“Now the tax collectors and ‘sinners’ were all gathering round to hear him” (Luke 15:1). 
Reading this passage again this morning, I couldn’t help but notice an editorial comment in the NIV translation (which is not included in the TNIV, the NIV from a few years ago). In the very first verse of Luke 15, the word “sinners” has quotation marks around it. Now, there is no punctuation like that in the Greek manuscript, so quotation marks like that tell you that the translator was trying to say something without changing the essential text. By putting quotation marks around “sinners,” the translator wanted to draw attention to something about that particular word, to make it stand out.
Now, I can’t pretend to know the mind of the translator, but I know when I see something like that, it’s a way of saying, to me, that the word really doesn’t apply. It’s what someone else might say about that person, it’s a label, but it doesn’t necessarily apply. It’s like when you say something and make “air quotes” around it. Or like how my vet puts quotes around my dog’s name on the medicine bottle, as if that’s just a nickname and not her real name. And that’s the impression I get when I see the quotes around the word sinners—as if the translator was being somewhat politically correct, trying to translate the word but emphasize that the word “sinners” didn’t really apply to the people Luke was talking about.
But is that right?
The Bible’s witness from the beginning of time is that we are all sinners. We are fallen. The whole creation is fallen. From the time in the Garden when humanity chose to do what God told us not to, to walk away from the best life God has offered to us, we have become, to use an older word, corrupt in our very nature. We are broken beyond repair. We are sinners. Therapists might like to talk about trying to boost our self-esteem. Teachers might want us to have more knowledge to feel better about ourselves. Doctors might want to prescribe some medication to alter our moods. But the problem remains the same. Self-esteem, education and medication do not remove the basic and inner brokenness that we all have. We are sinners. We sin. And we need a savior.
We put “sinners” in quotation marks because the whole idea makes us uncomfortable. We don’t like to think of ourselves as anything less than competent and self-made. But to deny who we are puts us farther away from being saved. If we keep convincing ourselves that our basic nature doesn’t really matter, we will never be able to turn to the one who can heal our brokenness. Who are the sinners? We are, but we are not left as sinners because we have a great savior who can take away all that is broken within us.