ON A JOURNEY WITH JESUS THE WOMAN WHO LOVED JESUS (Luke 7:36-50) 36

Now one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, so he went to the Pharisee's house and reclined at the table. 37

When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee's house, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume, 38

and as she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them. 39

When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is— that she is a sinner. 40

Jesus answered him, Simon, I have something to tell you. Tell me, teacher, he said.

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Two men owed money to a certain money-lender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. 42

Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he cancelled the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more? 43

Simon replied, I suppose the one who had the bigger debt cancelled. You have judged correctly, Jesus said. 44

Then he turned towards the woman and said to Simon, Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. 45

You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. 46

You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet.

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Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven— for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little. 48

Then Jesus said to her, Your sins are forgiven.

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The other guests began to say among themselves, Who is this who even forgives sins? 50

Jesus said to the woman, Your faith has saved you; go in peace.

Many people find Christianity threatening because of its insistence on facing sin as an issue in all our lives. Some have dismissed Christianity as dangerous and unhealthy because it ‘lays guilt’ on people. I want to show that this Christian message, when it’s truly Christian and not distorted, is supremely liberating and thoroughly healthy. It is true that it faces us all with very uncomfortable truths; but inasmuch as they are truths they are important if life is to make sense and have meaning. Thank God that the good news, the Gospel, brings us face to face with our Saviour as well as our sin, and speaks a message of reliable hope in a world where false hopes fail daily.

But to understand the importance of this good news, you have to face up to the bad news. People don’t go in for surgery for every ache or pain, but when the X-ray shows a growing tumour then they can’t get to surgery quickly enough. As one writer puts it, “The main human trouble is 1

desperately difficult to fix, even for God, and sin is the longest-running of human emergencies” (Plantinga Not the way p.5). Dr J. I. Packer writes: “If you have not learned about sin, you cannot understand yourself or your fellow-men or the world you live in or the Christian faith. And you will not be able to make head or tail of the Bible. For the Bible is an exposition of God’s answer to the problem of human sin and unless you have that problem clearly before you, you will keep missing the point of what it says”. There is an old proverb “If you want to know what water is, don’t ask a fish”. The idea is that as the fish only knows its own element, it has nothing to contrast it with. So we, born into a sinful world, ourselves sinful from the beginning, we grow up used to sin, excusing it, minimising it, desensitised to sin in ourselves and in others. We do not know the shock of sin until we see it in some extra-ordinary depravity or in some personal insult or betrayal which we ourselves experience. And so we think the Bible extreme or extravagant when it says “They are all corrupt… all have turned aside… there is no-one who does good, not even one” (Romans 3:12). To understand properly the nature and seriousness of sin, we need someone from outside the situation to tell us, someone whose sensitivity has not been diluted, whose understanding has not been confused. In the Bible God, the Creator God, becomes the Speaking God, telling us of our origins and our destiny, explaining to us why our world is as it is and why we are as we are, showing us the danger and seriousness of our sin and calling us to Himself as the one Person who can forgive us and change us and restore us to our intended destiny – with Him forever.

You see, sin is not properly understood until it is seen in terms of our relationship with God our Creator. A life in sin is not necessarily a scandalous life; it might be a very respectable, useful and admired one. But if it is a godless life, it is profoundly sinful and if He is not at the centre of your life than your life is essentially godless whatever marginal opinions or beliefs you may have. For in the Bible sin is not simply a broken code but a broken relationship; not just a relationship lost but a relationship renounced, where God is kept firmly outside a person’s life. Sin in the first place is a rebellion against God, a refusal of His Lordship, and then a replacing of His primacy with one’s own – with oneself! God made us to love Him and to live life His way, but our epitaph as a race, as generation after generation passes out into the night, is “I did it my way”. We think we can do very well without God until some calamity hits us or until our society begins to crumble because his laws are flouted or until we unexpectedly find ourselves confronted by Him. It may be as we begin to read the Bible and hear Him speak in it; it may be as we pray or hear the Gospel about Jesus Christ preached and feel that God is speaking to us, calling us, standing close to us; then we encounter a Being so infinitely powerful and so unbearably holy, and so indefectibly righteous and so minutely true, that we find ourselves with nowhere to hide, no excuses to make, and no hope of acquittal if He should condemn us. The marvel and the wonder is that He does not condemn us, though he does show us that we stand condemned by our sin. He shows us our pride and our self-centredness, our greed and our lust, our corrupt heart and unworthy motives. In the Lord Jesus’s uncompromising words on one occasion: ‘For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22 greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.’ (Mark 7:21,22). We hear a lot today about ‘self discovery’ and ‘self-understanding’ and ‘self-affirmation’, but we never truly discover ourselves by disguising ourselves. Jesus faces us with our sin, our guilt and our need of him. But in doing so he does not rubbish us, he gives us value! He is saying “Because you matter, I am going to deal with you; to face you with your responsibility for sin and to change you – come to me and I will heal you”. So he meets us in our sin, convicts us of our sin, but he 2

doesn’t leave us in our sin. All this is memorably illustrated in the tears and gratitude of this woman. 36

Now one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, so he went to the Pharisee's house and reclined at the table. 37

When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee's house, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume, 38

and as she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them. This is surely one of the most beautiful stories in the four gospels, and yet it occurs in a context of ugliness. There are two ugly things here: both of then illustrating the ugliness of sin and its destructive effects on the human spirit. First there is the fact of the woman’s background. She is notorious in the town as a sinner. Dr. Joel Green does not mince his words in order to describe the shock of her presence here and the anger of Simon the Pharisee. He writes: ‘Undoubtedly, this characterisation [a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town] marks her as a prostitute by vocation, a whore by social status, contagious in her impurity, and probably one who fraternises with Gentiles for economic purposes’ [Joel Green Luke 309]. She is a prostitute, with all that implies of human folly and corruption and exploitation and betrayal. But Jesus found her and loved her and called her back and brought her out and ‘made all things new’ for her. How and when that was done Luke doesn’t tell us – it’s one of the unwritten stories of Jesus that John says could fill the world. The first we hear of her is her gate-crashing the dinner party for Jesus put on by a local Pharisee in Capernaum. In that part of the world and at that time it was accepted that curious neighbours not among the invited guests would stand around the party, who would be reclining on low couches, eating and drinking, their feet tucked up behind. These ‘locals’ would be coming in and going out, listening to the conversation and giving recognition to the event and its main participants. Suddenly this woman appears. She had heard that Jesus was being entertained at Simon’s house and in the glow of gratitude and the joy of a new life given her in the weeks or months before, she had conceived this plan – to anoint him with her most precious perfume as a sign of his worth and her love. However she might have planned to do it, in the event she never got beyond his feet as she stood behind and over him dissolved in tears at such a love as she had met and such a life as she had lived. Her tears fall on his unwashed feet. Impulsively she wipes his wet feet with her hair, kissing them again and again in deep adoration and humility, and then she does the unheard of: she pours her perfume not over his head but over his feet. No words are spoken but the whole room is redolent with her unvoiced love. In Jesus, God has given beauty for ashes, the prisoner has been released, the poor have had good news preached to them of sin forgiven and peace with God.

Then we are shown another ugliness: not the ugliness of blatant sin but the ugliness of cold selfrighteousness. Simon sees nothing of the beauty of forgiveness, restoration, new life; he sees only an immoral woman, a past which for him can never be wiped away, a reputation which offends him and compromises Jesus. In Joel Green’s words: ‘The meal-setting raises issues of ritual purity, all the more so since this meal is hosted by a Pharisee. The woman who enters Simon’s house, whose sinful state is evident to all, comes into this scene like an alien, communicable disease; given Pharisaical views of holiness, the

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propriety of Simon’s response to the spectacle transpiring before him would be assumed’ [Green Luke 307] 39

When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is— that she is a sinner.

No doubt others there thought the same as he. Therefore Jesus responds out loud to what Simon is thinking privately. He wants this ‘daughter of Abraham’ to be accepted by the community; the lost sheep is brought back to the fold; the prodigal daughter is returned to the family. And so he tells them all a parable, the parable of the two debtors, one owing say £12,000 and another twelve hundred. Each is freely forgiven by this most untypical of money-lenders, their debts cancelled. “’Which of them’, asks Jesus, ‘will love him more?’” Grudgingly, no doubt because he can see the trap, Simon answers “I suppose the one who had the bigger debt cancelled”. And out of his own mouth he justifies the woman and condemns himself. This woman loves more than he does because she has been forgiven more than him. Only then does Jesus hold up a mirror to his ugliness. 44

Then he turned towards the woman and said to Simon, Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. 45

You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. 46

You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet.

Simon has not invited Jesus to his home out of love or even respect. He has pointedly omitted every customary expression of respect, the formal kiss is missing, the servant deputed to wash the feet of the honoured guest is missing, the anointing of olive-oil is missing. He has, in fact, invited the young rabbi from Nazareth to his house to ‘weigh him up’, even perhaps to entrap him in conversation and expose him, and he thinks Jesus’ acceptance of this woman is enough evidence to show he is no prophet. Jesus can absorb any insult to himself, but not the callous attitude that rejects the penitent sinner. Now he does something un-heard of. He openly criticises his host and the manner of his hospitality, elevating the acts of the woman, acts which actually make-good Simon’s omissions! The effect is to force the entire roomful of people to take sides – not between Simon and Jesus, but between Simon and the woman, the proud Pharisee and the repentant sinner. The woman herself is no longer what she was. What she has done tells its own story: 47

Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven— for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little. “Therefore” says Jesus, “I tell you her many sins have been forgiven, her extraordinary act of love shows it”. Her great love proves that her many sins have been forgiven (N.E.B.). I agree with Kenneth Bailey who writes “Jesus does not actually forgive her sins on the spot (he is misquoted by the hostile guests in the following verse). Rather he announces a forgiveness that has already taken place in the past… “Her actions show that her sins have been forgiven her by Jesus, as the parable of the freely-forgiven debtors shows and as the whole of the N.T. shows, and does not at all mean that the woman has earned forgiveness by her love, only that she has demonstrated her forgiveness by her love.

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The Jerusalem Bible translates v47 “For this reason I tell you that her sins, her many sins, must have been forgiven her, or she would not have shown such great love” (Bailey, p.18). As for Simon, Jesus simply adds with heavy irony, “But he who has been forgiven little, loves little”. Simon thought he had few sins in comparison with this woman. Yet in regard to Jesus and her he had revealed “deep levels of pride, arrogance, hard-heartedness, hostility, a judgemental spirit, dim understanding of what really defiles, a rejection of sinners, insensitivity, misunderstanding of the nature of God is forgiveness and sexism” (Bailey, p18). In the final analysis the great unrepentant sinner is Simon the Pharisee, not the woman who had lived a sinful life. Tell me, which are you? Are you someone who thinks you are quite alright as you are; reasonably well up in the stakes of respectability; sufficiently religious not to need to come to God as a sinner who needs to be saved? Or are you prepared to confess you sinfulness, yes even the sin which spoils your best works, even your religion? Are you ready to listen to the friend of sinners and to come to him for a cleansing only he can give because only He has born the cost of your salvation by his own death on a cross? Jesus’ last words to the woman (on this occasion anyway) are: “Your faith has saved you; go in peace”. Go in peace! Peace with whom? Peace with God! Oh it had been years since she had had any peace in that direction. Perhaps you are running from God, desperately keeping God out of your life and thoughts, only here under protest. But what a false peace that is. Who can keep God away forever? But God can keep you away forever. We must all stand before the Judge of all the earth. None of us can survive that scrutiny for “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”. But God has opened up a way of reconciliation. Jesus Christ is that way: his cross is our atonement, faith in him brings peace with God, forgiveness of sins and life everlasting. For God so loved the world that he gave His one and only Son, and Jesus so loved us that he took our place and bore our sins and died our death. And now millions of us would line up to do what that woman did. People who land safely after a near-disaster in the air sometimes kiss the ground in relief. We can do better than that: in faith and love and worship and self-giving we can kiss the nail-pierced feet of Jesus who loved us and gave himself for us, who saved us from an eternal disaster and an eternal darkness. And we to can ‘go in peace’ and in the joy of a new life. Oh, it doesn’t matter who you are or what you have been: ‘His blood can make the foulest clean; his blood availed for me’. There are many things in your life that are inexcusable; there is nothing in your life that is unforgivable. Listen to these lines taken from the poem The Everlasting Mercy by John Masefield in which a notorious sinner recounts the moment of his conversion. ‘I did not think, I did not strive, The deep peace burnt my ‘me’ alive; The bolted door had broken in, I knew that I had done with sin. I knew that Christ had given me birth To brother all the souls on earth, And every bird and every beast Should share the crumbs broke at the feast. O glory of the lighted mind How dead I’d been, how dumb, how blind.

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The station brook, to my new eyes, Was bubbling out of Paradise; The waters rushing from the rain Were singing Christ has risen again. I thought all earthly creatures knelt From rapture of the joy I felt.

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