“Those who are healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do. I have not come to call the righteous to repentance but sinners.”
Luke
This morning as I was pounding the treadmill and trying to understand this passage from Luke, the hymn “One Bread One Body” rang out on my Ipod.
“One bread, one body, one Lord of all,” sang the St. Louis Jesuits.
Eureka!
As a reasonably good person (like most of you) I’ve always struggled with this Gospel because I identify more with the righteous than the tax collectors who were sort of the mafia of their day.
But John Foley’s hymn helped me understand what Jesus was saying: He doesn’t divide us into artificial camps or teams like the Pharisees want him to here. WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.
Jesus came to heal all of us because we all sin. He loves all of us despite our flaws. He refuses to be as small as we are when we choose up sides and say God is on OUR side. With Jesus, there is no side – just common, struggling humans who need help and healing to greater or lesser degrees.
This is why Lent can be so rewarding. I used to dread and dislike Lent because of the way we observed it in childhood. At my Catholic school we had mandatory Stations of the Cross on Friday and at home we turned TV off for the duration. My mother found 25 ways to serve canned tuna. To this day, I can’t face the stuff. Then on Passion Sunday they put awful purple bags over the statues in church that finally came down on Holy Saturday. UGH! I could hardly wait for it to end.
But now I view Lent as a time for reflection and growth that I look forward to annually. I try to do more spiritual reading or perform random acts of kindness and, hardest of all, cut back on my favorite small sins. It has become a time of healing and hope – exactly what Jesus calls ALL of us to in today’s Gospel. We’re on a common journey as “one body in this one Lord.”