Luke 7:36-50 Galatians 2:15-21
This story of Jesus’ dinner at Simon’s house is full of valuable lessons layered in there one on top of another. As is the case with the other narratives in the gospels, someone seems to be a master of packing things in there. I only wish that I could get as much into my car for vacation. But then, I would probably have just as much difficulty getting it all back out as we do when we try to unpack stories like this one.
One key
that I have found to unraveling this
one is to look at the two people that join Jesus in the scene - the Pharisee
and the woman.
On
one side of the picture we have Simon.
He seems to have been well respected, at least fairly well off, and
since he was a successful Pharisee he probably did a pretty good job of living
righteously under Jewish law. One the
other side, we have the woman (who I’ll call Mary since the parallel anointing
story in Matthew names her as Mary Magdalene).
She was probably not so wealthy despite the fact that she possessed an
alabaster jar. She certainly wasn’t well
respected in the community. And, her
life clearly would not have fit in the category of righteousness.
Everything
that happens – everything that Jesus says – is based on a comparison of these
two.
And
so we come to another layer - the tension between righteousness and forgiveness
which Alan Culpepper describes very well....
“Does love lead to forgiveness, or is the ability to love
the result of being forgiven?”, he asks. “Jesus accepted the woman’s expression
of love as a sign that she had been forgiven much. Love is the natural response of the forgiven,
but the capacity to love is directly related to the ability to receive grace,
forgiveness, and love. Simon’s problem
was not his conduct but his attitude and self-understanding…. Because Simon thought of himself as pious and
righteous, he had no idea what it meant to be forgiven and no awareness of his
own need for forgiveness. He loved
little because he had experienced so little of God’s love. [And] because Simon did not recognize his
need for forgiveness, he excluded himself from God’s grace. On the other hand, because the woman knew she
was [imperfect], she could receive God’s forgiveness.”[1]
It
is not that righteousness and forgiveness cannot go together … or that we
cannot live righteously and also be forgiven.
Neither Culpepper nor Jesus is saying that. But there is a pitfall there that needs to be
avoided because there are two ways to interpret “righteousness.” As Jesus taught it, righteousness meant
nurturing healthy, whole relationships.
But religious authorities often seem to understand it as doing what is
necessary to keep ourselves morally “pure.” If we make Simon’s mistake and try to follow a
set of rules, then we fool ourselves into believing that we can fulfill
righteousness on our own if only we can control our lives well enough.
Another
step deeper – the issue of control.
I
just finished reading “The Shack.” It is
the story of Mack, a man who is suffering from what he calls “the Great
Sadness,” who feels like his life has spun out of control, and who has begun to
question the existence (or at least the “goodness”) of God. The reason for all of this is the death of his
youngest daughter who was kidnapped and murdered by a serial killer. That’s reason enough to feel angry and
betrayed by God, but as it happens, Missy was taken from the family’s campsite
while Mack was rescuing a son who had been trapped under a canoe. So, Mack also feels like it was all his fault
– that if he had only made different decisions or controlled the situation
differently, none of it would have happened.
Two
years later, Mack receives and mysterious invitation to travel to the cabin
where Missy was killed and meet with someone calling himself Papa – which is
his wife’s name for God. After some
struggle, he makes up his mind to go and see what it’s all about. He finds himself face to face with the three
persons of the Trinity, and even though he is seminary trained, he quickly
finds that he has very many mistaken ideas about this God.
I
picked up the book because Linda recommended it to me after my Pentecost sermon
where I told the story of the church from the point of view of the Spirit. It reminded her of the way William Young
developed the three personalities of the Trinity. And I found it to be a good read. But, I am sharing it with you because of this
conversation between Mack and Sarayu (the name of the Holy Spirit in the
book). Sarayu begins….
[2]“My goodness, you didn’t
think you could live the righteousness of God on your own, did you?”
“Well, I thought so, sorta,” [Mack replied]. “But you gotta admit, rules and principles
are simpler than relationships…. You
know how truly grateful I am for everything, but you’ve dumped a whole lot in
my lap this weekend. What do I do when I
get back? What do you expect of me now?”
…
“Let me answer that by asking you a question. Why do you think we came up with the Ten
Commandments?”
“I suppose, at least I have been taught, that it’s a set of
rules that you expected humans to obey in order to live righteously in your
good graces.”
“If that were true, which it is not, then how many do you
think lived righteously enough to enter our good graces?”
“Not very many, if people are like me,” Mack observed.
"Actually, we wanted you to give up trying to be righteous
on your own.”
“Are you saying I don’t have to follow the rules?”
“Yes. In Jesus you
are not under any law. All things are
lawful.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“Mackenzie, … trying to keep the law is actually … a way of
keeping control.”
“Is that why we like the law so much – to give us some
control?” asked Mack.
“It is much worse than that,” resumed [The Spirit]. “It grants you the power to judge others and
feel superior to them. You believe you
are living to a higher standard than those you judge. Enforcing rules … is a vague attempt to
create certainty out of uncertainty ….
Rules cannot bring freedom; they only have the power to accuse.”
Ultimately,
this scene seems to be about “letting go and letting God.” You can tell the way that I use those finger
quotes that I’m not entirely comfortable with that phrase. It seems like people use it mostly as a way
of denying or refusing their own responsibility. They say those words, take themselves out of
the center of their own lives, and sit idly by and watching as things happen
around them – watching and not engaging on the pretext that it is all up to
God.
That
is definitely not what I mean when I use those words. Letting go and letting God is not a ticket to
passively wander through the world as life goes by. For me, it means that we need to let go of our
need to control the future – our need to decide how things should turn out and then manage every detail that we can so that
everything turns out the way we planned.
That is what we need to turn over to God. As hard as it is … as scary as it may seem …
as insecure as it makes us feel, we need to turn over the future – our future –
to God. We need to let it go and trust
that God has a broader perspective and will lead us where we need to be.
We
also need to be intensely involved in the present. That means letting go of the past as well as
the future. We can learn a lot from the
past. Sometimes, we can even catch a
glimpse of where God’s plan is headed if we read it the right way. But mostly we don’t. Mostly when we look back all we see are the
mistakes we have made and the failures of others. That brings on guilt and judgment that only
lead us farther away from God, and that is not what God wants. God wants … God deeply desires restoration for us and for all of creation.
Mary
had found the love and forgiveness of God.
She came to Jesus in gratitude, and he publicly proclaimed that she had
been forgiven. In a very real sense,
that act was like a resurrection for her.
She who had been cast out of the community of believers because of her
sins against the law, she was now forgiven those sins and should be welcomed
back into the fold – restored both to God and to the community.
I
don’t know what happened to Simon after his dinner guests left, but I like to
imagine that he changed…. That he
changed radically thanks to the grace offered around that table. Now, “Unless we see something of ourselves in
the character of [Simon], we are so blind to our own need that we have failed
to hear the story.”[3] And if we have failed to hear the story, then
we may remain stuck – as Simon was – stuck in the pitfall of our own pride and
our need for control.
God’s
unfailing love is always surrounding us, guiding us, and working in our lives
to bring restoration. I like to imagine
that we all change every time we receive that gift, because once our lives have
been touched by an experience of God’s grace, God’s love becomes the controlling
force in our lives, and the gratitude of the forgiven is also the source of new
life. Ultimately, that is what salvation
is all about.
May
it be so.
[1] Culpepper,
R. Alan. “The Gospel of Luke: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections” in The
New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes, Volume IX
(Abingdon Press, Nashville) 1995. 172-3.
[2]
Young, William P. The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity.
(Windblown Media, Los Angeles). 2007. 198-203.
[3]
Culpepper, 172.
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