It was about a year ago, as I was driving to the grocery store, when I learned from an NPR episode that Richard Hays, the late Biblical scholar, had changed his mind. Hays was perhaps most famous for his 1996 book The Moral Vision of the New Testament, a faithful and thoughtful effort to relate Christian ethics to Biblical theology. In that book, Hays argued that the Church should be welcoming of gay and lesbian people while consigning them to lives of celibacy. It was a more eloquent version of “hate the sin, love the sinner.”
But sometime between 1996 and 2024, Richard Hays changed his mind. He and his son, Christopher Hays, an Old Testament scholar, co-authored a book in 2024, The Widening of God’s Mercy, and this was the topic of the radio broadcast I happened upon last year. In their 2024 book, father and son presented a heartfelt testimony, backed up by Biblical scholarship and theology, of how they had come to believe that sexual minorities in the Church should be offered the fullness of the sacraments, including ordination and marriage. Richard Hays had been struggling for years with cancer, from which he would eventually die last January. That book was both an end-of-life personal apology for his previous stance on issues of human sexuality and a theological apology for a Biblically based call to greater inclusivity in the Church. It was an act of repentance, of what Scripture calls metanoia.
The argument offered by Richard and Christopher Hays for their change of mind is that over the course of Scripture, especially in the Old Testament, God could be seen to have changed his mind. As noted in the title of their book, God’s mercy is ever widening, and the story of Scripture shows this quite clearly.
In a touching passage of the book, Richard Hays admitted that he was ashamed of how Christians had used his prior reasoning to oppress and exclude others in the Church. And then he offered a moving confession, saying, “I was more concerned about my own intellectual project than about the pain of gay and lesbian people inside and outside the church, including those driven out of the church by unloving condemnation.”[1] If you ask me, that is not just a change of mind; it’s a change of heart that takes my breath away.
While I deeply admire Hays’s change of heart and certainly agree with where it led him, I think there is a problem with how he gets there. For centuries, the Christian tradition has upheld the notion of God’s impassibility, that God is not capable of change and therefore cannot change his mind. On one level, Hays’s position seems to agree with what we are told in the Book of Exodus today. God does seem to change his mind about the favor shown to the people of Israel. Although God has brought them out of Egypt into freedom, they have substituted worship of a golden calf for proper worship of God. God is angry, and God wants to punish them. But Moses pleads with God to change his mind. Moses reminds God of his mercy and compassion. And then, God changes his mind because of Moses’s pleading.
But is it really that transactional? Surely, God’s mercy isn’t contingent on our begging. Isn’t it more accurate to say that Scripture details how humanity’s image of God is ever shifting and evolving? Isn’t it humanity’s mind that needs to change about God, and not God’s mind that must change? This is certainly what St. Augustine once said about this very passage in the Book of Exodus. What seems like God changing his mind is merely our imperfect human perception of God’s nature.[2]
God does not change his mind. God can’t, because God is not a variable, fickle, mortal creature like one of us, and thank goodness for that. It is, in fact, precisely in the earthly life and ministry of Jesus, that we see the perfect, visible expression of God’s unchanging nature. And in the parables of the lost sheep and lost coin in Luke’s Gospel, we see the constancy of God’s boundless love.
The posture of the scribes and Pharisees when they see Jesus in the company of tax collectors and sinners is an apt image for all of humanity. In our human nature and in our limited compassion, we are unlike God. Just as we ourselves might do secretly, the scribes and Pharisees grumble against Jesus and judge his openness to all people. We could very well imagine hardened faces and arms rigidly folded across our chests. This is our posture when we can’t admit that we are wrong. It’s our posture when we resent the conversion of a criminal on death row. It’s our posture when we want to see our enemies burning in eternal torment. It’s our posture when we say we are seeking justice but are really shaped by our world’s eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth economy. It’s our posture when we don’t want God to forgive those who commit heinous offenses.
There is a deep irony here because when we grumble against God’s mercy and compassion for all sorts and conditions of people, we invert the way things should be. We, in our sinful resentment and hard-heartedness, become immovably so, an unchangeable, sinful foil to the perfect unchangeability of God. We become unchanging in our judgment and mean-spiritedness. And we make God in our own fallible image, rather than the other way around, and so in this distortion of the truth, God becomes the one who is changing, not in mercy but in wrath. God is the one we want to change from love to hate, from patience to anger so that God can smite our worst opponents, while we remain steadfastly vengeful.
But if we truly believe that Jesus is the perfect image of God and therefore the perfect image of love, the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin are really about who God is and about the kind of people we are called to become by walking in the way of Christ. In these parables, God is like a shepherd who goes after the one lost sheep. God is the one who is always seeking the lost ones of his own accord. God is the one who wants no one to be lost, not even the vilest sinner.
God is like a woman turning her house upside down to find one lost coin. Her pursuit for her missing treasure is single-mindedly diligent. It’s the same with God. God pursues us in love with a persistence that we can hardly imagine, because each of us is a lost treasure to God.
These parables correct the distorted image of God that still circulates among people who call themselves Christians but are perversely energized by invoking God’s wrath against their foes. Jesus’s parables of the lost sheep and coin put God back into the position of the one who is unchangeable, and they invite us to recognize our humanity and sinful disposition to be unchanging in resentment. Above all, these parables invite us to be the ones who change. We are the ones who, like Richard and Christopher Hays, can have the courage to say that we have changed our minds and our hearts.
This is true metanoia and repentance, the about-face required of everyone in the Christian life. It’s not just a change of mind. It’s a change of heart that can only be prompted by turning from our sinful resentments and anger to face the God who is always, and has always, been eternally moving towards us in love. The defining feature of God is that he doesn’t change his mind. The defining hope of humanity is that it will always be capable of changing its mind.
When we admit that we’re lost, we will learn that we are found, always and everywhere by God. A God whose mind changes is not a God to whom we can turn. But a God who remains the same in perfect love, is a God who is always facing towards us when we turn from our hard-heartedness and sin to gaze upon his face of love.
The call of the Church in a deeply intolerant and unforgiving age is to be a community that rejoices in the discovery and homecoming of the lost, not in the punishment of the wicked. When we can rejoice that the most craven human being repents and receives God’s forgiveness, we are truly being the Church. St. Gregory the Great said it most eloquently: “true justice feels compassion, false justice scorn.”[3] We are seeking not our own justice, but the justice of God. And the justice of God shows nothing less than the indiscriminate tenacity of love.
So, rejoice, fellow sinners, with me. Rejoice that no matter how often we’re lost, we will always be found. Rejoice that there is no sheep too unimportant or insignificant for the persistent love of the Good Shepherd. Rejoice and be glad that it is never too late to change your mind. Because when it comes to love, God never changes his.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 14, 2025
[1] The Widening of God’s Mercy (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2024), p. 224
[2] Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, vol. III, ed. Joseph T. Lienhard (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2001), p. 142.
[3] Quoted in David Lyle Jeffrey, Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2012), p. 192