When Jesus Sees Beyond Your Past

Martha Bowers Taft was asked to introduce herself to her new elementary class in Cincinnati. My name is Martha Bowers Taft. My great-grandfather was president of the United States. My grandfather was a United States senator. My daddy is ambassador to Ireland. And I am a brownie.

A young lady entirely proud of who and what she was.

Today's passage gives us a woman who is anything but. Luke has been building a portrait of Jesus as Lord — Lord over nature, Lord over disease, Lord even over death. Here we watch him as Lord over sin itself.

A Pharisee named Simon asks Jesus to dinner, and Jesus accepts. That is surprising. Jesus has said hard things about the Pharisees: their lack of care for people, their hypocrisy, their poor grasp of the Scripture they prided themselves on. The word Pharisee means separated one, and they took it to heart — they liked to stay a notch above the common man and woman. Some preferred two notches.

He goes anyway. Note that before you go any further: the man who welcomes the woman in verse 37 is at that table because he first accepted an invitation from the man who despises her.

And she comes in carrying an alabaster flask that probably cost her a month's earnings, and walks through every sideways glance in that room to get to him.

Which are you today — the one who cannot stop coming, or the one who invited him and kept a notch between you?

Simon says it to himself, which is where most of our worst thoughts live. If this man were a prophet, he would know what sort of woman is touching him.

Simon cannot see the woman for who she is, because he cannot get past what she was.

Years ago, before Kent came here, he agreed to be a character witness for a couple caught up in a nasty custody case downtown — and there is no law nastier than family law. Opposing counsel spent his opening minutes painting a portrait of a human being who might as well have been the illegitimate offspring of Satan, then turned and asked, in the tone you would use for a puppy: Now, Pastor Keller, would you willingly associate with a person like that?

Every attorney knows the first rule of cross-examination. Never ask a question you don't know the answer to.

Sir, as a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ, you would be amazed at the people I willingly associate with. I follow one who is willing to associate with the lowliest and the least likely. He is willing to associate with me. So yes, sir. I willingly associate with people like that.

The attorney's problem was not that he had been outsmarted. His problem was that he thought Christianity is for good people, to make good people better.

That is not the gospel. And it is exactly Simon's problem.

Who is the person you have filed under what they were? Say their name to yourself, and ask what it would take to see them the way Christ sees you.

Simon, I have something to say to you. And Simon says: say it, teacher.

Be careful what you ask for, Simon.

Custom in that world said that when a guest entered your home you did three things. You greeted him with a kiss. You gave him water for the dust on his feet. You put a little scented oil on his head. Ordinary hospitality — the equivalent of taking someone's coat and offering them a drink.

Simon is 0 for 3.

That is the sting of these verses. Jesus does not accuse him of a scandal. He accuses him of the ordinary courtesies he skipped, which is a much harder charge to shake, because it exposes what Simon actually thought of his guest. You do not forget three things by accident. You omit them.

And the woman has done all of it, with what she had. No kiss at the door, so she has not stopped kissing his feet. No water, so she used her tears. No oil for his head, so she poured out a flask worth a month of her life on his feet.

She brought no dignity to that room and gave everything. He had all the dignity and gave nothing.

Here is the quiet question. It is easy to examine yourself for the dramatic sins. Go looking instead for the omissions — the courtesy you did not extend, the call you did not make, the person you did not greet because you did not think they warranted it.

What are you 0 for 3 on?

Two debtors. One owes five hundred denarii, one owes fifty, and neither can pay. The moneylender forgives them both. Which of them will love him more?

Simon answers: the one, I suppose. Which is the ancient Near Eastern version of whatever.

He gets the answer right and misses the point entirely, which is a thing that can be done with almost any Bible passage. He hears an arithmetic problem. Jesus is describing the room they are sitting in.

And here is what Simon never notices about the parable he just solved. Both men were bankrupt. The fifty-denarii debtor could not pay either. The difference between him and the other was not solvency, it was the size of a bill neither of them could cover. Simon assumed he was the fifty and therefore fine. He was the fifty and therefore also forgiven or also ruined, with no third option.

That is the trap of a respectable life. If your sins are quieter, you can go a very long time mistaking a smaller debt for no debt at all — and love him accordingly. Little forgiven, little love. Not because grace was rationed, but because you never thought you needed much.

Her sins are many. Her sins are forgiven. God's grace is greater than her sins.

Say that about yourself: God's grace is greater than my sins. Then ask the uncomfortable follow-up. Do you love him like a woman with an empty flask, or like a host who forgot the water?

Jesus turns to her and says, your sins are forgiven. Then: go in peace. Literally, go into peace — a peace this woman had not known in years.

Notice the order, because everything depends on it. His acceptance produces her love. She does not purchase his acceptance with her love, and he does not wait for her to love him first. The tears and the flask are the response, not the price.

Every one of us has something. An episode, a chapter, something we did or failed to do — and if it were put on a screen in front of everyone who knows us, we would leave in haste and never come back.

So use your imagination. Stand a little distance from a horrid hill outside Jerusalem, looking at three crosses. On the middle one is a man dying for sins he never committed, the most sinless person who ever lived. You are standing there wearing your guilt like an ugly black cloak. All you can see about yourself is the ugliness of it, and all you can see about him is that he is spotless.

As his blood flows out, you feel your guilt and your shame lifting off you and being drawn into him. The holiest man who ever lived becomes the darkest, filthiest thing in the universe, because he is taking your sins and mine and the sins of the whole world onto those battered shoulders. He does not only bear our sin. He becomes it.

And as he grows darker, you are becoming white as snow.

You were made for more than shame. Go into peace — and take somebody with you.