Thus you have the story. If I come short in any circumstance, I beg pardon of those that can correct me. It is three or four and twenty years since I saw the book: yet I have, as far as my memory will admit, given you the relation of the matter. However Luke, as you see, doth here present you with the substance of the whole.
Alas! Christ Jesus has but little thanks for the saving of little sinners. “To whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little.” He gets not water for his feet, by his saving of such sinners. There are abundance of dry-eyed Christians in the world, and abundance of dry-eyed duties too; duties that never were wetted with the tears of contrition and repentance, nor ever sweetened with the great sinner’s box of ointment. And the reason is, such sinners have not great sins to be saved from; or if they have, they look upon them in the diminishing glass of the holy law of God. But I rather believe, that the professors of our days want a due sense of what they are; for, verily, for the generality of them, both before and since conversion, they have been sinners of a lusty size. But if their eyes be holden, if convictions are not shewn, if their knowledge of their sins is but like to the eye-sight in twilight; the heart cannot be affected with that grace that has laid hold on the man; and so Christ Jesus sows much, and has little coming in.
Wherefore his way is ofttimes to step out of the way, to Jericho, to Samaria, to the country of the Gadarenes, to the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, and also to Mount Calvary, that he may lay hold of such kind of sinners as will love him to his liking; Luke xix. 1–11; John iv. 3–11; Mark v. 1–21; Matt. xv. 21–29; Luke xxiii. 33–44.
But thus much for the sixth reason, why Christ Jesus would have mercy offered in the first place to the biggest sinners, to wit, because such sinners, when converted, are apt to love him most. The Jerusalem sinners were they that outstripped, when they were converted, in some things, all the churches of the Gentiles. “They were of one heart, and of one soul, neither said any of them, that aught of the things that they possessed was their own.” “Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the price of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles’ feet,” &c.; Acts iv. 32–35. Now, shew me such another pattern if you can. But why did these do thus? Oh! they were Jerusalem sinners. These were the men that but a little before had killed the Prince of Life; and those to whom he did, that notwithstanding, send the first offer of grace and mercy. And the sense of this took them up betwixt the earth and the heaven, and carried them on in such ways and methods as could never be trodden by any since. They talk of the church of Rome, and set her in her primitive state, as a pattern and mother of churches; when the truth is, they were the Jerusalem sinners, when converts, that out-did all the churches that ever were.