students of jesus

There are two ways to be thankful, and one of them is deadly.

On the surface all thankfulness sounds good, but the path we take toward thankful words makes all the difference. The deadly path is gratitude based upon the lack of others. We look around and discover our place on the scale of good luck and think, “I’m glad I’m better off than them.” This is thanksgiving relative to someone else’s situation in life. It is Relative Thankfulness.

Relative thankfulness sees the world as a zero-sum game. It’s grateful the score is tilted in its favor. Perhaps you’ve heard the sound: “There are so many people struggling, but thank goodness I’m not among them.” Relative thankfulness has a thousand expressions: “we have bounteous table in a world where so many are hungry; I got the promotion over the other five candidates; I may have only one pair of shoes, but there are people in the world with no feet.”

Tune your ear to its nuance: the sound of relative thankfulness is everywhere, even in the houses of the holy: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The
Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself: ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.” (Luke 18:10-11) After praying prayers of relative thankfulness we discover we’ve only been talking to ourselves. We also find ourselves ranking the other people at the temple.

But there is a path that leads to life, thanksgiving that enters the gates of God’s estate. Healthy thanksgiving is absolute. Without qualification. It has no need to look about. Absolute thanks focuses on the Giver and the gift. Absolute thanks understands that the gift says everything about the Giver—and next to nothing about the one who receives it, other than the receiver is the object of perfect love. Relative thankfulness looks around; absolute thanks looks up. Absolute thanks yearns for everyone to know such joy. Absolute thanks is the little boy who hits a home run, and wishes every other boy on the team will get the same chance to experience the thrill of taking the victory lap.

Here is the danger, the destination, of relative thankfulness: it is tempted confuse the goodness of God with the goodness of the recipient. Relative thankfulness has favorite verses in the Bible: “Tell the righteous that it shall be well with them, for they shall eat the fruit of their deeds.” Or, “No good thing will He withhold from those who walk uprightly.” And as true as these verses are, relative thankfulness thinks the kindness and mercy of God somehow validates its own lifestyle. From there it’s only a short step to wondering out loud why in heaven’s name God would show kindness to others or why the rain would fall on the unjust as well as the just. It is dangerously close to envying the good fortune of others. It is incapable of rejoicing with others, or mourning with those who weep.

When the scripture reminds us of gratitude that leads to life, let’s turn our gaze where it belongs, and discover again the pure joy of absolute thanks.

Nothing quite ruins a fancy dinner like an hysterical woman. Polite conversation continues while we all pretend not to notice. Then someone finally speaks up because her behavior is unacceptable. It happened one night when a man named Simon, a proper and meticulous Pharisee, invited Jesus to dinner.

Before we jump to the story, imagine the circumstances before the dinner party began. Simon, a man who respected the law of God, had made plans to be the host. He probably had a personal agenda as well: you don’t invite a celebrity to your house without thinking through the topics of conversation. You try to anticipate all the details in advance and put your best foot forward. Simon instructed his servants to pay attention to every detail.

But then someone slipped past Security and began to make a scene:

One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee’s house and took his place at the table. And a woman in the city, who was a sinner, having learned that he was eating in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment. She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment. (Luke 7:36-38)

Perhaps you know the story. Simon recognizes the woman as a sinner from the streets of the city. He thinks to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him—that she is a sinner.” But it doesn’t take a prophet to see someone’s sin and label them as such. The true prophet seated at the table saw something else: the beauty of a changed heart and the seed of loving gratitude taking deep root.

Simon saw a dinner party ruined. Jesus saw a life in repair. He saw the contrast between those who think they have it all under control and those who know for certain they do not. Jesus saw the difference between one person striving to avoid the label “Sinner,” and one who saw that same label as a path to freedom.

The irony of the whole affair is that we would never remember the dinner party if it had gone perfectly. What makes the story worth telling again and again is how everything went wrong in the best possible way. Like that other time when four strangers tore a hole in Peter’s roof, or that time when Jesus ruined a perfectly planned funeral by stepping into the procession and raising the widow’s son. It seems interruptions followed whenever Jesus went—or is it that he himself is the Great Interruption?

That night, at Simon’s place, the interruption was forgiveness. Forgiveness is always an interruption—it interrupts our carefully planned party, our comfortable patterns of thinking. It interrupts the way we have structured our world into good guys and bad guys, into us and them. Forgiveness is Jesus’s preferred scandal. Forgiveness is the uninvited guest who makes a mockery of the fine china of our lives. We can choose between keeping the china in a fancy cabinet, using it only when we pretend everything’s at its best, or smashing the plates and making a mosaic of the shards of our messed-up lives.

Forgiveness cares nothing for etiquette and everything for the gauche. The secret beauty of forgiveness is it’s only available to the sinner.

Jesus speaks forgiveness to the mess and the refuse of all that’s ugly in our lives. His words become the stuff of stories told centuries later, like the time that woman broke in and ruined a dinner party. We should be so lucky to have our plans ruined again today.