Editorial
The Quiet Revolution, pp. 32-33, by James D. Smart
If we would do justice to the terms "righteous" and "sinner"
in their New Testament usage, we must first know something of the religious
and social order in the first-century Jewish community .... Paul and Jesus
stand together in their antithesis to Pharisaism, not because all Pharisees
were hypocrites, but simply because the life in God which is man's only
true life has to be God's gracious gift to him in the midst of his unworthiness
and sinfulness, and the one insuperable barrier to its realization is man's
confidence that by his own religious devotion and moral earnestness he
has already established for himself adequate credit with God .... The greatest
hindrance to [Christ's] mission he found not in the sins of the sinners,
but in the already established righteousness of the righteous. They were
so zealous in their keeping of the law that they were no longer conscious
of their own sin or of their need for forgiveness .... The "righteous"
were those who, like Paul the Pharisee, held themselves to a strict observance
of the hundreds of laws and regulations which were to be found in Scripture
and tradition. The "sinners" were those who for any reason refused
to conform to that religious program. They were not necessarily bad people
.... Anyone who rebelled against the burdensomeness of a legalistic religion
and went his own way was branded a sinner .... It can be seen thus that
the word comprehended a wide spectrum of people and that it did not by
any means signify an immoral or irresponsible life. The one thing that
all "sinners" had in common was their exclusion from the synagogue
and from the Jewish religious community. The Pharisees drew a sharp dividing
line between the righteous and the sinners and, of course, assumed that
God belonged with the righteous on their side of the dividing line. Jesus
offended them deeply when he refused to recognize the validity of the line,
treated men on both sides of it as sinners in need of God's forgiveness
and increasingly spent his time in the company of what, if we would avoid
misunderstanding, we should call "outsiders" rather than "sinners."
(Excerpt from Look at the Man by Tim Woodroof.
Used by permission)