In our gospel lesson, we find the pious Jews grumbling because Jesus was not only associating with sinners, but he had table fellowship with them, of all things. How that went against the grain of all their self-righteous certainties! Try to imagine, if you will, how different the gospel could have been had they been full of joy and delight that the sinners they so disparaged were being reconciled to God right before their very eyes.

Seldom, if ever, is anything perfect in this life, so there’s always something we could grumble about. Because it is so pervasive, we may not often consider our own grumbling sinful, but just think about how it separates us from one another and from God who desires us to love one another. Even when, and maybe especially when, we rely on that old Southern standby, “Bless her heart,” it is clear our grumbling comes from a judgmental heart. Rarely, of course, do we address our grumbling to the one who is the source of our irritation, rather we grumble to others about what we perceive as wrong, out of tune, off base in some way, which results in stirring up the grumbling pot as it passes on. Furthermore, we seem to act as if our grumbling frees us from needing to do something positive to change things for the better. I wonder what we think grumbling does for us. Has it ever occurred to us, for example, that we were behaving like the Pharisees and scribes around Jesus or the elder brother in Jesus’ parable when we grumble about things not going our way?

Grumbling, fault-finding, dwelling on the negative is not the way of Christ Jesus. If we want to be reconciled to God during this Lenten season, we’d do well to let our grumbling go, as innocuous as it may have seemed, and return to the Holy One with an open and contrite heart.