Martha Bowers Taft, great-granddaughter of William Howard Taft, was asked to introduce herself to her new elementary school class in Cincinnati. This is what she said: 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.
Here was a young lady entirely proud of who and what she was.
Luke 7 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, and the religious establishment loses its mind over it. Four things happen in this story.
A surprising invitation
A Pharisee named Simon asks Jesus to dinner, and Jesus accepts. That is surprising, because 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 of them preferred two notches.
Years ago, before I came here, I agreed to be a character witness for a couple caught up in one of those nasty custody cases downtown. 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 — and then turned to me 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.
I chuckled before I could stop myself. 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.
His 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 that is Simon's problem too.
A scandalous demonstration
A woman of the city comes in. Luke calls her a sinner; there are young ears in the room, so I will be circumspect and say she is a streetwalker. The town is small enough that everybody knows everybody's business, and Simon knows hers. She is carrying an alabaster flask of ointment that probably cost her everything she made in a month.
Look at what she is willing to walk through to get to Jesus — the scorn, the sideways glances, the whispering the whole way there. Nothing stops her.
She pours out the ointment. Her tears fall on his feet. Then she lets her hair down, which Jewish women simply did not do in public, and wipes his feet with it. Utter abandon, at the feet of her master.
And Simon says to himself: 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.
A stinging repudiation
Simon, I have something to say to you. And Simon says, say it, teacher. Be careful what you ask for, Simon.
Two debtors, Jesus says. One owes five hundred denarii, one owes fifty, and the moneylender forgives them both. Which loves him more? The one, I suppose — which is the ancient Near Eastern version of whatever.
Custom said that when a guest entered your home you did three things: greeted him with a kiss, gave him water for the dust on his feet, and put a little scented oil on his head. Simon is 0 for 3. The woman has done all of it, with what she had.
Her sins are many. Her sins are forgiven. God's grace is greater than her sins. Let me say that again — God's grace is greater than your sins. Whatever you are dragging around behind you that you think makes you unfit to come to God, hear me: his grace is greater than your sins.
A stunning proclamation
Jesus turns to her and says, your sins are forgiven. Notice the order. 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.
Then: go in peace. Literally, go into peace — a peace this woman had not known in years.
Every one of us has something — an episode, a chapter, something we did or failed to do — that if it were put up on a screen in front of everyone who knows us, we would leave in haste and never come back.
So use your imagination. Go back two thousand years and 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. And 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 is transformed in front of your eyes into the darkest, filthiest thing in the universe, because he is taking your sins and my sins and the sins of the whole world onto those battered and broken shoulders. He does not only bear our sin. He becomes it.
And as he grows darker, you are becoming white as snow. He takes your sin and you get his righteousness. He takes your guilt and you get his perfection. He takes your shame and hands you his holiness.
That is what Jesus did on the cross for you and for me.
So do not judge people by what they look like or by what they have done. Judge them by what God sees in them. And when you leave this place, remember that you were made for more than shame. You were made for more than guilt.
