A strange attraction

The 15th chapter of the Gospel of Luke might be thought of as the Bible's lost and found department. In that chapter Jesus tells three parables: a shepherd who searches for one lost sheep, a woman who searches for one lost coin, and a father with two sons, one of whom has gone into a "far country" and the other who is just as 'lost' staying home. The first verse of the chapter, though, is easily overlooked, but it bears thinking about. It says, “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear [Jesus.]” I don’t know about you, but that strikes me as a bit unusual. It’s true that repeatedly in the Gospels we are told how Jesus made himself available to those that many in polite society would have rejected. We know that he reached out to them in many ways, because as he put it, he came to ‘seek and to save the lost.’ We have the sense that Christ went looking for people who needed Good News in their lives, just as the shepherd looked for the lost sheep, or like the woman looked for her coin. But what I find intriguing in this text is that it approaches the matter from the other direction. It sounds to me as if the writer wants us to understand that the less religious, the less righteous, the less moral folks of the land took some initiative to hear what Jesus had to say. They were drawing near to hear him.
I call this a strange attraction. Ordinarily we wouldn’t expect such people to have any interest whatsoever in what a spiritual leader might have to say. They appear to be on a different wavelength altogether. Today we probably wouldn’t be apt to use the term ‘sinners’ to describe these people. It sounds uncomfortably pejorative and judgmental to our modern sensibilities. Yet we sort of know what the text is talking about here. These are the people who tend to live their lives without much regard at all to matters of religion. They are looking to get ahead, whatever it takes, hoping for any advantage. They don’t get too disturbed over the concerns of other people. If they have to bend the rules – morally or legally – so be it. Folks with these attitudes come in all social classes and backgrounds. They are among the intellectually elite and the economically disadvantaged, the high born and the low. Most of them aren’t bad folks -- though there are certainly some. In the main, though, they just aren’t motivated by the same values that you would typically associate with the followers of Jesus.
But here they are, drawing near to Jesus! Don’t you find that fascinating? What do you think there was about Jesus that would have attracted these otherwise pretty self-absorbed, indifferent, jaded folks? Do you suppose he was a strikingly handsome fellow? Messianic predictions of the prophets say: No, there would be nothing about the messiah that would turn people’s heads. Was it the fact that he had amazing powers to cure diseases and subdue nature? That surely must have been part of it. With his reputation preceding him into the villages, maybe his arrival was little like that of a first century rock star. While we wouldn’t be surprised if folks were a little curious about this unusual person, to be fair, this text says they were drawing near to hear him, not witness him doing something spectacular. They were interested in his teaching, certainly, but I think even more than were plainly interested in him. There was something about Jesus that attracted people who lived on the wrong side of the religious and moral tracks.
This is a compelling thought because I have noticed that we church folks, who are trying to be – and who the public generally regards as – followers of Jesus, don’t seem to be having that kind of affect on the people around us. In recent decades in this country there has been a marked falling off of participation in many churches. Sunday worship attendance, according to national researchers, slipped from about 50% in the early ‘70s to 41% at the end of the last century. A recent survery showed that on a typical week-end, only 17% of the US population would be found in a Christian worship service. Not only are we have a hard time attracting the indifferent and secular person, as Jesus was able to do, but we are also having trouble keeping folks involved who already have claimed an allegiance with us.
This raises the question that if, as we believe, the church is the Body of Christ in the world, why aren’t the unreligious people interested in what we have to share? They drew near to Jesus. There was something about him that attracted them. Maybe if we could re-discover what that was we’d have the opportunity to live that out in our own fellowship.