Sucker? Mooch?
From “Invitation to Abide” by Shunta Grant.
I heard this episode of “This American Life” years ago when it was first broadcast (this episode is a rerun of it), and never forgot it. I often thought of the boy speaking with a British accent and the guy who said he was a vegetarian to impress his Ivy League friends, when in actuality he and his dad would buy 40 Arby’s roast beef sandwiches at a time for snacks—that’s how not vegetarian he was. It always made me laugh again just thinking about it.
You can listen to the podcast with the file above, or you can go directly to the podcast wherever you listen. It’s episode #660. Here’s a link to it in Apple Podcasts.
I had forgotten the following two “acts” in the episode, although once I heard them again I remembered. (The third act is a story about childhood that included abuse. It’s really good and even funny, but just to let you know.) The second act, following the one about the British-accent-guy and the “vegetarian,” is about people who scam people to get their money. They often prey on the elderly, which just burns me. My dad was scammed a couple times. Sometimes, when I talk about what happened to him, I’ll quote the saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” In this podcast Ira (the host) explains that the people who become a known target because they fall for scams time after time are called “mooches” by the scammers.
Yuck, such ugly words, “sucker” and “mooch.” I don’t want to call my dad a sucker. Or a mooch. I often say Dad was the most Christ-like person I know. He fell for scams because he trusted people. He assumed they were what they pretended to be—good people who wanted to help him. It made me think, was Jesus a sucker? Or a mooch? It’s different, isn’t it? I can’t really think of stories in the Bible where people fooled Jesus into thinking they were someone they weren’t.
Dad was Christ-like in a different way. He wasn’t naive. He knew there were people who did bad things. He experienced wars and depression and many evidences of sin in the world. I started wondering why did I feel Dad was Christ-like? One of the reasons is his love for others. He didn’t want to make anyone feel bad. He was sympathetic when people told him their troubles. You could hear how his heart was saddened when he choked up about things that happened to those he loved. When a car repair didn’t work and I told him to bring the car back, he was reluctant to do so because it would make the people who had repaired it feel bad.
Once, someone asked me how I knew my dad loved me when he didn’t say the words “I love you,” while we were growing up. I told him a story I remembered from my childhood: I was sick on my birthday when I was in grade school. My birthday is on Halloween, so not only was I going to have birthday cake and all that, but we were also going to have a parade at school with all of us in our costumes. I had been looking forward to it for days. When my dad got home from work and came to visit me in my bedroom, I cried as I told him about my disappointment. I can still see and hear the image of him standing in the doorway and saying, “Oh, Mave.”
I’ve written this story about my dad before. I think of it when I read stories of Jesus looking at people with love and often sadness—the rich man who walked away when Jesus said to sell all he had and follow Jesus (Mark 10:17-23), the look when Mary was crying at the empty tomb and Jesus said her name (John 20:11-15), the people of Jerusalem as he rode on the donkey and thought of their sad future (Luke 19:41-44), as he spoke to his disciple John and his own mother while hanging on the cross {John 19:25-27). I can’t even remember all the specific times Jesus looked with love, but it comforts me to know that Jesus looks at me with those loving eyes. He looks at you with love, too. And when you are going through hard things, there is sadness in those eyes, too. He loves you. He loves me. He loves us.