Abstract
I started out watching Grumpy Old Men and Grumpy Old Women with real enjoyment. But my laughter soon gave way to unease. Too many of the regulars seemed to be nursing a sense of frustrated entitlement, and felt bitter about the lesser mortals they were forced to live among. I found it all a bit too sclerotic and un-self critical, and now I can’t stomach these programs any more.
You’ll be familiar with the sort of self-justifying, exclusionary righteousness that responds to personal feelings of inadequacy by damning others, including condemning in others whatever we can’t face in ourselves. The very public fall of a Scots Catholic Church leader early this year provided an example of this widespread dynamic, in his case involving a mismatch between public statements and private behaviour regarding homosexuality. I suggest that it’s this dynamic that sets the agenda for Jesus in today’s Gospel.
The Gospel reading begins with some grumpy old scribes and Pharisees, who are dismissive and contemptuous toward Jesus and what he’s doing: “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them”. And the heart of their bitterness is an abusive and hateful image of God.
Jesus sets about undoing this God image with the parables he tells. God is like an over-zealous shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine, so eager is he to reclaim the one sheep that was lost. God is like an anxious and even obsessive woman who cleans the house from top to bottom in search of a lost coin, which she obviously can’t do without. Forget sobriety, balance and prudence. This is a joyful God, dynamic about searching out and liberating sinners rather than serving as the ossified guardian of a static, smug rectitude. Today’s Gospel parables remind me of Charles Wesley’s hymn “Love divine all loves excelling”, with its “joy of heaven to earth come down”.
This reimagining of God is echoed in our 1 Timothy reading today. The writer is so confident in God’s forgiveness of his sins that even his shame and regret about his past is lifted. I refer to the way he sees even his past sinful life as valuable for encouraging others, “making me an example to those who come to believe in him for eternal life”. Our God is not ashamed of us and of our past, because even our forgiven sins and failures can be pointers and object lessons for God’s good purposes. And if our forgiving God helps us to forgive even ourselves in this way, then surely we become capable of forgiving others—no longer forced to look away from them in their shame, let alone to despise them.
I think that we’re given a further opportunity for re-imagining God as I’m suggesting in our Exodus reading today. Though it’s done in what looks to me like a subtle manner, rather like Jesus’ use of parables. On the face of it this reading is about Moses arguing a bloodthirsty God into a change of mind. But what if it’s a bit of theatre instead, like the political theatre that we in Australia’s national capital sometimes see during Parliamentary Question Time? Some backbencher gets up and asks a cabinet minister a leading question about an issue over which the government has been misrepresented and criticised. This provides the minister with a staged opportunity for listing all the things that the government’s actually doing right. The press gallery is the intended target of this exercise, in the hope that public perception might be changed. So too perhaps in Exodus, as Moses lists the past examples of God’s steadfast love and faithfulness whereupon, lo and behold, God acts in just this way—God isn’t a monster after all. I wonder if this Exodus passage is really aimed at undoing an inappropriate God image in the minds of its hearers rather than portraying an actual instance of God’s anger having to be calmed down.
This reimagining of God may of course take time, and a deft hand in commending it. I suggest that we see such a deft approach in the parables told by Jesus in today’s Gospel. The lowly shepherd and the woman aren’t likely to be figures who would push the buttons of our grumpy scribes and Pharisees, making them feel that Jesus is targeting their kind directly, and hence getting their backs up. Instead Jesus starts gently, and it’s only the third parable he tells, in the passage immediately after today’s Gospel reading—the parable of the prodigal son—in which the scribes and Pharisees are likely to be directly confronted by a story straight out of their world, from their social class, with its scurrilously insouciant son who nevertheless receives such an over-the-top welcome home from his father. No grumpy old man would feel anything but resentful about the parable of the prodigal son, which is perhaps why Luke first gives us Jesus softening up his audience with the two less-confronting parables in today’s Gospel.
Now, if we do re-imagine God, as Jesus helps us to do in these Gospel parables, how might things change for us? For you and for me, this newly-reimagined God of mercy and forgiveness frees us from an isolated posture of fearful and defensive rigidity, enabling us to admit our own sins, also providing us with the confidence and wherewithal to move on in life. Our readings today plainly show that God’s mercy isn’t a response to our acts of repentance, so much as their necessary precondition. Because we’ll only drop our guard when we feel safe, won’t we? A harsh God, like a harsh parent or an abusive spouse, will only make us evade and deny and dissemble. Only a merciful God empowers God’s people for penitence, as our rites of confession in the Church recognise with their invitation to remember God’s mercy and not just our sins. We see David realising just this in our psalm portion today. God’s mercy is named right up front, creating a safe space in which David can admit and let go of his guilt over the whole sorry Bathsheba episode.
One last thing. For you and for me this newly-reimagined God of mercy and forgiveness calls us together with others into a new community. Rather than grumpy old men (or women) who despise Jesus’ love for sinners, we find ourselves drawn together by God with other forgiven sinners in a mood of joyfulness. We see this happening in today’s Gospel. In both parables, after the lost sheep and the lost coin have been recovered, the shepherd and the woman gather their friends and neighbours to celebrate the joyful outcome. We see this happening around us right now as God gathers us to celebrate the Eucharist together. And it’s not a gathering best suited to the grumpy or the disapproving.
The Lord be with you…