PENTECOST XIV (Proper 19) 2019

• Exodus 32:7-14 and Psalm 51:1-10 •
• 1 Timothy 1:12-17 •
• Luke 15:1-10

Domenico Fetti -- The Lost Coin

In the Gospel for this Sunday, the Pharisees and scribes complain that Jesus is regularly found in the company of sinners. When Christians read this today, they rather too readily assume a position of moral superiority over the benighted Pharisees, and complacently identify themselves with what they perceive to be the non-judgmental attitude that they think Jesus exemplifies. This scarcely makes sense of the passage, which invokes the concept of repentance. Penitents, after all, must have something to repent.
       But biblical interpretation aside, identifying Jesus with the non-judgmental inclusivism that is currently fashionable, makes for a position that is either hypocritical or profoundly unattractive. In reality, no decent person should be content to rub along with child abusers, wife beaters, racists, rapists or people traffickers playing on the weak and vulnerable. Any one who refuses to be 'judgmental' about such conduct is in effect condoning great evil.

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Marc Chagall -- Lamentation of Jeremiah

​It is the reality of great evil that Jeremiah and the Psalmists grapple with in the Old Testament lessons. Their context was the ancient world, certainly, but there are plenty of modern contexts to which their words apply. The history of Africa, both colonial and post-colonial, is a terrible case in point – marked by ‘foolish’ adults who act like ‘stupid children’ and have no real understanding, alongside ordinary people who have simply ‘gone astray’, and are ‘perverse’. The modern world is not short of people who are ‘skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good’. This description fits perfectly for warring factions in Syria and Afghanistan, mass murderers in America and ethnic cleansers in Europe.

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So what, then, is the message of the Gospel for this Sunday? It is a truth about the human heart that the wicked do not easily turn from their ways. When they do, accordingly, there really is occasion for 'joy in the presence of the angels of God'. This is not because those who repent great evils are in some way more to be praised or admired than people who don’t perform such acts in the first place. Rather, it is because stories of their repentance are signs of hope that in the end, as God in Christ has promised, light can indeed overcome darkness.