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THE SINLESS FRIEND
OF SINNERS #3
TO HATE KILLING, BUT LOVE THE KILLER
I suppose it's like the Kennedy assassination; we can
all remember where we were three years, three months ago yesterday when
the news began to flash around the world from Littleton, Colorado. Two
young high-schoolers, in their Trench Coat Mafia outfits, and their unbelievable
arsenal of weapons, had gunned down 12 fellow students and a teacher at
Columbine High School. Eric David Harris and Dylan Bennet Klebold join
other names like Andrew Golden, Mitchell Johnson, Luke Woodham, and Michael
Carneal, in the Young Killers' Hall of Shame.
So today let me ask you this straightforward question — and I ask it of
myself as well. How did we feel about the crime these young men committed,
and how did we feel about the young men themselves?
All around the world, people everywhere spoke with one voice to condemn
what happened at Columbine High School. Nobody anywhere said: "Oh,
I think it was okay." Or: "There's nothing wrong with doing
that." And even a person professing no religion would probably not
hesitate to attach the theological word "sin" to the deliberate
carnage of April 20, 1999.
Notice that it is much easier to call something "sin" if it's
far removed from your own experience. Have you participated, ever, in
a high school mass killing? Of course you haven't. So that is a clear
sin, and simpler to identify as such. In fact, we partly rise up in horror
because we can't even relate to this particular crime. It's foreign to
us, repugnant, evil, sick. We turn away with tears in our eyes. Am I right?
In a fascinating biography dating back to 1964, entitled My Shadow Ran
Fast, Bill Sands describes his own tumultuous early life as a youth in
and out of prison. He found himself in San Quentin Penitentiary, and found
out that there was a hierarchy of "sin" even there. A caste
system, so to speak. Ironically, murderers, in jail for life, got the
best jobs, not because anybody admired murder, but because it was just
more economical to use an inmate with a life sentence for the long-term
jobs. Next was robbers, who were higher than embezzlers — because robbers
at least faced their victims and stole, rather than sneaking money out
the back door at night. Below them, con men, and then purse snatchers,
who were low on the totem pole because they stole from helpless women.
Lowest of all on the scale: rapists. Even a hardened murderer despised
a "rapo," considered him to be scum. And even below that, a
child molester: "the lowest creatures that breathed." So I say
again: even sinners look down on those "other" sins that WE
don't commit.
With that in mind, then, it's a very easy step from hating that sin, to
feeling such pure anger, such holy hatred against these two young men:
Dylan and Eric. They're dead now, of course; they were the last two to
perish in the wreckage of that Tuesday afternoon. But it was easy to hate
them after you read stories of how they calmly butchered their classmates.
"Do you believe in God?" they sneered at Cassie Bernall. Terrified,
but brave, she quietly told them that she did. She'd given her life to
Jesus Christ two years earlier. Without another word, they shot and killed
her. Even three years, three months later, my blood boils over again as
I think about it.
So friend, here's a clear and unavoidable spiritual reality. There are
some sins we don't hate very much — because we can relate to them or because
we even do them. But there are other sins that are despicable to us .
. . and generally speaking, the people who do them are despicable to us
too. So the old expression: "Hate the sin, but love the sinner"
only works in our lives about half the time. The half where we don't hate
the sin very much — or where we're the person committing it. Then we love
the sinner just fine.
This is why, when we think about this incredible Person named Jesus, we
almost set down our Bibles in amazement. Because here was a person who
didn't just hate a few sins; He hated all of them. Every sin was foreign
to Him; every conceivable type of transgression was something He never
tried or experimented with or had any sympathy toward.
We've spent these past two days rejoicing over the fact that Jesus loves
people just like you and me. He's naturally drawn to members of the human
race, despite our sins. But at the same time, every single type of sin
you and I are involved in — from mass murder right down to petty theft,
to big lies and small ones, to pride, to jealousy, to lustful thinking
— is absolutely hateful to Jesus.
One of the pioneer minds that led out in the beginnings of my own Adventist
denomination did years and years of thoughtful study into the life and
character of Jesus. Here's what she writes — E. G. White:
"He [Jesus] hated but one thing in this
world, and that was sin. He could not witness a wrong act without pain
which it was impossible to disguise."
In another place, the same writer gives us this vivid
picture:
"As the sinless One, His nature recoiled from evil."
And a third description:
"While He was free from the taint of sin, the refined sensibilities
of His holy nature rendered contact with evil unspeakably painful to Him."
It's hard to imagine that some of the little, petty
things we indulge in — and shrug off, or even joke about at the office
— were agony for Jesus to even see. He didn't ever once taste these things
Himself, but it hurt Him terribly to be around it. Every sin happening
around Him was just like Littleton, Colorado, time and time and time again.
Endless CNN reruns of those 13 faces, the black-and-white yearbook photos,
the guns, the corpses lying on the sidewalk.
And yet there was a strong, noble-ness to the way Jesus hated sin. It
was never because He was proud — "I don't do that!" Or because
He looked down on people who struggled with a temptation. He wasn't a
prissy-proper, pain-in-the-neck, pasty-white saint who blushed and clucked
His tongue at a salty joke — and surely He heard many of them during His
three-and-a-half years of public ministry. The "F-words" of
His day — He heard them all, many times. And the pain showed on His face,
yes; but somehow in the heart, and on the face of Jesus, it was clear
that sin pained Him precisely because He loved the people so much. He
saw them, always, as victims of Lucifer, of precious jewels who were falling
so short of the good ideal, the perfect blueprint He as their Creator
had always had.
How would Jesus have felt about these two boys who died in the spray of
April 20 bullets? Certainly all heaven was in anguish that Tuesday over
what Dylan and Eric did to their friends at Columbine. That monstrous
crime must have devastated the tender heart of Jesus. And yet He loved
those boys desperately; He would have wanted to spend time with them,
fellowshiping with them, helping them to find wholeness and purpose in
life and pure excitement, heavenly thrills, from godly sources.
We wonder, I guess, in amazement how Jesus could hate sin more than any
of us do, and yet bear to be constantly around sinners. In his latest
book, Philip Yancey writes how Jesus sought human contact, friendships,
fellowship. Every single person He spent time with was a sinner.
"Jesus never tried to hide His loneliness
and His dependence on other people," he writes. "He chose His
disciples not as servants but as friends. He shared moments of joy and
grief with them, and asked for them in times of need. They became His
family, His substitute mother and brother and sisters. . . . He loved
them, plain and simple."
And I guess that last line reveals how His intense
love for sinners made it possible for Him to be around people whose sins
caused Him a despairing grief. Somehow, love won out every time. He hated
hypocrisy, but He ate with hypocrites. Lying was, and is, an enormous
abomination to Jesus, but He went on long walks with people who couldn't
tell the truth if they choked on it. Pride was a detestable thing to Christ,
a deadly infection. And yet He deliberately sought out the company — the
permanent company — of 12 of the most pride-filled, greedy, grasping,
ladder-climbing, pushing, shoving guys in all Galilee. Because He loved
them so much.
"The Man from Nazareth," Yancey writes in awe, "was a sinless
Friend of sinners, a pattern that should convict us on both counts."
You and I are sinners; we dabble in it all the time; and yet we shun other
people who commit those "other" sins. Jesus, "that Holy
Thing," who never once sinned, and who hated sin as you and I never
could or will, embraced and loved — with natural, heavenly affection —
all sinners.
I mentioned Bill Sands, there in San Quentin. He got
in trouble once, thrown into "the hole." Nobody cared about
him. Nobody gave a rip. He had two life sentences to work off, consecutive
life sentences. And suddenly he had a visitor: Warden Duffy. A quiet,
much-respected man who ran "the joint." Duffy was not a criminal;
he didn't have a record; he hadn't ever kidnaped or killed or even stolen
a paper clip. And he spent his life among men who did all those things.
Bill Sands began to complain, angrily, how his life was a mess. Nobody
cared. Why should he try? And Warden Duffy literally turned this young
con's life around with three quiet words. Interestingly, Bill Sands writes:
"The thief on the other cross, the one who
repented, must have seen a Face like that when he cried out in his agony.
When [Duffy] spoke, I knew at last that my long descent had ended. "Bill
. . . I care."
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