The friend of sinners

Who Did Jesus Welcome?

The short answer scandalized the respectable people of His day: Jesus welcomed exactly the people everyone else shut out. Tax collectors who had sold out their neighbors, prostitutes, lepers, the demon-tormented, foreigners, the notoriously immoral, the religiously unclean; these were not the exceptions to His ministry but very often its center. The Gospel writers record the complaint against Him almost as a headline: this man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them. It was meant as an accusation. It reads now like the best news in the world. If your record or your reputation has made you feel unwelcome everywhere else, you are precisely the kind of person Jesus went looking for.

“Then drew near unto him all the publicans and sinners for to hear him.”Luke 15:1

“And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.”Luke 15:2

“For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.”Luke 19:10

“And when the scribes and Pharisees saw him eat with publicans and sinners, they said unto his disciples, How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners?”Mark 2:16

What the Gospels actually show

Luke sets the scene plainly: then drew near unto him all the publicans and sinners for to hear him. The word publican meant a collaborator, a cheat, a traitor to his own people, and yet they drew near, because something in Him made it safe to. The religious leaders murmured, saying, this man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them. When they sneered that He ate with tax collectors, Jesus answered, they that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick. And He named His whole mission in one sentence: the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost. He was not tolerating the lost. He was hunting for them.

Why this drew people to Him

People came to Him because His welcome had no fine print. He did not require them to become respectable first, to earn a place, to hide the truth about themselves. The tax collectors and sinners drew near precisely because they sensed He would not recoil. And this is the deep reversal at the heart of His character: religion, as people usually practice it, moves away from the unclean, but Jesus moved toward them. He entered Zacchaeus's house, He let the sinful woman weep on His feet, He talked theology with a Samaritan woman whom His culture triply despised. Grace that runs toward you instead of away is the most magnetic thing on earth.