NOTES for Luk 15:1

The Gospels often mention the attention with which tax collectors and sinners listen to Jesus. In this case, of course, the point is not that the same Pharisees, for example, considered themselves sinless. In those days the Synagogue knew enough about spiritual life for all its members to understand that there are no sinless people in the world. Only a very naive or extremely self-confident person could consider himself sinless.

In those days, as later, the path of righteousness was seen as the path on which a person overcomes his own sinfulness on the way to God and after God. And it was in this path, in whether a person was walking it or not, that the difference between a righteous person and a sinner consisted. The Pharisees considered themselves righteous in this sense: they were sure they had entered the path and were walking it more or less successfully. But tax collectors, for example, could not say this about themselves.

The point here was not that tax collectors were necessarily some terrible villains and dreadful sinners, but that they, at least as it was customary to think, committed a very serious and, what was especially terrible, absolutely voluntary and conscious sin: they entered the service of the pagans who oppressed the people of God. One can of course look at this situation in different ways, but the logic is clear: a person who sins voluntarily and consciously cannot, by definition, walk the path of righteousness. These are the people the evangelists usually call sinners, in keeping with the usage of their time.

Of course, not only tax collectors could be such people, but tax collectors proved to be sinners by definition, according to the nature of their occupation. At the same time it is important to keep in mind that it was impossible to be cleansed from the consequences of a sin committed voluntarily and consciously. Even cleansing sacrifices did not help here. A person could repent of a consciously committed sin, and God could forgive him, but the consequences of such a sin continued to weigh on the person, depriving him of the possibility of entering the path of righteousness.

But with the coming of Christ everything changed. Now the possibility of beginning spiritual life with a clean slate and entering the path of righteousness appeared even for those who had sinned consciously and then repented of what they had done. It is not surprising that tax collectors and sinners listened to Christ especially attentively: He alone could give them the possibility they were seeking and, as it seemed, could not find. But, of course, the Messiah opened the way into the Kingdom not only for them. They simply valued the opened possibilities especially highly, and therefore listened to the Savior as no one else did.