Tax Collectors Welcomed: Religious Leaders Objected
Daily Scripture
Luke 7:28-35
28 I tell you that no greater human being has ever been born than John. Yet whoever is least in God’s kingdom is greater than he.” 29 Everyone who heard this, including the tax collectors, acknowledged God’s justice because they had been baptized by John. 30 But the Pharisees and legal experts rejected God’s will for themselves because they hadn’t been baptized by John.
31 “To what will I compare the people of this generation?” Jesus asked. “What are they like? 32 They are like children sitting in the marketplace calling out to each other, ‘We played the flute for you and you didn’t dance. We sang a funeral song and you didn’t cry.’ 33 John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ 34 Yet the Human One [or Son of Man] came eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunk, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ 35 But wisdom is proved to be right by all her descendants.”
Daily Reflection & Prayer
Most Judean religious leaders were “complaining that John was too austere, complaining in the next breath that Jesus was too much the life and soul of the party…. People today still judge Jesus by their expectations, instead of pausing and probing into the evidence to see what was really going on…. Following the Messiah who is different to what we imagined is always demanding; but this is the only way to the kingdom of God.” * Jesus needs to shape our expectations, rather than us demanding that he be like we expect.
- Tax collectors and other “sinners,” with an inner sense of need, accepted John’s baptism and Jesus’ message. The religious leaders, sure they were already fine with God, refused to accept either John or Jesus. When have you seen a person’s genuine spiritual receptivity help them overcome significant obstacles to faith such as ridicule or intellectual scorn from others?
- Jesus noted that the religious leaders found fault with both John’s ascetic lifestyle and his own more engaged, accepting approach. They seemed determined to reject God’s messengers who behaved in any way different from theirs. Have you ever found settled attitudes or preconceptions making it hard for you to recognize and accept God’s work through people or methods that made you uncomfortable because they were different from what you were used to?
Prayer
Lord Jesus, faith can be just as subject to fads and fashions as clothing styles. Keep me focused on the central message of your kingdom, neither accepting nor rejecting ideas or ministries based on “what’s hot” now. Amen.
GPS Insights
Ginny Howell
Ginny Howell serves as the Worship Experience Director for Resurrection, leading the church’s efforts to provide radical hospitality and an excellent worship experience across all of our locations. She’s a mom to three, g-momma to one sweet little boy, and shares much of her time with her closest companion, a rescued Pit Bull named Lola.
Our culture feels overloaded with comparisons, arguments and a myriad of us vs. them dynamics, similar to what Jesus describes in verse 32. ‘We played the flute for you and you didn’t dance. We sang a funeral song and you didn’t cry.’
This type of noise feels deafening to me right now, and it’s hard to know what to do with it all, or maybe more specifically just how to be in a time like this.
Last night I had the opportunity to spend some time with our Student Ministry team at our Leawood location. It was a special evening as we hosted a Baptism service for our students, and there was a refreshing energy in the air as students and families began to gather before the service.
Students being baptized were excitedly checking in and picking up t-shirts, and parents and extended family members were showing up to support the young people in their lives. Other students were there to support their friends and Mentors showed up to do the same. For an age group we typically associate with cliques, competition and lots of other (mostly negative) stereotypes, I saw none of that.
Students cheered as they watched their friends being baptized. Some parents who had never been baptized made the choice to get baptized alongside their students. We even had a multi-generational baptism with a teenage girl, her mother and her grandmother all being baptized together. What struck me even more than the camaraderie and overwhelming sense of how much these students genuinely support one another were the words of one of our pastors as she lead us into the service. “Baptism isn’t magic. It’s a choice. It’s a shift in how we interact with the world. Baptism doesn’t make human experiences go away, it just means we don’t have to experience them alone.”
The last student to be baptized checked in over 20 minutes late. That student also might have had on clothes that some would not consider “church appropriate.” Nobody rolled their eyes at their tardiness, and nobody asked them to change their clothes. After they emerged from the water, just as for all the other students, the room erupted with cheers and friends were ready with high 5’s and fist bumps. There was no us vs. them in the Student Center at Leawood last night. It was a beautiful example of what authentic community looks like.
It is so hard to push out all the negative noise right now, and hard to really know just how to be in a time such as this. But through our baptism, and our choice to follow Jesus, we must lean into that shift in how we interact with the world. It can’t be the noise and negativity that guides us, but the example of Jesus where we focus our attention.
I am grateful to our students and their leaders for the ways they cultivate community and are building Christ-like connections. May it be an inspiration to us all to place our focus on Jesus and live into our true calling as followers of Christ.
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Scripture quotations are taken from The Common English Bible ©2011. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
References
* N. T. Wright, Luke for Everyone (New Testament for Everyone Book 4) (pp. 88-89). Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition.
