What Does Your Proof Text Prove? (34)

A Minneapolis pastor named Jonathan Parnell is offering tips on being a friend of sinners. He believes it’s a good thing to be. John MacArthur riffed on the “friend of sinners” idea in a 1980 sermon. He liked it too. A church in Milwaukee identifies with the concept so much that it has taken the name. “Friend of Sinners Church” offers a free breakfast followed by a worship service each Sunday.

So was Jesus a friend of sinners? Should we be? Well, yes and no.

Words of Accusation

The phrase “friend of sinners” doesn’t come from the Prophets, Psalms or even the mouths of the Lord’s disciples. You don’t find it anywhere in the epistles. Still less is it a name the Lord Jesus took for himself. It comes from the gospels, specifically Matthew and Luke, and if you look it up, you’ll find it was an accusation leveled against the Lord Jesus by his critics. In the same breath, they called him a glutton and a drunkard. Neither accusation was true.

The Greek word philos is frequently translated “friend” or “associate”, but it’s actually a little stronger than that. It’s one of at least four Greek words translated “love”. As a prefix, philo always means precisely that. In English, the suffix “-phile” does the same thing. An audiophile loves high quality sound. A bibliophile loves books. An anglophile prefers his own kind. The word implies a strong affection for or attraction to something or someone. Passions of this sort can be intense.

Was that how it was with our Lord?

While We Were Still Sinners

In one sense, most definitely. It’s the teaching of the apostles. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Paul writes that he “came into the world to save sinners”. That was his purpose in giving his life. To the extent that a true friend loves in even the worst of situations, Christ was a friend to sinners. He cared when nobody else did, and he did what nobody else could.

Still, we ought to be careful to remember it was Christ’s enemies who named him “friend of sinners”. It was not a compliment. That should be a hint to us that the expression needs some qualification before we get all warm and fuzzy about it.

Qualifying the Expression

Let us not for a moment imagine the Lord Jesus was in any way attracted to the sinfulness of sinners or that in eating and drinking with them he was in any way endorsing their lifestyle choices. He was the spotless Lamb of God. The very idea is ridiculous. Rather, he “endured from sinners such hostility against himself”. More than a few of those sinners are sizzling in Hades today, I suspect, awaiting their final judgment. If we can say that the Lord showed friendship to such at all, it was an exercise in futility. They never reciprocated his expression of love and never will. Rest assured, the Lord knew exactly which “sinners” in his company would respond and which would not.

Speaking of qualifications, expressing his love for sinners came with a built-in time limit. His “friendship” was not, as some would have it, extended endlessly to reprobates and wretches who scoffed at it and spurned it. As he told his disciples when sending them out with the good news, “If anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town”; in other words, have no association with these sinners at all, let alone friendship. For these sinners, he said, “It will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Not friends at all. Rather, it will be, “I never knew you.”

Not the Righteous

In fact, the Lord himself put limitations on his friendship with sinners. Confronted with the accusation that he was a friend of sinners, the Lord responded, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” In saying this, he was not at all implying he lacked affection for genuinely righteous men and women. Rather, he was indicating that he had no mandate to call the self-righteous to repentance because they would not hear, believing themselves safe.

Were these equally sinners too? Of course they were. In fact, we know that on occasion the Lord ate and drank with Pharisees as well as publicans, and it was not the publicans who were in the gravest spiritual danger. However, for Jesus to spend all his time courting the proud, self-reliant Pharisees would have been a wasted investment. He ate and drank where large numbers of men and women recognized they were sinners and longed to be free of their sin.

I Have Called You Friends

So then, I would prefer to say that rather than being a friend of sinners, the Lord Jesus was a friend to those sinners who knew they were sinners and looked to him for salvation. He was no friend to sinners who loved their sin and planned on wallowing in it for the rest of their lives.

When the Lord Jesus himself used philos to describe his relationships on earth, it applied to a much more limited group: Lazarus, the eleven disciples who remained at the Passover feast after he sent Judas out, and anyone else who obeys his commandments.

That much we can say with certainty, because he did.