When Jesus died on a Roman cross, he had just a few dozen followers. He’d claimed he was the great King whom God had promised to send to the Jewish people. But instead of being crowned, he’d been killed. A reasonable observer might have thought this little Jewish sect would fizzle out—extinguished like a cigarette by Rome. But it didn’t. Jesus never ruled an empire, raised an army, or even wrote a book. Most of his followers were poor. They weren’t the power brokers of their day. And yet, the Christian movement spread like wildfire after Jesus’s death, and it’s been growing ever since.

A Diagnosis

If you pick up a Bible and start to read the New Testament, the first book you’ll read is Matthew’s Gospel. If you get as far as chapter 9, you’ll come to the part where Matthew shares how he met Jesus. Like Jesus, Matthew was Jewish. But unlike Jesus, Matthew was a tax collector, working for the Roman overlords to gather taxes from his fellow Jews. The tax collectors were hated by their fellow countrymen. They profited from the exploitation of their own people and typically extorted extra cash to line their own pockets, so they were shunned by other Jews. But strangely, Jesus called Matthew to be one of his core followers, and even more strangely, Matthew left his tax collector booth and followed Jesus.

When Jesus went to dinner at Matthew’s house, “many tax collectors and sinners” came to the dinner too (Matt. 9:10). A group of ardently religious Jews known as the Pharisees were horrified. They asked Jesus’s disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” (Matt. 9:11). It was a fair question. Jesus was supposed to have been sent by God. And here he was surrounded by the most notoriously sinful people of his day. In our terms, it would be like a famous pastor walking straight into the sketchiest casino in Las Vegas.

Jesus’s response to the Pharisees’ critique is striking: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick [need one]. Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt. 9:12–13). Jesus has a point. It’s when we’re struck with cancer that we need a doctor, not when we’re well. If Jesus is the spiritual doctor sent by God, he didn’t come for people who are good but for the morally diseased. The tax collectors were the spiritual lepers of their day: their sickness was on show for all to see. But Jesus’s comment about mercy leaves us with a nagging question, What about the Pharisees?

I wonder where you see yourself in Matthew’s story. I don’t know whether you believe there’s a God who made the universe or not. But if we imagine for a moment that there is, I wonder if you think that God would see you as a “righteous” or “good” person? Not perfect, certainly. But maybe (like the Pharisees) you see yourself as good enough to be on the right side of God.

Or maybe you identify more with the tax collectors. Perhaps you have a sneaking fear that if there’s a God who judges human lives, you might be in his bad books. That was how my best friend, Rachel, felt when she first became convinced that God exists. She was an undergrad at Yale University, and an atheist. But one day, as Rachel sat reading a book about Christianity in the library, she suddenly became convinced that God is real. It was a terrifying moment. She knew that she was sinful. She was greedy, selfish, mean, deceitful, irreligious, and sexually immoral—she’d even stolen the book on Christianity that she was reading! Rachel was a straight-up tax collector. But if you read through Matthew’s Gospel—or the other three biographies of Jesus’s life included in the Bible— you’ll find that Jesus’s diagnosis of our spiritual state is bad news not just for the tax collector types like Rachel but also for the most clean-living, seemingly religious citizens. Alarmingly, like a sophisticated imaging device that sees through all our outer layers, Jesus diagnoses spiritual cancer deep in all our hearts (Mark 7:20–23).

You may be thinking, Listen, I’m not perfect. But I’m not a spiritual cancer case! I get why murderers, rapists, and people like that might face God’s judgment. But I’m not like them. According to Jesus, however, you and I aren’t as unlike the murderers as we might think. “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder,’” Jesus declared. “But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment” (Matt. 5:21–22). We may not express our anger with the violent extreme of murder. But when you hear the stories of the kinds of people who do kill, you begin to entertain the uncomfortable thought that if you’d lived their life, you might have chosen murder too. The global bestseller The Secret History tells the story of a group of college students who conspire in cold blood to murder one of their best friends. The narrator (one of the same students) tells us he doesn’t think of himself as a bad person, and as we walk step-by-step with him toward the murder, we see how he got there and wonder if we would’ve trod that path as well.

Likewise, we may hear about harmful sexual behavior and think, I’m not like that. But Jesus says that if we take an honest look inside our hearts, we’ll find we’re not so different. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ ” Jesus told his first disciples. “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:27–28). If there’s a God who sees what happens in my heart—the selfishness, meanness, greed, shameful desires, petty jealousies, and lack of care for others’ suffering—it’s not surprising that he diagnoses me as spiritually sick.

Read More