The sinner from God’s perspective

Sermon for Trinity 3

1 Peter 5:6-11  +  Luke 15:1-10

How do you see yourself in relation to God? Worthy? Unworthy? Loved? Unloved? In favor? Out of favor? Somewhere in between? How you see yourself will also have an effect on how you see other people in their relation to God. But I would suggest to you that the more important question is, how does God see you? And, how does God see the people around you? What is God’s perspective?

That’s what Jesus reveals to us in today’s Gospel. The Pharisees saw themselves as high up there on God’s list of favorites, and they saw the tax collectors and sinners who were coming to Jesus to hear Him as being permanently erased from God’s list of favorites. So Jesus reveals to us the sinner from God’s perspective.

It says that all the tax collectors (at that time, notorious liars, thieves and cheaters of their fellow Jews) and the sinners (well-known prostitutes, adulterers, and otherwise immoral people) drew near to Jesus. Why? To hear Him. To hear Him say what? What was His message to them? That’s an important question. Was He telling them, “It’s all right to cheat and steal and have sex outside of marriage”? “It doesn’t matter”? “God accepts you just as you are”? No. Jesus acknowledged their sinfulness and their lostness. But He likely didn’t dwell on it for all that long, because they knew that part well enough already. These were Israelites, after all. They knew the Ten Commandments. What’s more, John the Baptist recently had done his job of pointing out the sinfulness of everyone in Israel, including the tax collectors and the sinners. Not only that, but Jewish society at that time was very clear about these things. Open, public sins like prostitution, adultery and fornication were recognized as evil things, and cheating and stealing from your neighbor were understood to be inexcusable wrongs. These tax collectors and sinners weren’t pretending to be righteous or justified in their lifestyles. They knew they had ruined things with God.

But then along comes Jesus, claiming to have been sent from God, announcing a message from God, showing the sinner from God’s perspective: God isn’t done with you. God still loves you. In fact, God loves all men. He wants all men to be saved. He wants all to be brought to repentance. He doesn’t expect you to earn His favor. In fact, He forbids you to try. No, God is willing to forgive you, to forgive everyone, freely, by grace, and I, Jesus, the Son of God, am the one for whose sake God the Father is willing to do it. That’s the message the tax collectors and the sinners were hearing from Jesus.

And after all that, all the Pharisees and scribes could do was to sneer at Jesus in disgust, This man receives sinners and eats with them! From their perspective, the sinners didn’t deserve to be forgiven. From their perspective, God should rejoice to be rid of them, and Jesus should spend His time with the worthy, praising them for how worthy they were, telling them how they, above other men, had indeed earned God’s favor.

So Jesus tells three parables (two of which we heard in our Gospel today) explaining lost things from God’s perspective. How does God see the sinner?

He knows and cares about each and every one. God sees the sinner as one of His sheep that has gone astray, that has left the flock and the pastures and the protection of its shepherd. It doesn’t matter how big or little, how public or private the sin is. As Isaiah says, All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way.

Hmm. “All we like sheep have gone astray.” “Each one.” That’s what God’s Word says. So in reality, there aren’t 99 “righteous” sheep who haven’t gone astray, who don’t need to repent. Everyone’s a sinner. Everyone needs to repent. The 99 in Jesus parable simply represent those who think they’re righteous, who think they’ve earned God’s favor, who think they don’t need to repent. Such were the Pharisees and scribes in our Gospel.

So what does the shepherd do? He leaves the 99 and goes after the one sinner, the sheep that has gone astray. And he doesn’t just go after him. Always keep Isaiah’s prophecy in view. It continues, we have turned, every one, to his own way, and the Lord has laid on Him—on the Christ! —the iniquity of us all. Not included in this parable but always in view in the Scriptures is the fact that Jesus didn’t just go looking for us all. He gave His life for us all. He bore the sins of us all and suffered for them all. The journey this Shepherd took to find His sheep wasn’t just difficult. It was deadly, as He knew it would be. But it was the only way to buy the sheep back from its wanderings, and it’s the only message that will bring the sheep to repentance. Your God cared about you, His sinful, rebellious sheep, enough to lay down His life for you. And now He sends out His Gospel to find you, to preach repentance and the remission of sins through faith in Christ Jesus.

And when He finds His sheep with the Gospel, when His sheep repents and believes the good news, He is like the shepherd who hefted the sheep onto his shoulders and rejoiced as he returned home and celebrated with all his friends and neighbors the success of his mission, the return of the one sheep to his fold. That’s how God sees the sinner. That’s God’s perspective.

The parable of the lost coin is similar to that of the lost sheep. It emphasizes the fact that there is value to the sinner in God’s eyes, and just as much value in the one who has gone lost as in those who haven’t (although all have, as we’ve already seen). The one silver coin that was lost is worth no more and no less than each of the other nine coins, whereas the Pharisees thought of themselves as far more valuable in God’s sight than the tax collectors and sinners. No, says Jesus. No one can earn a place of value in God’s sight. Everyone has already been assigned an equal value by God Himself. So when God finds a lost sinner and brings him or her to repentance, He sees all the effort He spent in searching as being worth it. He rejoices to get His coin back.

We should say a word here about what repentance is, if God is so joyful over the one sinner who repents. It’s neatly summarized for you on the back of your service folder today from our Augsburg Confession: Now, strictly speaking, repentance consists of two parts. One part is contrition, that is, terrors striking the conscience through the knowledge of sin. The other part is faith, which is born of the Gospel or the Absolution and believes that for Christ’s sake, sins are forgiven. It comforts the conscience and delivers it from terror. Then good works are bound to follow, which are the fruit of repentance.

This is what God seeks in each and every human being. He sends out His terror-striking Word to all those who deny their sinfulness, like the Pharisees in our Gospel, and to all those who are indifferent or unconcerned about their sinfulness, so that both kinds of sinner are brought to shudder before God’s judgment seat. He also sends out His comforting Gospel of His willingness to forgive sins freely for Christ’s sake through faith to all those who are shuddering in terror. And when His Word has accomplished this goal, He forgives and justifies the believer and welcomes him and her into His home, where there is rejoicing every day over the one sinner who repents, even me, even you.

It’s not that we all stray from God’s house or go lost every time we sin; there are many sins that we commit in ignorance or in weakness that do not extinguish faith or drive out the Holy Spirit. But can you imagine a day going by in which you can honestly say, “I’m more worthy of God’s favor than those sinners over there. Today I need no repentance”? God forbid that you ever fall into such blindness and into such pride! See yourself from God’s perspective. Always sinful and undeserving of His favor and eternal life. And yet always desired by Him, always precious to Him, and daily urged by Him to live in contrition and repentance, recognizing and mourning your sins, and at the same time trusting in His gracious promise to forgive you freely for Christ’s sake, into whom you have been baptized. And then struggling against sin and striving, with God’s help, to sin no more.

This is what God wants for you. This is what God wants for everyone. And this is why God calls people not only to be baptized, but to join themselves to a Christian congregation where they can keep coming to Jesus, as the tax collectors and sinners did, to hear His Word and His instruction, to receive His absolution, and also to receive regularly the seal and pledge of His mercy and forgiveness in the Sacrament of Christ’s very body and blood.

From God’s perspective, all of you here were worth seeking and finding and bringing to repentance, and all of you, as you repent and as you live daily in repentance, are a cause of great joy and celebration in heaven. Now live your lives from God’s perspective, not your own, and see both yourselves and your neighbor as God sees you: as sinners with whom our God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—yearns to spend eternity, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.