During His earthly ministry Jesus scandalized the proper by sitting down and eating with sinners. Two thousand years later, He is still doing it. That is why He is here with us today, and why He is seated at this Table. I mean, look around you. Look at your own heart, and your own history. And then consider that you have been invited here. One of the first things that should occur to you is that Jesus doesn’t seem to care about His reputation at all.
This meal is food for the hungry—food for the starving. It is not dessert for the well-fed. It is not a reward for the righteous. It is not a ribbon for your trophy case. This is God’s soup kitchen, and we are the derelicts and winos, fresh off the street.
But imagine a wino taking pride over some of his fellows because he is inside the soup kitchen while they are still outside. “Poor, benighted heathen,” he says to himself. Having imagined the picture, you have a good image of what many “proper” Christians have done—they have turned everything around, and have misunderstood the graciousness of grace.
We must never let the nobility of what we have become in Jesus obscure for us in the slightest a vision of what we were, and what we would still be apart from Him. The apostle Peter reminds us not to forget that we have been cleansed from our past sins.
When we forget our past sinfulness, this does not make us holy, it rather plunges us into the peculiar kind of sinfulness developed by the well-scrubbed and highly respectable Pharisee. “I thank thee, Lord, that I am not as other men. Soli Deo gloria!”
And the human heart is slippery and bears constant watching. We can even start to take pride in the fact that we understand that we can’t take pride in anything. “I thank thee, Lord, that I am not as this Arminian who boasts in his own understanding.” So come. But come in grace. Come with humility of mind and heart. Come with genuine gratitude.