Luke 15:1-10
I grew up in a fairly strict religious home. I never heard either parent cuss. Thanks to an incident with flaming popcorn in a microwave oven, my children can’t say the same thing about me. One grandfather would get upset if someone said “golly” or “gosh” because those were just cleaned-up versions of taking God’s name in vain. My other grandfather refused to carry a pocketknife on Sunday; he felt carrying weapons of any kind violated the Sabbath. We didn’t smoke. We didn’t drink. A couple of the men in our family did chew, but we never ran with girls who do. You get the picture.
Please understand: I’m not making fun of these rules. They formed a behavioral base that kept our lives fairly uncomplicated. Some scholars call these kinds of rules “purity codes.” They describe who is “pure” and who is “impure.” However, this passage from Luke shows us that Jesus wasn’t overly into purity codes. In fact, he regularly disagreed with Pharisees, some of whom were champions of purity codes.
No matter how a religion begins, over time it nearly always starts to develop ideas about who is “pure” and who is “impure,” who is sacred and who is profane. The Pharisees in our passage cared a great deal about their code, and they were scandalized when Jesus refused to honor it by hobnobbing with people who didn’t measure up to the Code.
Purity codes might make us better behaved. They might simplify our lives by keeping us out of trouble. The problem comes when a purity code becomes an ego game that we can play to pretend that we can earn our way into the Kingdom, or that other people aren’t as good as we are.
The old laws and rules in the Old Testament originally helped to bind Israel together in the middle of dozens of other tribes that had radically different ideas about gods and morality. Israel’s laws were helpful. But some of the Pharisees had turned the old laws into an ego-driven purity code. They took the original commandments in scripture and created a “hedge” of extra rules around the original rules, to keep people from even getting close to violating them. The new rules became part of the Code, too. For some of them, the Code was more important than people. Their righteousness was a self-righteousness, not the biblical righteousness of justice for everyone.
I don’t think Jesus had a problem with the Law as such. He just didn’t think the Law was more important than actual people. He said that the Sabbath was made for man; not man for the Sabbath. You could probably have heard some of the Pharisees gasp out loud at the very idea. Jesus’ parable about the one lost sheep tells us something about how much he valued every individual person, rather than the rules everyone was supposed to follow.
To a strict purist, the rules are the most important thing. Any person who breaks the rules is wrong, or bad, or an outsider. Jesus, however, always started at the other end. He started with love for the individual person, the ‘one sheep’ in the parable. When Jesus and his disciples were hungry and needed to eat, that overrode the prohibition against any kind of grain-harvesting on the Sabbath. When a man with a withered arm needed healing, or a stooped-over woman needed to be straightened, Jesus responded to the needs of the individual, even though it took place on the Sabbath and the Purity Code said that nobody was supposed to perform any kind of work, no matter how small or humane.
Jesus didn’t measure people by their adherence to a code. In his eyes, people who failed to measure up to the Code were not lesser people. The very fact that they realized their imperfections made them better able to hear what Jesus had to say.
Richard Rohr points out that “The point of the Christian life is not to distinguish oneself from the ungodly, but to stand in radical solidarity with everyone and everything else.” The point of the cross was God’s solidarity with us and love for us. The point of the cross was not God’s judgment on us for failure to live up to the Code. The cross reminds us that God loves each and every individual person on the earth, no matter how well-behaved we are. People who pride themselves on the Code don’t see what the cross has to do with them.
Followers of Jesus do not have the right to stand in judgment over other people for not being “pure” enough. Jesus never did that. Jesus actually became angry at some of the Pharisees who had the gall to judge others. They were more concerned with the needs of their egos than with the needs of the people around them.
For Jesus, the presence of God was not to be found in adherence to rules or purity codes. God is to be found in every individual person – it’s the one sheep over whom heaven rejoices, not the ninety-nine who are sure that they’re already righteous! None of us can achieve enough purity to merit our worthiness. But if any one of us goes deep enough within ourselves, we will find the presence of God there, because each of us was created in the image of God. In the fifteenth century, St. Catherine of Genoa used to run through the streets shouting, “My deepest me is God! My deepest me is God!” I’m sure she got some strange looks, but she had a point. At the core of each of us is God’s image.
Going deep within ourselves requires us to be honest with ourselves. Unhealthy religion encourages us to pretend to be something that we’re not, or to pile up brownie points for good behavior.
Healthy religion leads us to be honest about the parts of ourselves that we like to pretend aren’t there. Those parts are sometimes called our shadows or our “shadow selves.” It doesn’t help to think of our shadows as our “bad sides” or our “evil sides.” They are what they are. And if we ignore them or pretend that they don’t exist, they’re going to come out anyway, often in destructive ways.
For example, I grew up thinking of myself as a nice guy, but anger was my shadow. I didn’t like to admit that I got angry. The face I presented to the world, and to myself, was always calm, always “nice.” But the anger was there. I thought I hid it from everyone else. I thought other people got angry, but not me. For the longest time, I wasn’t in touch with my anger, or to use theological terms, I didn’t confess my anger honestly to myself and to God. The anger didn’t go away; it just simmered beneath the surface, affecting me and the people around me in ways I didn’t recognize.
And then I had something of a midlife crisis. So much anger had built up over the years that it finally had to come out. I found myself sitting in church being angry for no good reason. It was a shock to realize and admit what my wife had of course known all along: I have a temper. Healthy spirituality for me couldn’t develop until I began to come to grips with my shadow of anger. Ironically, the calmest people in the world are the people who have faced their anger and learned to recognize it and deal with it, rather than refusing to acknowledge that it exists. When my young grandsons are fighting loudly with each other, I realize that I’m not entirely calm yet.
Anger isn’t the only spiritual trap or shadow. People who study the Enneagram can tell you about at least eight others. For example, some people really like to help. Perhaps you’ve known people who are terminally helpful, who get offended if you don’t let them help you. Their shadow side may be that helping you is a way of controlling you or getting you to love them. Helping is the way they feed their egos and feel superior. Their shadow is actually pride.
When such a person realizes for the first time that their “helping” is really a manipulative ploy for their own ego’s benefit, it’s a humiliating experience. It’s humiliating when we realize that we’re not entirely the person we thought ourselves to be. But we can only begin to mature and grow by working through that humiliating realization, by coming to grips with our shadows. Ironically, the path to spiritual health for terminal helpers may be to stop helping people! Or at least to be able to help people without expecting anything in return. That will take a while; it takes years to uncover and make peace with our shadows.
Someone with gardening experience has said that we’re not made up entirely of weeds. But we’re not made up entirely of wheat, either. We have to learn to accept and forgive this mixture in ourselves. Jesus once told a parable in which an enemy sowed weeds (KJV: tares) in a wheat field. The owner told the workers to let the wheat and weeds grow together, lest in rooting out the weeds, the good wheat was torn up also. That is the life we live – not a straight line, but a back-and-forth journey. If we beat ourselves up for our weeds, or obsess too much on rooting out the weeds or negative things in our lives, we may well neglect to develop the positive things that bring us to spiritual maturity.
The Pharisees in our passage today had a lot of shadow work to do. Their purity code had become merely an excuse for their egos to feel superior to other people.
Jesus challenged the codes by loving the people at the bottom of the social and moral ladder. That’s what shocked and angered the Pharisees so much: Jesus didn’t honor the codes that let them feel superior! When Jesus helped sinners and tax collectors, when he treated them with respect, the Pharisees took it as a slight on their superior standing. Their egos just couldn’t take that kind of abuse.
Jesus focused on the people whom the purity codes abandoned. As much as we resist it, Jesus does us a favor when he undermines our egos. The light of Christ helps us see ourselves as we are. Only then can we begin to be honest and let go of our judgments.
Like every other religion, Christianity has focused too often on laws and purity codes. They keep us from accepting ourselves and other people. It doesn’t matter to Jesus what your shadow side is. Each of us is that one sheep the shepherd is eager to carry home.
1 Timothy 1:15 tells us:
1:15 The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners–of whom I am the foremost.
Christ is the light that allows us to see ourselves in our fullness – the parts we’re proud of, as well as the parts we want to hide. Jesus doesn’t call us to feel ashamed. He calls us to be honest, to have eyes that see ourselves for what we actually are, to open ourselves to God’s grace, and to be transformed into mature, loving citizens of the kingdom of God.
Let’s pray. Lord, each of us stands in need of your healing grace. Help us to be courageous enough to be honest with ourselves about our shadows. Forgive us for the times when we can see others’ faults so clearly and remain so blind to our own. Help us to open our souls to your Spirit, that we might grow and be transformed into citizens of your kingdom. In Christ’s name we pray, amen.
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