Saturday, First Week in Ordinary Time

At one point in his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul quotes a standard piece of wisdom, ‘bad company ruins good morals’. There is nothing especially Christian about this insight. It is a wisdom saying that is common to various cultures and traditions. We have a version of it in our own culture, ‘Show me your friends and I will tell you who you are’. In every age and in every culture we find the conviction that the company we keep shapes us. However, the saying, ‘bad company ruins good morals’, certainly did not apply to Jesus. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus keeps what would have been regarded at the time as very bad company, something he did regularly. When he called Levi, a tax collector, to follow him, he immediately went on to share table in Levi’s house, in the company of Levi’s fellow tax collectors and others considered ‘sinners’ by the moral guardians of the day. As a result, the scribes ask Jesus’ disciples, ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ ‘Why does this supposedly man of God keep such bad company? Doesn’t he know that bad company ruins good morals?’ In reality, the opposite happened. Far from sinners dragging Jesus down, his goodness lifted them up, just as a doctor heals the sick rather than being infected by them. We are all sinners, in one way or another, and Jesus came to lift us all up. He came to enhance our lives with his goodness, to make us more loving with his love. He came to enable us to keep setting out afresh, in the strength of his Spirit, the Holy Spirit. In another of his letters Paul says, ‘where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more’. If we open ourselves up to the Lord’s gracious presence, we will be empowered to grow up more fully into his image and likeness.