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[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 on the historical line, and there the biggest part of the answer is. Because he gave himself to and for the people who were outside the Law, outside the conventional religious framework. I have not in the last five minutes been using the words but we can bring them back now—radical alternative. There was never an alternative so radical. Even Socrates never so upset people’s notions of God and humanity and virtue and righteousness and truth. And it was all the more radical because Jesus did not say “revolt against Caesar” and gave him nothing but the word “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” This leads me to a third point. I asked what did this mean to Jesus? I ask now: What does it mean to sinners?

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SINNERS?

It meant many things, which there is not time to talk about, I’m going to pick out one word—freedom. But that word must not be misunderstood. It did not mean freedom to do anything they pleased. I have cited the old familiar laws about murder and adultery. Jesus certainly made them no easier when he stretched them to include anger and lust. Nor did it mean political freedom won by the edge of the sword. Render unto Caesar the things he is due.

It is the sort of freedom that John and Jesus had shown in completely different ways. John was free of material things by renouncing them—neither eating nor drinking. Jesus was free of material things by using them, eating and drinking as the friend of tax collectors and sinners. And “wisdom is justified by her works.” The same thing is true in other respects—do you fight Caesar or not? He is entitled to his due; but what if he claims more than his due? What, for example, if he puts himself in the place of God?

This brings us back, to look from another angle of what I have already said. What Jesus did for sinners was bring them back to God. And this is to be free—free for obedience, free for the service that only the free children of God can render. I have already quoted the term’s card. You may have noticed what I understand as a misprint on it. The heading is right—“Christianity—the Radical Alternative.” But for this evening—“friends (plural) of sinners.” Even if that is a slip, I am happy to take it up.

How does one follow him whom we call the friend of sinners? We do it by being friends of sinners—friends that is, of the outcast, the friendless, the unloved. There is no more radical alternative to conventional society than that. Again, I have quoted, from the other side, as it were, the crucial words. Can I say them of myself? That I came not to be served, but to serve, and in that service to give my life for my fellow human beings? The best way to offer friendship, service, love, to this or that group of your fellows? That will take the best brainwork of which you are capable; but when you know, that is what being a follower of the friend of sinners means.