How Much Have You Been Forgiven
This past week marked the 40th Anniversary of Boston Pride. Yesterday, over 200 distinct groups dressed up, lined up, and acted up in celebration of Boston’s gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and allied community. Though the rain was falling hard the rainbows were flying high all the way from the South End to City Hall! Soaked to the bone, people were marching, drumming, dancing, chanting, waving, smiling and singing, all with great, great pride! Our double-digit First Church contingent joined with other local United Church of Christ communities to share the gospel truth of God’s extravagantly inclusive love for all people. “No matter who you are, no matter what you do, you’re welcome in our churches, cause God loves you!” That was just one of the chants.
As I was walking with Nancy and the kids and so many brothers and sisters, I couldn’t help but think of the extravagant, totally “out there” love of the woman in our passage. If nothing else, this woman had her pride! She had come to understand her own worthiness even though society had not. Can any
of us imagine being so secure in ourselves that we would feel comfortable walking into someone else’s dinner party, finding a seat on the floor, washing the feet of the guest of honor, and doing all of this without invitation?
For the record, her walking into a dinner party would have been no big deal back in 1st century Palestine. The political and religious elites commonly threw parties that were open to intrusions of this sort by strangers and street folks who became part of the so called “public entertainment” of the evening. That being said, you can bet that the seats, and food and drink were reserved for invited guests only. What was a big deal were the woman’s bold actions at Jesus’ feet especially given the reputations that preceded them both. He was supposed to be a prophet, and she, referred to as “a woman of the city,” was arguably considered to be a prostitute.
We can assume from her description that she’s had her share of being called a “sinner” by the so-called “righteous” of society. And yet, by her actions alone, its clear she is ready to come out of the closets of her self or other-induced shame, to step into the public eye, and to share with great abandon her gratitude and love for the beloved Rabbi. My question in all this is “why?” Why does she come out in this way? Why express her love so boldly at someone else’s dinner party?
She cries out her tears, whether of remorse, or lamentation or just plain joy to be in his most holy presence. With those salty drops, she washes his feet and dries them with her hair. She offers him precious oil from an alabaster jar. She acts as a person with freedom in her soul, a self-possessed sense of agency, a capacity to love on her own terms despite what others might say or think. Set aside for a moment, Simon’s decidedly inhospitable response to her presence at Jesus’ feet. Just imagine her courage! Given her reputation, if not her rap sheet, it would have taken extraordinary chutzpah, indeed a deep sense of her own dignity and pride, to step up to any religious leader in such a forthright encounter. Why does she do it?
The only answer I can come up with is that she knew in her heart of hearts that Jesus was one and perhaps the only person who would not reject her. How did she know this? My guess, and that of several scholars, is that something must have happened before the party that assured her that he would accept her, no matter what. Perhaps a prior face-to-face encounter with Jesus or maybe it was just from his growing reputation as one who would receive and bless even the tax collectors and sinner, the true outcasts of society. Surely she must have somehow known that in Jesus’ presence she could not and would not be made a fool as had happened so many times before! Perhaps this was the last step in her return to wholeness and peace. Perhaps this was what she needed to do to move from shame of being labeled a sinner to a deep sense of her God-given dignity. These were acts of love, devotion and surrender to the one who would forgive her and accept her for who she was! Whatever she had done, or had been made to do, she was forgiven. She was already assured of her pride, so why not bring it on – you go girl, style!
Now, having offered a little context, allow me to zero in on what I take to be the punch line of this story and parable from Luke’s gospel. It comes when Jesus is teaching Simon a lesson about the practices of hospitality and about what motivates people to do the right thing, in love. He says to him…
“But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.” Go ahead. Think about that.
“…the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.
You can invert it you’d like.
“The one to whom much is forgiven, loves much.”
Either way, my guess is that at least some of your minds are already racing about how this proverb applies to you and your life. Indeed, this statement begs a compelling question: How much have you been forgiven?
Mind you, the text is perhaps intentionally ambiguous when it comes to who is doing the forgiving. Jesus doesn’t say to the woman ‘I forgive your sins” though the guests around the table challenge his authority to do so. He doesn’t even say “God forgives your sins”. He just says as a matter of fact “Your sins are forgiven.” Forgiven by God? Forgiven by others? Perhaps hardest of all, forgiven by oneself? My personal guess is Jesus means all of the above!
The one to whom little is forgiven, loves little. The one to whom much is forgiven, loves much. In any case, what’s clear is that according to Jesus, there is a correlation between our capacity to receive forgiveness and our capacity to share love. And, the woman in this passage is a model of precisely this connection.
Forget for a moment about the first century social and political context. Just think about the dinner tables in your own homes. The connection makes sense at an intuitive level. Consider a time when you know you’ve blown it, when you know you’ve done something really, really stupid, whether coming home late without calling for the nth time, or shamefully eating the last piece of pie, or forgetting a
loved one’s birthday. Or maybe it’s something far more serious, something you did in the heat of the moment, when you were too tired, too hungry, too eager to impress someone, or too scared to fail. Ideally, you are thinking of an instant in your life when you then have reached out, sought forgiveness and reconciliation, and heard in response those words that were like a balm for your temporarily wretched feeling soul: I forgive you! The feeling may last only a few minutes or maybe a lifetime, but the gratitude and devotion one feels in a moment like that is incredibly powerful, enough to increases and deepen one’s love. Those words – I forgive you - when sincerely said and sincerely received are enough to make you want to do really, really nice things for a person, out of sheer gratitude and in return their generosity of spirit to accept you despite your misguided ways. We can readily imagine the gratitude this woman felt on the night of that dinner, the impact it made on her and her deepening relationship with Jesus and with God.
Thomas Cahill, in his excellent book about the World Before and After Jesus, called The Desire of the Everlasting Hills, offers the following observation:
“In Greek psychological theory, emotion was deemed a daimon, a spirit or demon that came to posses one. One goes from tranquility to emotion as the sea goes from undisturbed calm to roiling chaos when it is “possessed” by a storm. Thus one is “possessed” by eros or anger or pity or fear—all of them “gods” in some sense. This is probably the underlying reason that Luke has erased from his portrait of Jesus the catalogue of emotions attributed to him by Mark. Jesus, in Luke’s view, cannot have been “moved to pity” or compassion. These minor gods cannot overcome his inner tranquility as they do ours. But this is not because Jesus is some unfeeling Martian. He does not merely feel compassion, an emotion that can come and go and is dependent on outside forces, he is Compassion.
If Jesus is a model of Compassion, indeed if Jesus is Compassion, here, then this woman is a model of grace accepted, forgiveness received, of “fears relieved”. She knew instinctually that Jesus because he was compassion and living forgiveness personified could not reject her, and so she knew was free to be herself, to let down her hair and to let out that divine spark of love that was in her from the day she was born. Oblivious to the social norms and customs of the day, she allows herself to be possessed by a wondrous spirit of gratitude and devotion, not only because she knows Jesus will not reject her as so many others have, but because by accepting her, the burdens of her shame will be turned to lasting sense of dignity and pride in who she is!
I need to say that shame and forgiveness are often incredibly complex experiences, sometimes rooted in or coupled with experiences of trauma, depression, addictions of all sorts. I’m not suggesting this turn from forgiveness to love is simple. In his book, the New Being, Paul Tillich, offers a deeper understanding of what’s going on here. He writers that “nothing greater can happen to a human being than that he is forgiven. For forgiveness means reconciliation in spite of estrangement; it means reunion in spite of hostility; it means acceptance of those who are unacceptable, and it means reception of those who are rejected... He goes on to say
Forgiveness is an answer, the divine answer, to the question implied in our existence. An answer is answer only for him…who is aware of the question. This awareness cannot be fabricated. It may be in a hidden place in our souls, covered by many strata of righteousness. It may reach our consciousness in certain moments. Or, day by day, it may fill our conscious life as well as its unconscious depths and drive us to the question to which forgiveness is the answer
So I ask you again about your own awareness, you own experience -- How much have you been forgiven -- by God, others or yourself?
Remember….Jesus’ forgiveness is not about wiping the slate clean. It’s not for that matter a forgiveness of particular misguided actions. It’s about trusting God’s grace enough to know that you are accepted and loved no matter what and then acting accordingly. And so the opposite of shame and unworthiness is not merely self-respect or pride. The opposite of shame is freedom, the freedom of creative self-expression, the freedom of knowing that you are worthy and that you have gifts that ought not to be kept hidden but that ought to be shared in love for oneself, for others and for God. By laying down the burden of shame as the woman did, by picking up that alabaster jar of gratitude, she was experiencing nothing less than the freedom and joy of genuine love rooted in a sense of shared human dignity! God’s grace restored her pride and increased her capacity to love herself and so to love others and so to love God, that great source of every blessing. Her sins forgiven, her new life could begin.
If by chance you are still scratching your head some at the question about how much you’ve been forgiven, its okay. More often than not we’re probably in the habit of counting ourselves among the righteous. More often than not we are the ones who already have seats at the tables where there is money, education and enlightened conversation. That being said, I’d like to think that we all come here to church to find our seats a different table, to be honest to God and to ourselves, and to count ourselves among the unrighteous, among the sinners with whom Jesus
always found greatest companionship and solidarity! A friend once said that he loves when people tell him that those who go to church are hypocrites. His response is “of course we’re hypocrites! And we go to church to remind us again and again that we are hypocrites, that we are always falling short of the values of love and justice we preach and teach and pray here.
On that note, I’d like to end with a word to our newcomers on this Joining Sunday. I trust you all know what you are in for by joining with us in this covenanted community. If not, allow me to be abundantly clear. Welcome to First Church, which when we are honest to God and each other is a blessed community of the unrighteous, or at the very least of the righteous “in recovery”! Welcome to First Church - a church where we’re all sinners, where we’re all need of some forgiveness, where we’re all dying to be forgiven so that we can live to truly love. Grab a seat; pull up a chair in this household of God where there is room for us all. Bring your deepest appetite and your gravest of thirsts to this table of grace, and know that you will never be turned away. God welcomes us all into a covenanted community of transformation where Jesus leads the way from rejection to acceptance, from shame to dignity, from pride to freedom to love for every human being and for all creation. Amen.