One of the nice things about teaching at a Bible school is the chance to preach the same sermons several times in a row at different churches. After three or four tries at the same message, even someone as obtuse as me can put together a fairly good talk. One of my stand-by messages comes from Luke 7. It is the story of an unnamed woman who bursts into a party at a Pharisee’s house and repents of her wicked ways. Over the years I have seen how the story can be viewed with the repenting woman, the cold Pharisee or the gracious God as the centre character. Today I would like to put God in the spotlight.
The curtain opens on an unnamed town
visited by Jesus. A local religious official named Simon invites the Teacher
over for supper to check out whether He is cosher or not. No doubt Simon had
many interesting and challenging questions planned for Jesus, but he doesn’t
get to ask any of them. His carefully planned night is dramatically interrupted
by a weeping woman who bursts in and falls at the feet of Christ. She has no
back story other than a snide thought bubble by Simon that she is a ‘sinner’.
It seems fair from the context to infer that she is a local prostitute who
heard Jesus speak earlier. Instead of apologizing for the intrusion or asking a
question she simply falls at the feet of Jesus weeping. As an act of faith and
repentance she wets his dirty feet with her tears and wipes them with her hair.
One might imagine that the Saviour would
thank her for her kind act but shoo her away so he could get on with the ‘real’
work of convincing Simon that he was not a heretic. Instead this fallen woman
who many would say deserves to be ignored becomes His focus and good example.
To explain his approval of the woman Jesus
gives a parable just for Simon. The parable pictures two people who owe debts.
One owes a lot and the other only owes a little. Despite what some people
think, Pharisees like Simon were quite astute at such imagery and he no doubt
recognized that the debts represented sin. So the one person lived a life
uncommonly pure while the other was an uncommonly prolific sinner. However, the
conclusion of the parable certainly ran contrary to Simon’s thinking. He might
have imagined that the moneylender would have loved the person with the least
debt more than the other. So the parable would have been about how God loves
nice people more than sinners.
Instead Jesus asks which one of the debtors
would love the lender more if he forgave all their debts. Obviously the one who
owes more would be more grateful and have stronger feelings for the lender. The
first time I read that I had a ‘God’s not who you think He is’ moment. It shows
that God is more interested in how much we love Him than in how much we have
sinned. Suddenly, the woman is seen as being the hero of the story not because
she did a lot of good but precisely because her forgiven sins make her love God
more than the guy who had little to forgive and feels he doesn’t owe much to
the Lord.
It isn’t saying that God winks at sin but
that He is interested in how we feel about Him. He wants His people to know and
love Him fiercely rather than to be cold fish who spend their lives walking on
eggshells. Jesus says as much when he sums up the many commandments of the
Bible into two statements. The first of which was ‘Love the Lord your God with
all your heart, soul, strength and mind’ rather than ‘Be super-careful never to
do anything wrong because then I will hate you.’
Our sin does separate us from God and He
takes that seriously. Yet if we repent of it and turn back to Him, God’s grace
sort of works back into our past making that same sin into a kind of benefit to
us. Like the unnamed woman our repented sins become a ‘useful experience’. We
can have compassion for others struggling with those sins and see God not as a
judge but as the way out.
One last thought. Simon was just that type
of religious snob that all of us love to hate but Jesus didn’t give up on him.
He took the time to give the Pharisee a whole parable in the hopes that he
would come around. I don’t know this for sure, but I think Simon changed. After
all, how did we know his judgemental thoughts about Jesus unless he himself was
the one describing the evening? I like to picture him laughing at himself every
time he got to that part of the story. Maybe there is hope not just for the
overt sinners among us but for the ‘I’m-better-than-you’ Pharisees too.
By Jason Gayoway
Published in The Daily Herald Tribune February 25, 2015
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