Turns out there’s no volume discount.
I laughed when I first heard about it. An NFL owner, a team I’ve got no love for anyway, got caught up in a prostitution sting in Ohio earlier this week. According to court records, he allegedly responded to an ad online, agreed on a price, and showed up. Except the person waiting for him had a badge instead of whatever he expected.
I’ll admit that one felt good for about ten seconds. Wrong team, wrong owner, easy to enjoy. If for no other reason than it wasn’t the owner of my team in the crosshairs for once.
Then, as usual, the conversation drifted somewhere else entirely. A lot of people got hung up on the price. A man with that kind of money, doing something like that, for that little.
Like the number was the scandal. Like he’d have come off better if he’d paid ten times as much.
He wouldn’t have. And if you caught yourself thinking he would, that means some part of you has already sorted this into “tacky” instead of “wrong,” which may be its own kind of trouble.
It doesn’t matter if the number is a hundred and forty dollars or a hundred and forty thousand. Doesn’t change what it is. There’s no bulk pricing on sin, no discount for going big, no premium package that makes it more respectable.
Wrong is wrong at every price point, and most of us already know this, we just don’t like applying it evenly.
Because it’s a lot more comfortable to grade sin on a curve when the ones at the bottom of it happen to be ours.
The gossip. The grudge you won’t let go. The thing you said about your neighbor that felt more like observation than judgment while you were saying it. None of that makes the news. None of it gets a mugshot. So it’s easy to let it slide under a lower bar than the one you’d hold somebody else to, especially somebody whose mistakes ended up in the news.
I do this too. Everybody does. It’s always easier to point out what the other guy does wrong while giving yourself a pass.
The good news is that he can be forgiven. Whatever he did, whatever it cost him, there’s a way out of it that doesn’t run through explaining himself well enough. And the better news is that the same door’s open for the rest of us. Turns out forgiveness doesn’t have a price list either.
You (probably) don’t need forgiving for what he did specifically.
But take away what Christ did for you, and you’re standing on the same side of that line he is. Not a nicer version of it. The same line.
Funny story either way. Just don’t spend so long laughing at his price tag that you forget to check your own.
P.S.
If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.
No commentary. No telling you what to think. Nothing to buy. Nothing fancy.
Just steady time in the Word.
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