Friend of sinners
Though your sins are like scarlet,
They shall be like snow. Isaiah 1:18
Read Galatians 2:17—21
So let me sort this: I’ve been crucified. I’ve died. I’ve died with Christ. I’ve died, at least, to all my efforts to deserve God. My life with God has come to me, but it has not been my achievement. Not my moral achievement. Now I live. I live because Christ lives in me. That is why I am alive to God. Because the Son loves the Father and the Father cannot help loving the Son, and the Son lives in me. So in my life toward others I now need to live toward them as Christ does. In a warm, welcoming, loving embrace. Jesus was known for being a friend of sinners, and for eating with them, eating with tax collectors and sinners. It is said so often that it is part of his identity. It’s virtually Jesus’ name. So, if he has broken down barriers to the outcast, what option have I but to follow him and to connect with the disconnected?
Dear Lord, I see you connecting me to your Father, the holy God of all creation, and connecting me with the unholy within it. I feel fear of One because of his holiness. And I feel fear of the others because of their unholiness. As I reflect tonight, I see that it is in your one movement that you bring all this to be. For you came from the One to the other, and brought the other to the One. Now you have set me free, gloriously free, from having to judge the sinner: rather, to love. To love with the love that has won me. So I am the more ready now to eat with those whom you would eat with and to honour you as I do.