Although we may
never have thought of it in quite that way, I think we all know that rarely, in
this life, are boundaries drawn any more clearly than around the dinner table.
We’re upset if our whole busy family can’t make it home to share at least one meal
a day together. We take care whom we
invite to dinner. Your daughter is dating a young man. "Dad, can I invite
Ted to lunch after church?" Your ears perk up. What does this mean? Who is
this stranger who intrudes at our table?
You
are at your first week on your new job. You wonder if you will like it here,
how you will get along with your new colleagues. Then someone says, "Some
of us have a group that goes out for lunch on Fridays. Do you want to join
us?" You think that you may make friends here after all.
Boundaries
are erected around the table, and well they should be. After all, the table is
a place of intimacy, for the sharing of food together is one of the most
intimate of human activities. The family meal, eaten by the gathered family at
the end of the day, is a sort of sacrament of family life, an outward and
visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.
So
the 23rd Psalm sings, "You prepare a table before me in the
presence of my enemies." The psalmist knows that the one who will
invite you to the table is the one who will stick beside you through think and
thin, even when you are threatened by your enemies.
For the Jew,
every meal was a religious occasion. We get our custom of saying a blessing,
grace before meals, from the Jews. When you say a blessing before eating, you
claim the dinner table as a place of divine grace and revelation.
So
today's gospel puts us at the table with Jesus. Jesus was the guest of a man
named Simon, a Pharisee who spent much
of his day studying God's word and attempting to put his religion into practice
in everyday life.
The
blessing has been said, God has been invoked, and then the conversation begins.
All goes well until there enters a woman, a "woman of the city." She’s
a woman who for one reason or another, must survive by behavior that her
society --that our society as well--considers sinful. Whether or not she had any other life choices
she might have made, we don’t know. But we do know, she isn’t particularly
proud of the choices she has made.
But now this un-named, not-very-respectable woman
has somehow or other found it within herself to take action around the sorry
state of her life. She has decided to
seek from Jesus what she cannot get from anyone else—not even from
herself—forgiveness. Think about the courage that took.
Entering Simon’s
house, this un-named woman must have been aware that everyone present was
staring at her. And she no doubt knew what they were thinking. Strangely enough
to us, it probably didn't bother her. She would have had to have hardened
herself to their contempt, and learned long ago to fling their insults right
back at them.
But somehow this man Jesus had gotten beyond her
defenses, gotten beyond her shame and the despair she felt about herself,
gotten deep down to the most vulnerable part of her. His was the only look in
the room that was neither leering nor contemptuous. Jesus didn’t look at her
with anything but acceptance and love. There wasn't a name anyone had called
her that she hadn't called herself a hundred times. But Jesus didn't call her anything, except a
child of God. Who is this who
forgives?
She came in and
fell upon Jesus, literally letting down her hair, kissing Jesus' tired feet,
and anointing them with oil and drying them with her hair. Everyone would have
been stunned, speechless. The woman was
doing something very improper, letting down her hair like that in public,
crying her tears over Jesus’ feet. It violated the rules of etiquette. And then
this woman started kissing his feet. That seems strange to us. But not so
strange if we understand that in Jewish custom if somebody has saved your life,
you would come to that person and kiss their feet.
.She had come to
Jesus for Forgiveness. She had Accepted her self and her sin, and accepted as
well the forgiveness—the new way of life Jesus was offering her. She had
Surrendered herself, her sins, her old way of life to Him. She was giving
Thanks for the forgiveness and new life that had been born within her.
Perhaps she went through that entire process in
those few moments, kneeling at Jesus’ feet.
Perhaps Jesus had previously saved her from her old life and she’d
simply come to thank Him. Perhaps she
was the same woman Jesus saved from stoning. Perhaps she was even Mary
Magdalene. We don’t know. But in any
case, everyone present—except for Jesus--would have been perplexed and
speechless at her behavior. Who is this who forgives?
Whatever
the back story, this behavior was more than Simon could take. It wasn't just
that this woman had violated social propriety. In fact, as Jesus notes, she was
showing true hospitality. It was customary, when a guest entered your house, to
offer a kiss of welcome, to wash the guest's feet as a sign of hospitality.
Simon hadn’t done that—was he trying to slight Jesus? We don’t know. In any
case, Simon’s problem with the woman’s behavior was essentially pietistic.
"If this man were a real
prophet," Simon said to himself, just loud enough for everyone at the table
to hear, "he would be able to see what sort of woman this is!"
After all, what
are prophets for if not to be able to recognize real sin when it occurs? Isn’t
that their job-- to point to the boundaries between the holy and the unholy,
the righteous and the unrighteous? If Jesus were really a prophet, he
would be able to see just who and what this woman was.
Simon didn’t get it. Jesus did see. He knew exactly
who and what this woman was. He simply refused to condemn her. Who is this who forgives?
Instead, Jesus told a parable. One man owed his
creditor a small sum. Another owed a great sum. The creditor forgave both.
Think now, Simon, which one would be the most grateful? I suppose the one who
owed the greater sum, Simon admitted grudgingly. Then Jesus turned and looked
into Simon’s eyes and said,
"Simon, look
at this woman. You showed me no hospitality. Look how she welcomes me. Someone,
who has been forgiven much can love much. Such a person has much compassion in
their heart. Someone who has been forgiven little, can only love a little.” Then Jesus turned
and said to the woman,
“Go in peace. Your sins are forgiven.”
That must have caused quite a stir around the
table. The fellow next to Simon leaned over and asked the room at large,
'Who is this who
even claims to forgive sins?' They had come to Simon’s house that
night, to check out Jesus, to judge him, to see whether he met their criteria
for what a prophet ought to be. Now all of a sudden it was Jesus doing the
judging. He spoke as if he could see right through everyone there. And he
pronounced a blessing upon this notorious sinner:
'Your faith has saved you; go in peace.' Then he turned back to Simon.
”Her sins are
many and they have been forgive,
therefore she has great compassion.”
Jesus understood. When you and I realize the depth of the
forgiveness we have received, we can find it a source of great compassion
within us. Great compassion for all those irritating, imperfect people out
there--like our spouse, our children, our in-laws, our preacher, our friends.
Great compassion for gays, for lesbians, for notorious sinners, for AIDS
victims and adulterers and addicts and the mentally ill, and pornographers and
shacked-up couples and the town drunk, and heretics and just plain every day
sinners.
How much compassion can you and I find within
ourselves? What kind of vision do we
have? Can we see in those sinners a family member? Can we see in them a mirror of our own selves? Who is
this who forgives?
When we bow our heads together in corporate prayer,
when we join hands to sing the closing response, when we offer one another
signs of peace and forgiveness, when we gather around the church’s dinner
table to celebrate the Lord's Supper,
what does that mean to us?
Whom do you see
gathered in the sanctuary, seated at the table, greeting
one another with signs of peace? Is it
simply a moment just for the family, those of us gathered here in the fold? Or
is our worship a moment of invitation and inclusion, meant to be shared with
the whole world? Is this a place for the righteous elect? Or is this a meal for
lost sheep being brought into the fold?
For
Jesus, forgiveness is not some doctrine to be believed. Rather, it is a feast
to be given, a party to which the outcasts are invited, a gift to be received
with empty hands. So Jesus not only tells a parable at the table, he becomes
a parable-- a sign to us of what God is up to in the world. In Jesus, God is
busy inviting the whole world into the family--to the table. Who is
this who forgives?
That
concept can be a bit tough to swallow
for us insiders. We have begun this
service of worship with an invocation, with prayer and song asking God to be
present among us. We are here to receive Jesus into our hearts and minds. But
what do we make of this story about a woman, a "woman of the
city," an outsider and sinner, who was better at receiving Jesus than
Simon the pious insider?
The
Jesus whom we receive is too often the Jesus of the elect, the Jesus owned by
the insiders. But now, here comes this Jesus who has this thing for the
outsiders; who makes the table, the sanctuary not just a place of warmhearted
fellowship for the family, but also a means of grace, a sign of invitation to
others to come join the family.
How well do we
receive that Jesus? When Jesus
says to her, "Your faith has saved you; go in peace." He doesn’t mean, "Because you have faith,
you have been forgiven." He doesn’t mean “If you clean up your act and act
respectable, and dress and act more like everybody else, you can come to my
church and be accepted.”
That would be a
transaction—a deal struck with God. "if you do this, I'll give you that”.
We all know that attitude. We’ve all tried to bargain with God at least once.
The problem is, that’s not grace. And God above all, is a God of grace, not of
transactions.
This woman's
faith is revealed in her act of coming to Jesus. In her faith, she
sees something that Simon, for all his
religion, can't see. The woman of the city sees who Jesus really is. Simon sees
only a would-be prophet. See sees forgiveness and new life. Simon sees a
rabble-rouser who dares to usurp a privilege reserved for God—forgiveness. She
sees the Savior of the whole world, the one who has come to invite all sinners
(and aren't we all?) to the gospel feast. Simon sees a troublemaker outside the
religious establishment. Who is this who
forgives?
Throughout
his life and ministry, Jesus went around assaulting our human
view of what is “religious." We
church people have an almost universal tendency to try to use religion to draw
lines across the world. We want to demarcate the sinners from the saved, the
insiders from outsiders. We try to make religion an exclusive club of middle class saints, nice and clean and well
groomed and upright and pious.
We do that for a
lot of reasons. One of which is that by drawing those lines we can pretend to
ourselves, and to one another that we aren’t really as awful sinners as those we work so hard to
exclude. We insiders try to use our religion as a sort of shield against
admitting the reality that we are just as broken, just as alienated from one
another and God, just as angry, just as prone to violence and addiction, just
as slothful and envious and proud, just as much a sinner and quite possibly
twice as hypocritical and only half as honest, in other words, just as human as
those outsiders we’re trying so hard to ostracize and exclude.
But then, Jesus
comes along and makes being religious into an openhanded hospitality, by His
gracious welcome and invitation toward those whom our religion often excludes. Who is this who forgives? Jesus comes along
and wordlessly points to the woman anointing his feet with her tears. And we
wonder to ourselves—if we’re honest—why am I not down there kneeling at His
feet as well?
Who is a
Christian? A Christian is someone who comes to Jesus with the broken pieces of
their life in their hands—their shame, their sins, their failures, their
shortcomings, and hears Him say, "Your faith has saved you; go in
peace."
A Christian is
someone who then turns to a person who has wronged them, or to a notorious
sinner, or just to some other fallible human being and tells them, “In Jesus
Christ, your sins too, can be forgiven. Through Him, I can and do forgive you.
Please forgive me.”
Who is this who forgives? It’s you and me, hopefully.
Who is this who needs forgiveness?
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