Word to the Wise
Saturday, February 24, 2007 - Lenten Weekday
[Isaiah 58:9B-14 and Luke 5:27-32]The Pharisees and their scribes complained to his disciples, saying, "Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?" Jesus said to them in reply, "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."
One of the the best stories of Southern literature is REVELATION by Flannery O'Connor. In the story, Mrs. Ruby Turpin goes to a doctor's office where she mentally passes judgment on every other person sitting in the room - considering whether or not they approach her level of righteousness. Eventually she is suddenly attacked by a mentally disturbed girl in the room who growls at her: "Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog." The physical attack was shocking enough in the waiting room, but the words of the girl are an even greater shock to the righteous Ruby Turpin. Later on in the day, while she is down at her hog pen, hosing the pigs and still puzzling about the attack, she has a vision. I'd like to quote that part of the story. Please remember that O'Connor's characters speak and think like rural southerners of the 1950's and 60's. "There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a bribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away." (from FLANNERY O'CONNOR, THE COMPLETE STORIES, Farrar, Straus, Giroux) The "righteousness" of the Pharisees, scribes and perhaps most of us at some time or another, could be the very thing that could create a gulf between us and the Lord. He came to call sinners to repentance. Will we deny him a place at our table because he sat at "theirs?" Those whom we consider socially, racially, emotionally or any other -ly inferior will enter the kingdom before we do and the reason that we are even invited will not be the ones we think that justify us! AMEN
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