Christian Living: "Being Forgiven"

Today we begin to look at the Christian life through the Gospel of Luke. We will be reading passages about what it means to live as a Christian. And, we can guess before we even get started what’s in store. We will be told, for instance, that if we want to become followers of Christ that we must deny ourselves and take up our cross daily; to save our lives, we must lose our lives for Christ’s sake (Luke 9:23-24).

But, we don’t start our discussion of the Christian life with a list of rules, of musts and shoulds – a list that includes some pretty onerous demands. No, we start our discussion of the Christian life by talking about forgiveness.

Why forgiveness? Why do we begin our discussion of the Christian life with forgiveness? Because, well because without forgiveness, there can be no love. And, without love our Christian life becomes only a list of impossible rules and musts. Our Christian life becomes a matter of guilt or pride, but not love.

Why forgiveness? Paul Tillich, one of the 20^th century’s most influential theologians and philosophers, said that "nothing greater can happen to a human being than he [or she] is forgiven." (The New Being (1955), reprinted in www.religion-online.org). Karl Menninger, the famed psychiatrist, once said that if he could convince the patients in psychiatric hospitals that their sins were forgiven, 75 percent of them could walk out the next day! (Today in the Word, March 1989, p. 8.) One unknown author put it this way: "If our greatest need had been information, God would have sent us an educator; If our greatest need had been technology, God would have sent us a scientist; If our greatest need had been money, God would have sent us an economist; If our greatest need had been pleasure, God would have sent us an entertainer; But our greatest need was forgiveness, so God sent us a Savior."

Why forgiveness? Because, we need the reassurance, as a line from our service of baptism says, that "we are washed in the promise of God’s forgiving love . . . ." Without being washed in this forgiving love, without this cascade of forgiveness, we’ll try and try to prove ourselves to be worthy and good in our Christian lives, dancing as fast as we possibly can to do everything that is on the list of rules without ever really hearing the tune to which we are dancing as Christians – the song of God’s love for us and the song of our love for God. Only through the wash, the cascade of forgiveness, can we approach the Christian life not as a list of rules but as a response of love, a response that brings us closer and closer to abiding in Christ and Christ in us, in the words of the epistle of First John. Only with forgiveness, can we hope to sing the song of love that actually makes our Christian life possible.

Well, shouldn’t it be simple enough then? A small boy thought the answer was, in fact, pretty simple. When his church school teacher asked, "Can anyone tell me what you must do before you can obtain forgiveness of sin?" the small boy replied simply with one word, "Sin," he said. (Bits & Pieces, May, 1991). To obtain forgiveness, you must sin.

Well, of course, there is truth in this simple answer. To obtain forgiveness, we must sin, and we need to know we have sinned. But the answer goes further as today’s story from Luke, the story of the sinful woman and the Pharisee, tells us. Knowing that we have sinned is not merely a simple answer to a simple question. Today’s story shows us that knowing we have sinned isn’t simply the kind of knowledge that is in our heads. It is the kind of knowledge that permeates our very beings. It’s the knowledge of an emptiness in us, the knowledge of something that keeps us from being whole. It’s a knowledge deep in our souls that propels us to find our Savior.

The woman in our story had this kind of knowledge. From the beginning of the story we know intellectually, as a matter of fact, what everyone in the story knew. This woman was a sinner. We don’t know her sin although the story might be spicier if we speculated. But, this speculation isn’t necessary. All we need to know is that she was known in town as a sinner, not a good Jew like the Pharisee in the story. She was a sinner, not a good Jew who had followed all the rules. She came knowing who she was, a sinner - not one impressed with her own goodness, not one trying to prove herself to God or anyone else.

She came knowing who and what she was. She came seeking her Savior. She may have heard of this man named Jesus who seemed to love those no one else would or could, who had the power to forgive sins. Something drew her to find this man, to interrupt on his dinner, to intrude in a way that might bring her further scorn and shame. After all, she knew the rules of the game. She was unclean, she was unwelcome, she was a sinner in the eyes of all.

Yet, she had heard of this man. And, she sought out this man, this Son of God, who forgave sins. We can imagine that she was drawn to Jesus as if she had no choice, as if that place, that empty place in her that ached to be filled could not resist finding this Jesus, this Son of God, who could make her whole.

And, so something propelled her, something inside her was willing to do anything to find her Savior. We don’t know how she knew Jesus was her Savior, but we know without a doubt that she knew. Her words don’t tell us this, because, in fact, she never utters a word. But, we don’t need her words. All we need to do is capture the beauty of her actions – actions that take only one sentence in the story to describe, but actions that teach us more lessons about forgiveness than many words could.

Together let’s look again at this sinful woman. See her with me in your mind’s eye, kneeling at Jesus’ feet, kneeling so that she could anoint his precious feet with fragrant oil. As she kneels, she’s overcome with emotion and begins to weep so uncontrollably that her tears flow onto Jesus’ dusty feet, dusty because his host, the good Pharisee, hadn’t extended the small hospitality of seeing that his guest’s road worn feet were washed. We can imagine the woman must have been taken aback, even a little embarrassed as the flood of her tears began to bathe her Savior’s feet. And, having nothing else to wipe away the tears that fell, she takes down her hair to dry his feet – an act that would have risked even further scorn from those gathered. Yet she wipes Jesus’ feet with her hair. And, the more she wipes, the more tears that fall. And, all the while, as her tears wash Jesus’ feet, this woman, this sinful woman, has been kissing his feet – kissing them over and over again.

With this beautiful scene in front of us, we hardly need Jesus’ parable to tell us that this woman loved Jesus deeply. But, lest we make the mistake of some translators, it was not because of her deep love that she was forgiven. It was because of Christ’s forgiveness, forgiveness that was hers before the first tear fell on his feet, it was in response to this incredible gift of forgiveness that she loved so deeply. This sinful woman loved much because she had been forgiven much. In the words of the parable about the 500 and 50 denari debtors, this woman was a 500 denari sinner. Her debt was great; her need for forgiveness was great; her love in response was great.

But, what about the 50 denari sinner? What about the Pharisee, a righteous man, a good man, a man who knew the rules of the religious life, a man who, through the lens of these rules, could look only with disgust on this woman and suspicion on Jesus. What about the Pharisee, the 50 denari sinner? His actions, just as the woman’s, speak volumes to us about forgiveness. He knew the rules, but there was no love in his actions. The Pharisee knew all the rules, but he didn’t know the love that flows when we know, not with our heads, but with our whole being, that "we are washed in the promise of God’s forgiving love . . . ." The Pharisee knew the rules, but he didn’t know the tears of love, tears flowing on the Savior’s feet. The Pharisee knew the rules, but he didn’t know the love that must be the foundation of the religious life, the Christian life.

Does this mean that if you aren’t the type of sinner who has sinned greatly – the 500 denari type of sinner, that you are incapable of a great love. No, I don’t think that Jesus’ parable contrasting the debtor who owes much with the one who owes little is meant to instruct us to begin dividing ourselves into 50 denari sinners or 500 denari sinners. Actually, it is at the point when the Pharisee did just that, when, in his thoughts, he began to identify the woman as a 500 denari sinner and himself implicitly as the 50 denari type, that Jesus interrupts the Pharisee’s thoughts with the parable. Remember right before the parable about the debtors in our story, the Pharisee thought to himself "If this man[, meaning Jesus,] were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him – that she is a sinner." We can just hear the disgust the Pharisee has for this women.

Immediately, however, Jesus uses the parable of the two debtors to rebuke the Pharisee. It’s not that the woman’s sin is irrelevant or that the Pharisee’s righteousness is wrong. But, to truly lead the religious life, the Christian life - before the rules, before the righteousness, must come love and before love, forgiveness. Forgiveness that means searching for our Savior, letting the Spirit propel us, drive us to find him and to fall crying at his feet. Forgiveness that gives us new life, makes us whole, begins to let that empty place in each of us be filled with God’s love.

In reality, we are all 500 denari sinners. We have much to be forgiven, not perhaps because our actions have been so sinful, not because we are known as a sinner in our town. We have much to be forgiven because our Lord and Savior gave his life so that we might be reconciled to God. We have all been forgiven a great debt. We all need to let the tears of love flow uncontrollably on our Savior’s feet. The tears that say we know, not just in our heads, but in our whole beings. The tears that say we know we are sinners, that we know we need forgiveness, the tears that say we know we have been forgiven. When we know that our debt is great and that that great debt has been forgiven, then we can talk about the Christian life, not a life oblivious to the rules, but a life that is washed first in love – a love from which all else flows. When we know, when we feel in our being that we have been forgiven, when the ache within subsides and the empty place begins to fill, then the Christian life becomes not a dance of rules, a dance that we can never do quite fast enough, but the Christian life becomes a song of love, a song that propels us forward to a life we never thought possible, a life in which we abide in the love of Christ and the love of Christ abides in us. This is the Christian life.