Once upon a time there was a tailor, whose name was Baruch. He had a keen eye and great skill with a needle. The clothes he made were so fine. But he didn’t have many customers: he figured he needed better publicity. So he went to the Jacobson Advertising Agency, and they told him, “You should get some celebrity endorsements.”

The following week, as it turns out, Baruch heard that a famous preacher named Jesus was going to be speaking in town. Baruch had heard quite a bit about this Jesus fellow, and so he decided he’d go listen and find out for himself what all the excitement was about.

After the service was over, Baruch came up to Jesus and said, “I’d like to make you an offer. Come on by my shop tomorrow, and I’ll fit you up with a really nice suit of clothes. My gift to you. The only thing I ask is this: whenever anybody comments on how nice the suit looks, you tell them, ‘I got it from Baruch the tailor.’ Other than that, no cost: I’m happy to support your ministry.”

So Jesus got himself some new clothes, and wore them around as he preached. Lots of people admired his suit, and he told them where he got it: and soon business was much better for Baruch the tailor.

In fact business was so good that Baruch opened a chain of stores all across Galilee, in Samaria, even around Jerusalem and some of the suburbs in Judea. His consultants at the Jacobson Advertising Agency told him, “This can work well for you. But you’ve got to keep on building name recognition. And timing is important: you want to hit a big advertising blitz in November, so you can ride the wave of Christmas shopping.”

So the next time Jesus came to town, Baruch went to see him and said, “Listen, I want to support your ministry more. I want to give you a new suit every season, plus matching jackets for your staff people. And I want to put your name on the chain. We’ll call it Baruch and Jesus.”

Jesus thought about that for a minute, and then smiled and said, “Don’t you think it might go better if we call it Lord and Tailor?”

Once upon another time it was Jesus who went to the Jacobson Advertising Agency. One of the vice-presidents came over, shook his hand, and ushered him into his office, as he said, “I’m Simon Jacobson: what can I do for you?”

Jesus said, “Well, I’m running this mission to save the world. But you know how it is: the people I’m trying to invite get distracted so easily, what with the hectic pace of life these days. It’s like a seed gets planted in people’s hearts, and it starts to grow and they’re really enthusiastic for a while; then it’s like the weeds start to choke out the growth of the good seed, people get caught up in other activities, and they end up not following through on their own good intentions.”

Simon thought about that. “Well, let me see. I expect your message has some complexity to it. It probably says, in this kind of situation you do this, but in these other circumstances you do that. I bet it takes a while to learn all the details. So you need two things, a symbol and a slogan. The symbol needs to be some easy-to-recognize logo that stands for your mission, and anytime anybody sees it, they’ll immediately think of you and your message. And the slogan needs to be a few words long, tying your symbol to your message in a brief, memorable way. So, let’s brainstorm what we could use for those two things.”

Jesus said, “Wait, Simon, I’ve got it. I know what they should be. The symbol should be the cross. And then the slogan could be, Take up your cross and follow me.”

Simon the advertising VP laughed. “No, no, that won’t do at all. I mean, that would be like picking an electric chair or a gallows for your symbol. You don’t want to choose something that represents suffering and death. What you want is a happy symbol, something that can be used everywhere, in art and jewelry and architecture.”

Simon leaned forward in his chair to make his point. “Think about it, Jesus. When they build a great cathedral and put something on top of the spire, when a renaissance master paints a picture of the meaning of life, or even when a girl wears a necklace with her prom dress: well obviously none of them would decide to use a cross, would they? No, you need something more cheerful as your symbol. How about a champagne glass? Everybody likes champagne. And then you’d pick a slogan like The Joy of Life, or something along those lines.”

Jesus was about to answer when they were interrupted by a loud burst of laughter and the sound of tables being scraped across the floor, coming from the big outer office. Simon looked at his watch. “Oh. Listen, Jesus. It’s the Friday before Christmas, and our agency always holds our corporate Christmas party, starting about now, at 4:00 pm. I don’t want to kick you out – I mean, you’re welcome to stay for the party, if you like – but I expect you’d rather come back later. Let me have my secretary make you an appointment for the week after New Year’s, and we’ll be able to discuss all this further.”

Jesus said, “Thanks, Simon. I love parties. I think I’ll stay.” Simon looked surprised for a moment; then he managed to smile and say, “Hey. That’d be great.” Jesus stood up, made the “after you” gesture with his hand, and they headed out to the office Christmas party.

It turns out that the idea that Jesus would attend an office Christmas party sometimes catches people off guard. And yet he did that kind of thing rather often. You remember old Zacchaeus? Little guy, used to collect taxes down in Jericho? Crooked as a snake, everybody said. Remember that time he climbed up a sycamore tree, because he was too short to see the parade? So when Jesus got there, he looked up and, bold as you please, invited himself over to Zack’s house for a big dinner party: and all the locals were clucking their tongues and saying, “There he goes again, feasting in the home of a sinner.” Then there was that time up in Galilee when that other tax man, Levi, threw a big bash so all his tax collector buddies would have a chance to meet Jesus, and the Pharisees came by and complained, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners!?” And who could forget the way his opponents used to make fun of him: “He’s a glutton and a drunk – and he’s the friend of tax collectors and sinners!”

Behind all that tongue clucking was an attitude that said, “Look, Jesus, there are people you just shouldn’t bother with. They are losers and they’ll always be losers, they are sinners and they’ll always be sinners. It’s a waste of time and resources trying to do something for them. So okay, a person could drop off a food basket, maybe, or some used clothing; there’s a certain virtue in an act of kindness like that. But then you ought to leave. A respectable person isn’t going to hang out with a crowd like that. It’s like you don’t get that, Jesus, when you go ahead and eat with those people, when you go ahead and become friends with them. You like them. You shouldn’t do that.”

But Jesus went on liking sinners. He kept on being a friend to sinners. He kept on going to parties with sinners. And some people never understood that.

So there was Jesus, at the office Christmas party. There was a lot to eat and a lot to drink. It was pretty relaxed: the jackets and ties were gone, a lot of people had kicked off their shoes – in fact Jesus looked pretty comfortable, sitting sideways on the sofa, with his bare feet up on a cushion. Down at the other end of the room there were several couples dancing, looking a little awkward about it. There was a fair amount of flirting going on, some of it perhaps only in fun, some of it the beginnings of speculative exploration. There were occasional loud bursts of laughter, though some of it had a brittle edge to it. The corporate office Christmas party could serve as a symbol of our time: it presents us with a group of people who work together day after day, who often know little about the rest of each other’s lives: all of them trying to be happy, even while they realize that the laughter is often forced and the happiness is contrived.

Simon looked across the room and spotted someone who didn’t belong there, a secretary named Maggie who wasn’t one of the secretaries any longer. Maggie had worked for the agency for a couple of years, and had the easy-going standards of modern society: various staff members had found her willing enough to go to bed on an informal basis. Then she had decided that she wanted more than the occasional roll in the hay, and began pressuring one of the other vice-presidents for a commitment. She’d been let go the following week. Her job had been eliminated. As Personnel had explain to her, these are tough economic times we live in, and unfortunately it was necessary to reduce support staff, everyone was very sorry and all, and surely a good secretary shouldn’t have much trouble finding another job. But everyone knew the real reason: she’d been fired because she was an immoral little gold-digger.

Simon had reached for the phone to call Security, but he hesitated for a moment, because he saw that Maggie was looking at Jesus. Staring at him. Just standing there, from behind his right shoulder, for almost a minute. Jesus must have felt the force of her gaze, because he twisted around on the sofa and looked at her. There was something – Simon couldn’t tell what it was, but there was something that happened in that moment. Maggie came around the end of the sofa, fell down on her knees, and began to weep, and there she was crying all over Jesus’ feet. Bizarre!

Simon thought to himself, “Which is funnier, that Maggie’s coming on to Jesus this way, or that Jesus doesn’t even know what kind of a strumpet he’s got fawning all over him that way? You kind of expect religious leaders to know better than that.”

Then Jesus spoke up. “Simon, I have something to say to you.” Sometimes when Jesus speaks, he speaks with that still small voice, like Elijah encountered at Mount Sinai. But other times when Jesus speaks, he speaks with a voice that is not blaring loud amidst all the noise, and yet you hear it: you hear it through all the static, you hear it in the midst of all the distractions. Maybe you tell yourself, “Nah, I didn’t hear that.” Maybe you tell yourself, “That’s just a random thought that I thought in my own head.” Even then, you know you’ve heard something, and you’re not going to have an easy time explaining it away. Jesus didn’t shout, or even raise his voice. But in the moment he said it, the stereo came to the end of the CD, and shut itself off. And somehow there was a break at that same moment in all the conversations: and so the voice of Jesus seemed to fill the room, without being very loud at all. “Simon, I have something to say to you.”

Simon looked around the room. Everyone was looking at him. He shrugged. “Sure, Jesus, what is it?”

“Once upon a time there was a banker who had lent money to a couple of old friends, and both loans had gone into default. One of them owed two months’ pay. One of them owed twenty years’ pay. Since neither of them could make good on the loan, the banker forgave them both. Now here’s the question, Simon. Which of these two characters will be more grateful?”

Simon looked around the room again. He was baffled. He wasn’t baffled by the question, which didn’t seem that hard. What he was baffled about was: How did he end up playing parable question-and-answer in front of the entire ad agency at the corporate Christmas party, anyway? Nobody does that sort of thing.

At a Christmas party you can get away with so many things. As your way of showing honor to the Savior of the world, you can get blind drunk: and most people will decide to turn a blind eye to that. Or maybe instead, as your way of showing honor to the Savior of the world, after the party is over you might run out to Nieman Marcus – or Lord and Taylor – and then run up a credit card debt of more than two months’ pay (which I think they will not forgive); if you do that, nobody will need to turn a blind eye to that: everyone will think you are normal.

It’s a troubling world we live in, isn’t it? Our society has come to have its own opinions about Christmas: things once disparaged as wrong are now accepted as ordinary parts of Christmas, and things once admired as devout are often not so welcome as a part of Christmas. It appears that having a religious conversation at an office Christmas party will fall into that not-so-welcome category.

Perhaps if someone had pushed the ‘start’ button on the CD player again, or if the chatters had taken up their conversations again, then Simon could have ignored the question. But everyone seemed to be waiting for his answer. So he spread his hands, and said, “Well, Jesus, I suppose the one who was forgiven the greater debt would feel more grateful.”

Robert Robinson’s old hymn “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” is set as a prayer to God, and the third stanza goes like this:

Oh, to grace how great a debtor
daily I’m constrained to be.
Let that grace now like a fetter
bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it:
prone to leave the God I love.
Here’s my heart! Oh, take and seal it!
Seal it for thy courts above.

It is a prayer that says, “I have been overwhelmed with an immense debt to you, O God, and you have forgiven me. Again and again I wander away from the God I love. And every single day, your grace draws me back and forgives me again. So in the gratitude of one who has been forgiven much, here is my prayer: here is my heart, which I present to you, for you to own, O Lord my God: inscribe your mark of ownership on it, press your royal seal of sovereignty into it, so that all my words and actions may demonstrate that I belong to you.” That’s what that third stanza means.

Jesus said, “Good job, Simon. That’s the right answer.” And he smiled. Simon looked at Jesus, who kept on smiling at him, and Simon felt – awkward. Of course it was the right answer. That much had to be obvious to everyone in the room. What wasn’t obvious was why Jesus was asking the question in the first place.

Then Jesus said, “You see this woman? Maggie? Her many sins have been forgiven, and so she’s very grateful. Anybody can see that. But other people don’t seem so grateful. Have you ever noticed that, Simon?”

Simon gave a half shrug, hoping to indicate that it was a matter of indifference to him. “Sure, Jesus,” he said. “Everybody knows people aren’t all the same.”

“Exactly,” said Jesus, as if he were speaking to a star pupil. “And why aren’t they all the same, when it comes to gratitude? It’s because some of them haven’t been forgiven for very much. Maybe it’s because they don’t have many sins. Or it could be that they have as many sins as anybody else, but they’ve never admitted that, even to themselves, and so they’ve never hoped for forgiveness.”

Then Jesus turned to Maggie and said, “Know this, my child: your sins are forgiven. Go in peace.” Wow. The range of emotions that played across her face, when Jesus said that to her: several intense sobs and a flood of tears, transforming into joy and acceptance, and then calm resolve. Maggie got up from her knees, nodded to Jesus, and whispered the words “Thank you!” And no one said a word as she walked across the room and out the door.

People had wanted to mock her, as she was leaving, but somehow they were held in silence. As soon as she was gone, though, once again the party burst into chatter. They had wanted to say something snide to one another about Maggie, but now they turned their disapproval toward Jesus. People were saying, “Is it all that easy then? Jesus says, ‘Your sins are forgiven’ and poof, they’re all gone in an instant?” Others were saying, “Really!? Who does he think he is? Only God Almighty can offer a blanket forgiveness like that.” And still others were saying, “It’s obvious that Jesus can’t have known what we all know about Maggie’s loose morals, or he would never have said that to her.”

And Simon thought to himself, “This is the strangest Christmas party I have ever seen. And Jesus is the strangest person I have ever encountered.”

Here are four questions for you to ponder on, in this coming week:

1. Some people have known the astonishing depth of forgiveness, when Jesus has given them his life-changing love in overflowing abundance. What is that like?

2. Some people have never quite connected with that experience, and the whole idea of forgiveness and newness of life seems out of reach to them. What is that like?

3. Which of those two feels like your life?

4. And, which of those two do you want the story of your life to be?