of what we just heard in the Gospel: ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ Now what caught my attention was not the peculiarity of this objection, per se. We’ve heard that criticism often enough that neither the comment itself nor Jesus’ reply surprises us. The problem for me was that I was hearing both this Gospel text and another statement of Jesus that was bouncing around within my mind. Jesus had just finished speaking with some disciples of John the Baptist. 

Then, ‘"Jesus began to speak to the crowds concerning John: "What did you go out into the wilderness to behold? A reed shaken by the wind? Why then did you go out? To see a man dressed in soft robes? Behold, those who wear soft robes are in kings' houses. Why then did you go out? To see a prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet.”’ (Matthew 11:7-9)

When Jesus spoke to the crowd about John, he first addressed the extremes of possibilities. He was essentially denying that these were the real reasons behind people seeking John. If we put those words in statement form we would hear something like this: You didn’t go out to see ‘A reed shaken by the wind’, a blubbering idiot, a psychotic lunatic. Likewise, you didn’t go out ‘To see a man dressed in soft robes’, a king, a prosperous merchant, a wealthy nobleman. You went out hoping to see a prophet.

The scene from Luke’s Gospel in which the Pharisees and Scribes complain might well provoke very similar questions. The Pharisees and Scribes were observing a gathering of sinners with Jesus. But what did they come out to see? Another sinner carousing with sinners? A preacher with criticism and judgment to match their own? What they couldn’t or wouldn’t see was a crowd of plain-folk hoping to become something more, an admittedly sinful people desiring holiness in their lives. They might well be considered the beginning of what we know as ‘church’.

Criticism, judgment and condemnation are not the hallmarks of salvation. But a Church which is human as well as divine can expect to find within it some of the same issues which plague the rest of fallen mankind. Selfishness, narrow-mindedness, greed, arrogance, elitism along with at least a smattering of those seven sins we call deadly. Now the problem is not that there are areas within the Church, both at the clerical and lay level, that are sorely in need of improvement. These we should expect even as we long for perfection. Rather, the problem for us, and all Christians, is the same as it was for the Pharisees and Scribes: how do we keep our focus when regularly confronted with sins or apparent sins within our church, our bishop, our pastor or our parish community? How do we keep our focus when God is not following our plan? 

We need to take a well directed lesson from those critics of old. They couldn’t or wouldn’t see a crowd of plain-folk hoping to become something more, an admittedly sinful people desiring holiness in their lives. Even worse, they attended to the human flaws that were so readily evident while simultaneously missing the very presence of the only one who would offer the means to change it all. Even within the Church it’s sometimes difficult to recognize and focus on the presence of Christ and the saving work we are witnessing.

My wife regularly brings up a question which I’ll pose here in the context of our current issue: What would it look like if the Church or the church community were the way you wanted it to be? Answer that and then examine your answer. Is it just another solution to a Pharisaical objection?