Preview: "Christ in the Sinner" on the Son Rise Morning Show

Before I realized that we'd continue our Son Rise Morning Show series on Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson's The Friendship of Christ into January, we looked at his chapter on "Christ in the Saint" on December 8; on Monday, January 19th, we'll discuss the next chapter, "Christ in the Sinner" in the section titled "Christ in the Exterior", at my usual time, a little after 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central. Listen live here or catch the podcast later here.

Benson prefaces this chapter with the verse, "This man receiveth sinners and eateth with them." -- Luke 15:2. He posits that this is a challenging idea for us--how can Jesus Christ, who "knew no sin"(2 Corinthians 5:21) be "in the sinner"?

But as he points out, Jesus ate and drank with sinners--as after the conversion of Matthew (portrayed above by James Tissot)--and spoke of sinners in surprising ways:

. . . it is clear that among His most marked characteristics, as recorded in the Gospels, were His Friendship for sinners, His extraordinary sympathy for them, and His apparent ease in their company. It was, in fact, for this very thing that fault was found with Him, who claimed, as He did, to teach a doctrine of perfection. And yet, if we think of it, this characteristic of His is one of His supreme credentials for His Divinity; since none but the Highest could condescend so low -- none but God would be so human. On the one side there is no patronage as from a superior height -- "This man receiveth sinners."{2} He is not content to preach to them: He "eateth with them" as if on their level. And, on the other, not a taint of the silly modern pose of unmorality: His final message is always, "Go, and now sin no more."{3}

So emphatic, indeed, is His Friendship for sinners that it seems, superficially, as if comparatively He cared but little for the saints. "I am not come to call the just," He says, "but sinners."{4} Three times over in a single discourse He drives this lesson home to souls that are naturally prejudiced the other way -- since the chief danger of religious souls lies in Pharisaism -- in three tremendous parables.{5} The piece of silver lost in the house is declared more precious than the nine pieces in the money-box: the single willful sheep lost in the wilderness more valuable than the ninety-nine in the fold: the rebellious son lost in the world more dear than the elder, and the heir, safe at home. [Tissot's painting of the Return of the Prodigal Son]

See, too, how He acted on what He said. It is not merely a vague benevolence that He practises towards sinners in the abstract; but a particular kindness towards sinners in the concrete.

Benson finds a lesson in these examples: "We cannot know Christ in His most characteristic aspect until we find Him among the Sinners." 

Now this recognition of Christ in the Sinner is the single essential to our capacity for helping the sinner. We must believe in his possibilities. And his only "possibility" is Christ. We have to recognize, that is to say, that beneath his apparent absence of faith there is still, at any rate, a spark of hope; beneath his hopelessness, at least a glimmer of charity. Mere pleading and rebuke are worse than useless. We have to do, on the level of our own capacities, something of what Christ did in His Omnipotent love -- identify ourselves with the sinner, penetrate through his lovelessness and his darkness down to the love and light of Christ Who has not yet wholly left him to himself. We have, in a word, to make the best of him and not the worst (as our Lord does for ourselves every time He forgives us our sins), to forgive his trespasses as we hope that God will forgive our own. To recognize Christ in the sinner is not only to Christ's service, but to the sinner's as well.

To fail to recognize Christ, therefore, in the sinner is to fail to recognize Christ when He is most fully and characteristically Himself. All the devotion in the world to the White Host in the monstrance; all the adoration in the world to the Stainless Child in the arms of His Stainless Mother -- all this fails utterly to attain to its true end, unless there accompanies it a passion for the souls of those who dishonour Him, since, beneath all the filth and the corruption of their sins, He who is in the Blessed Sacrament and the Crib dwells here also, and cries to us for help.

The laity must be prepared to hope for a sinner's conversion, to forgive a sinner if he or she offends us, and to "make the best of him and not the worst." We certainly don't want "to hug ourselves in our own religion, to leave sinners to themselves, to draw the curtains close, to make small cynical remarks, and to forget that a failure to recognize the claim of the heathen and the publican is a failure to recognize the Lord whom we profess to serve, under the disguise in which He most urgently desires our friendship". 

In his day, Benson suggested the laity should "support, let us say, Rescue Societies, or guilds for the conversion of the heathen," but now I think we have wider opportunities: pro-life pregnancy crisis centers, programs for prison ministry, etc.

And Benson offers a final poignant admonition:

Lastly, it is necessary to remember that if we are to have pity on Christ in the Sinner, we must therefore have pity on Christ in ourself. . . .

Since Robert Bridges did not publish the poetry of Father Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ, until 1918, when Benson wrote The Friendship of Christ (published in 1912) he wouldn't have known of Hopkins' poem, "My Own Heart Let Me Have Pity On":

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.