What makes a sinner?
One of the key stops on the Romans Road to salvation is Romans 3:23. Stop me if you’ve heard it from an evangelical friend of yours—“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Or, perhaps you haven’t walked that path before; maybe you’ve spent your whole life in mainline Protestantism. If that’s the case, then you are likely familiar with the idea of corporate confession.
In the Episcopal Church, on most Sunday mornings, it sounds something like, “Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone…” Thanks in large part of the Protestant Reformation, modern American Christianity seems fairly comfortable with the idea that we are all fallen, sinful people.
This is a very healthy way of understanding our place in God’s plan of salvation, but it can prove very unhelpful when the calendar rolls over to Proper 19 in Year C and the word sinner takes a prominent role in both New Testament lessons. It wasn’t until I started reading my usual commentaries on this week’s lesson in preparation for preaching that I realized that when Paul talks about Jesus coming to save sinners and the Pharisees grumble about his welcoming and, worse yet, eating with sinners, they don’t mean sinners in the universal sense. Instead, there is a very particular meaning for that word. This was something of a theme in the commentaries I read, but I’ll choose Greg Carey of Lancaster Theological Seminary’s explanation:
