Hey, Jesus, you’re squandering God’s grace.
You’re throwing it around like New
Money at Sacks 5th Avenue.
If
you’re truly on God’s payroll, you’d hold back, and not associate with people
like that
—sinners, tax collectors, all those people not welcome at
God’s table.
—You’re squandering God’s goodwill,
you’re being a bad steward of God’s kindness,
God’s grace.
Then,
as we know, Jesus responds to such accusations with stories about lost things,
lost animals, and lost people. He tells the religious authorities
—God is like a woman scouring her house for a single cent.
—God is like a shepherd leaving all his sheep alone in the
woods in order to find a single lost one.
—God is like a father embarrassing himself for his sinner
son’s sake…
—You all, however, are like a jealous brother who embraces
his father’s embarrassment, and holds a grudge against this lost son who was
found.
Jesus
leaves them, but maybe the Disciples aren’t fully convinced—we rarely are right?
Maybe they are murmuring about cost-benefit analysis,
or wondering where their next meal will come from,
or wondering what they’re neighbors will say when they
notice them dining with undesirables.
I’d
imagine Jesus stops suddenly along the road, maybe Thomas is looking down at
his I-Phone and doesn’t notice until he runs into Andrew, not such a good
thing—he’s got a temper on him…
Jesus
turns to them and says, “I see that you don’t get it. You want grace to make
sense, to add up…
But grace doesn’t make cents,
or dollars,
or any sort of back and forth I owe you and you owe me, quid pro quo, way of being.
or any sort of back and forth I owe you and you owe me, quid pro quo, way of being.
But, because you all are stubborn,
let’s think this through their way,
let’s run the numbers and play out
the alternative scenario,
auditing God’s books,
and thinking through what the
Pharisees and Scribes accused me of doing with God’s grace.
Let’s assume God is a God of limited resources, like Smaug, the
dragon in The Hobbit, who hordes his Gold and kills any poor beggar or fool who
tries to so much as touch it.
God has
put his great big pile of money into a trust, and asked me to manage it.
And I
did… but soon enough the Pharisees and Scribes saw what I was doing, you’ve
seen it first hand, right?
Forgiving like a fool,
searching in places good folk ought not be,
associating with the destitute and disposable…
And
this God of limited resources, greedy
as all get out, called me into his office and raked me over the coals just
like the Pharisees say he would.
This God of limits asked, “Are the charges against you true?
Are you not charging interest on my grace and looking out for my bottom line?
Show me your books at once!”
So, I
left his office,
ran to my desk (getting there before the goons who would put
all my work stuff into a box and boot me out the door could make it there).
I furiously called and emailed all my customers…
after all, look at my baby soft hands, I’ve not worked a day
in my life.”
At this
James guhuffed, seeing Jesus’ calloused carpenter hands.
“I
called everyone, the unclean man with a demon I exorcised, the whole pile of
people I healed at the house of Peter’s mother-in-law, the lepers, that paralyzed
fella, the centurion and his slave, the widow and her son…
you get the idea—all
these people I’ve been helping in the name of God.
I said to one, “What do you owe God? 100 jugs of oil, pay
50.”
To another, “100 bushels of wheat, make it 80.”
And you’ve
seen it guys, the way people praise God in response to mercy, in response to
forgiveness, healing…
The
whole village partied in response to the unexpected generosity from this Scrooge version of God.
He heard the hip-hip-hoorays hollered the whole way home,
So he found me and gave me my job back
—after all, people he’d never expected to pay him back, or
even associate with him, were singing his praises to the highest heaven.
So, if
the Pharisees are right--God’s bag, his greatest joy and way of relating to the
world, is filling his sack with loot,
and yet my gracious
representation of him has got him more loot than all the tight fistedness of
the Pharisees,
if that’s the case, then you as my disciples ought to do the
same.
Yes,
even in the face of resistance and book keeping and holding grudges, go and
represent God as gracious.
They’ll
tell you it is dishonest to go to
the least, lost, and disinherited with God’s goods,
that you can’t squeeze a drop of praise of God from them no
matter how hard you try…
well, they’re thinking is too heavenly minded, be wise,
shrewd, dishonest in the eyes of the
Religious-folk, so that you might go to those who will actually notice the services God has provided.
In business this is called a Blue
Water strategy
—while everyone else is fighting
over a small group of people, making the water red with the blood of
competition, you go where no other company is, and you fish that market alone
—you are rewarded, while everyone else is bloodied
You get
it, right?
If our way of honoring God and spreading God’s Grace around,
is still the most profitable way of doing this God thing
—even within a system that assumes God is a tight-fisted
titan, hoarding his Grace and counting every penny of it…
how much more faithful is our open handed, merciful
generosity in light of God’s true nature?
—in light of the God who searches out the lost?
squanders His very self for the sake of those he seeks!
