Sermon for the Lord’s Day

June 13, 2010

Rev. Lorelei Hillman

Luke 7:35-50

Good morning!  Let’s see how awake we all are this morning, and play a little “The Price is Right.”  Say you were going shopping for furniture today, and you wanted to buy a sectional sofa – how much would that cost?  And how many people would that seat?  So, if you wanted to seat 12-18 people on your new sectional sofa, about how much would you have to spend?  (around $5,000-8,000)

Don’t worry, I’m not getting you involved in our small, “creeping” kitchen remodeling project!  I’m asking because, in this complex and somewhat difficult passage from Luke, furniture is a big clue.  So, hold that thought.

Now, how many of you were a bit confounded by the woman in this story?  First, she shows up at a dinner party in tears, then proceeds to make a spectacle out of herself by “standing behind Jesus at his feet and bathing his feet with her tears.”  I was just trying to figure out how she managed that.  So, Jesus is at dinner with his new friend, the Pharisee, sitting in his chair, and she is standing behind him…  How does that work?

Well, furniture is the key.  In Jesus’ day, in Roman-occupied territories, wealthy people didn’t sit at a table in chairs – they reclined around a U-shaped couch called a triclinium.  Hosts could fit 12-18 men (women weren’t invited), all facing into the center where the food was on trays.  You can imagine how big a piece of furniture like that would be, and how big a room it would take, so the indication is that anyone who had one of these tricliniums would be a pretty wealthy man.  Here we should note that the Pharisee, a Jewish religious leader of a ‘purity-focused denomination,’ if you will, is a wealthy man – in Roman-occupied territory.

And into the middle of this wealthy man’s party comes a weeping woman.  The Pharisee, apparently an astute man, identifies her immediately as ‘a sinner.’  He also seems to see this as some sort of test for Jesus, because he thinks Jesus should know “what kind of woman” she is.  Implied in his comment to himself is that, knowing the woman is unclean, Jesus should not let her touch him.  Pharisees were pretty particular about this stuff – they were the ‘purist’ branch of the Jewish faith, and paid careful attention to matters of ritual cleanliness.  No doubt, the Pharisee had heard of Jesus’ shocking reputation for eating with all the ‘wrong’ people, but perhaps he’d never actually seen it for himself.

So, what do you suppose the woman’s sin was?  Why was she unclean?  The text itself does not tell us, but typically, people think she was a prostitute.  In fact, ‘prostitute’ is a label which has been applied (or implied) about a lot of the women in the Bible – Abraham gave his wife away to local rulers (twice) and was reprimanded for it; Rahab was a prostitute who saved the Hebrew spies who went into the promised land to check it out; Judah thought his daughter-in-law was a prostitute when she tricked him into giving her the son she deserved by law; just about every Mary in the Bible has been painted with this same brush, including the mother of Jesus, whose pregnancy was suspect from the beginning.  Yesterday, on NPR, I heard a guest describe Mary Magdalene as a prostitute – but she was the woman delivered of seven demons by Jesus, but that doesn’t make her a whore.

And it actually makes a big difference in the message of this text if we sign our weeping woman off as a prostitute.  First, because there’s not much chance that anyone in this congregation is now, or ever has been, a whore – particularly not the men!  Second, when we categorize this woman, we abstract her, and can disassociate ourselves with the meaning of the text.  Jesus is speaking to her sin, which is not my sin, so I don’t have to listen.

But there are many clues in the text which indicate that she is not a prostitute.  She got into the home of a Pharisee.  At least outwardly, then, she could not have been such an ‘extreme case.’  Remember the woman Jesus healed of a hemorrhage?  She was even afraid to touch Jesus in a noisy crowd outside.  If this woman were sexually unclean, she probably never would have had the nerve to come into a Pharisee’s home and try to touch a rabbi.  And she’s carrying an alabaster jar full of ointment; the expense of that indicates that she was rich, and prostitutes don’t get rich.  Pimps and madams may, but not prostitutes.

So, if not a prostitute, what?  The term ‘sinner’ was often applied to men who were either lapsed in their Jewish faith, or to people who collaborated with the Roman oppressors.  And while it may have been rare that women were entrepreneurs at all in that day, there were some.  The evidence is that they traded over long distances, too, as we know from Lydia, who traded purple cloth from western Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) into Macedonia (Greece) and beyond.  However, these women would not have been considered courageous and intelligent; society looked askance at any woman who exceeded her traditional social roles.  Her neighbors would have thought her to some degree selfish and greedy, or even decadent.[1]

The hints throughout the text are convincing.  When the Pharisee thinks, “she is a sinner,” we should almost react by saying, “It takes one to know one!”  He, a wealthy man in Roman-occupied territory, may well have done business with her!  At any rate, he dismisses her as unworthy and expects Jesus to do the same.

But Jesus takes a different approach.

He tells a story about a creditor with two debtors.  The one owes five hundred dinarii, the second fifty denarii.  One denarius at that time was the day-wage for a laborer.  Two denarii paid the Temple tax.  Five denarii could buy you an ox.[2]

So Jesus is comparing the weeping woman to someone who owes five hundred oxen.  And the Pharisee to someone who owes a mere fifty oxen.  Besides being something of a slap in the face to a wealthy man to be so much less wealthy than a woman, Jesus is comparing them as peers.  He did not say to the man, “Well yes, but her sin is sexual and yours non-sexual, so she ‘owes’ more.  Their sin is the same.  Basically, he is naming Simon, the Pharisee, as a Roman collaborator, too!

And here’s why that is so important: as long as the woman’s sin is seen as sexual, it remains personal.  In our minds, as in the minds of those who first read Luke’s gospel, a whore bears the shame of her own degradation.

But a collaborator shames everyone.

Before we feel sorry for Simon, remember, he invited Jesus over – and now it’s looking like it was more about status or curiosity than a real desire to know Jesus.  He skipped all the proper niceties that a good Jewish host was supposed to observe.  And Jesus compares him again to the woman, and again he is found to be lacking.

What is important here is that Jesus is not talking about status, he is talking about LOVE.  Which debtor, being unable to pay, and having their debt completely cancelled, completely forgiven, will love their creditor more?  This is not a term you would use to describe finances; nor would you use it to describe someone whose shame is more than personal.  You would expect to hear ‘gratitude’ maybe, or ‘relief.’  The weeping woman gets this; the recalcitrant Pharisee does not.

Jesus overrides the abstract ‘sinner’ label Simon has stuck on this woman.  He says, “Do you SEE this woman?”  Simon did not see her.  He looked at her and thought he knew her – and thought that Jesus did not know her.  But Jesus knew more than Simon, saw more in the woman than Simon, who was without love, could ever see.

He saw a woman who ‘got it.’  Who had come face to face with the real shame of her public sin, the cost of it, the impact of it, and then was stunned to find in that very place God’s forgiveness.  Her entire debt cancelled for no other reason than that this is what God wanted.  Because God loved her.

Simon, without love, is still working off the payment plan for that sectional sofa.  And much of the time, so are we.  You see, I think it’s easy for us to pray for and accept God’s forgiveness for our personal sins.  Most of us do realize, ‘get,’ that we are not perfect.  We do what we shouldn’t, are thoughtless or unkind, or even a bit cruel at times.  We get impatient, we get greedy, we get offended.  We know that God loves us anyway.

But as Brian McLaren says in his book Everything Must Change, “Only a fraction of our sins are personal.  By far the greater part are sins of neglect, sins of default, our social sins, our systematic sin, our economic sin.”[3]

It is our public sin, the things we do as a group, which we like to hide away or ignore.  The times we added our voice to an unloving label, happy to slap it on someone else when it well could be applied to us, too.  The times we abstracted another person, made them less than human, less than valued, less than loved because our hearts had no love in them for someone who did not ‘belong.’  The times we did not welcome, honor, embrace Christ because we were more concerned with appearances than with truth.

I think that Jesus’ question, “which of them will love him more?” is ironic.  I think he meant for Simon to realize, as he answered, “I suppose the one for whom he cancelled the greater debt” that his own answer applied to him, and not to the woman.  For the woman has seen what is true through the eyes of love, but Simon – Simon still doesn’t get it.

We don’t have the whole story.  Theologians discuss and argue whether the woman received forgiveness because of her love (and didn’t need Jesus to ‘forgive’ her), or if she loved because she was forgiven.  Luke is ambiguous.  I’m going to take a risk.  I’m going to say that forgiveness came first, that God’s forgiveness pre-exists our repentance – and it was this truth that filled our weeping woman’s heart with love. 

How irresistible is love which loves us before we are sorry, before we even realize how deep our sin is?  How impossible is it for us to even see that love when we are focused on imposing the full penalty of the debt to ourselves and to others?

Jesus affirms the woman, “Your sins ARE forgiven.”  The people around the table dive for their account books.  “Is he allowed to cancel the debt?  Is he the creditor?  What does the sales contract say?”

Jesus, facing the woman says, “YOUR faith has saved you; go in peace.”

Bibliography

Jeffers, James S.  The Greco-Roman World of the New Testament Era: Exploring the Background of Early Christianity.  Intervarsity Press: Downers Grove, IL; 1999.

McLaren, Brian D.  Everything Must Change: When the World’s Biggest Problems and Jesus’ Good News Collide.  Thomas Nelson: Nashville, TN; 2007.

Harmon, Nolan B., ed.  The Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. VIII.  Abingdon Press: Nashville, TN; 1980.