GIVE
And let it be noted that I am saying this only to those who have received something to begin with. Others have no motive for giving. Henry Drummond had to speak once at a very expensive and exclusive club. He began by saying “Gentlemen, the entrance fee for the Kingdom of God is— nothing. The annual subscription is everything.” Now that really is my sermon in one sentence. The entrance fee is nothing because it is God’s gift. It is especially meant for people who have nothing at all. The Gospel is that to become a Christian, you need do nothing at all; Christ has done it. Yet to be a Christian demands everything that you have. It means everything from harvests upward. It means that your money is not yours. Not that you are to be silly with it. Not that you are to starve yourself, still less that you are to neglect your wife and children. But it is not yours, it is God’s and you are using it for him.
But that is a little thing. Paul never bothered to say that. What he said was “you are not your own.” You do not possess yourself, because “you were bought with a price.” You are not; your Lord Jesus Christ is. And if you are like me, you say to yourself. “Is it worth it?” Can I really believe that God wants a life like mine? There was a tremendous scene in Green Pastures. Noah appears as an old black preacher. Another calls on him and they talk and it is only after a while that Noah discovers that his visitor is the Lord God. Then, on his knees in complete dedication, he utters a sentence which for all its lack of grammar and the like, is one of the grandest I know: “I’s not much Lord, but I’s all I got.” I don’t think my words can go higher than that. One can only turn in contrast to beautiful and dignified Wesleyan English—“love so amazing, so divine demands my soul, my life, my all” (C. Wesley).
10. Editor’s Note: CKB is not talking about himself, but rather the famous nineteenth-century Englishman for whom he was named.
“FRIEND OF SINNERS”—Matthew 11.18–19
[Preached twice on 10/21/82 at Bede-Hilds College Durham, and on 11/20/83 at Bishop Auckland]
That is a text that you may think fits well enough for the subject that appears on this term’s card for this morning’s service—indeed it was hardly possible to avoid it—a friend of publicans and sinners. But, you may say, its much less well suited for the topic suggested for the term as a whole—“Christianity the radical alternative.” For I suppose these words suggest to you as they do to me a lifestyle wholly different, radically different, different at the root from that which is accepted in the society in which most of us live. This is a consumer society, brought up to what our parents would have thought of as luxury, expecting a continually rising standard of living, and feeling cheated if we didn’t get it. This means that the radical alternative inevitably takes on a social, and indeed a political, tone. If Christianity is such a radical alternative, it is out to change society, and you have little chance of making changes, quick changes anyway, in society except by political means. So Christianity regarded as a radical alternative is bound to forsake the middle of the road, consensus and go for some kind of political extremism, whether of the left or the right.
Over against this our text, “Jesus the friend of sinners” will, if I am not mistaken, suggest to some of you a cozy individualistic piety, in which the happy individual luxuriates in an unhealthy guilt complex, and enjoys the feelings that he is just the sort of person whose company God likes. So are we this morning out of step with the series as a whole and left with an alternative which may conceivable be radical but is not particularly desirable? I invite you first to look at these words in their historical setting.
IN THEIR HISTORICAL SETTING
Publicans, tax collectors, of course, known as the poor income tax man, and customs officials are fair game. But these tax collectors were not like the relatively harmless people who inhabit the office down on Claypath. They were the agents of a foreign government with compelling authority. The money they collected did not keep the service of your own country going; they were channeled away to Rome, and the very coins you had to hand over bore idolatrous symbols on them. You lost the money you could well have used; you were reminded that you were a subject race; you were involved in a treachery not only to your own nation but to your own religion. It was these tax collectors that fastened all this on you. A friend of tax collectors—not likely!
Sinners: when we use the word we mean bad people, and of course that is a simple meaning the word often has in Scripture. But not here. These were sinners in a technical sense, people who could not be bothered to keep all the Jewish Laws, some at least of which had nothing to do with morality. These people and the religious who could be sanctimonious, had no time for each other. That puts it mildly. “These people who don’t know the Law are under a curse” (John 7.49). That was the verdict of the religious. On the other side, there was a famous rabbi, Akiba, who was at first one of the irreligious, the people of the land, and did not begin to study until he was about forty. And he recalled: “When I was an am ha’aretz I used to say ‘I wish I had one of those scholars here, I would bite him, like an ass.’ People said, ‘You mean like a dog.’ ‘No like an ass. An ass’s bite breaks the bone, a dog’s doesn’t.’” No love lost here. I am saying at present one thing—“friend of sinners” may sound to us like smug piety. It did not sound like that when it was first uttered. It would have been hard to state a more radically different way of ordering life and society. It described one who was standing ordinary values on their heads and making himself an undesirable character—as is clear from the context. No religious scruples, a glutton and a drunkard. The religious man who was the friend of the irreligious. Radical enough. I proceed with a question: What did this mean to Jesus?
WHAT DID THIS MEAN TO JESUS?
If I were not in decency required to keep this sermon going a respectable time I could answer the question in one word—it meant death. Perhaps that does need more expansion. You can hear the mumbling of the sinners in the words I have read to you. You simply can’t make anything of these religious people. First there is John the Baptizer. He lives out in the desert, he eats next to nothing, only the most unattractive things—locusts and such like. The man is mad; for that is what ‘he has a devil’ means. And now there is Jesus. He spends all his time at parties given by undesirable people; he simply isn’t respectable. But that is not all. Plenty of people, if they had the chance, would eat too much and drink too much. This eating and drinking broke the rules; it transgressed Torah, and that was the basis of society. The one hope for Israel was that everyone should be perfectly, obedient; then God would rescue his people. “If all Israel would keep one Sabbath perfectly, the Kingdom of God would come.” This is our link with God; this is our hope for the future. And this man not only breaks the link himself, he incites others to do it too.
All that could, theoretically, be because Jesus didn’t believe in God. But that is absurd; he was always talking about the heavenly Father. What he was doing was making himself the way to God, instead of the Law. The Law was alright in its way—it is quite right when it tells you not to murder, to steal, to commit adultery; but there were too many people for whom it did nothing, nothing except shut them out of the religious community. And what the Law could not do for these people, Jesus did. When he made himself the friend of sinners and publicans, they were finding their way home to God.
It followed that the only way to save the old familiar trusted institutional framework of religion was to get rid of Jesus. And get rid of him, they did; at least they did their best. He saw it coming. The Son of Man came not to be served, he said, but to serve and give his life for many—not for the select few, the pious elements in Israel but for the many, the masses, the outsiders.
If you ask why Jesus died, you can answer the questions along two lines, one historical the other theological. They converge in the end but they are distinguishable. I like to begin
