This sermon was preached at St. John's Lutheran, Karoonda (9 am) and Trinity Lutheran, Tailem Bend (11 am).
We're pretty good at spotting bad advice. “Child, you better make
a lot of money so you can get a job” - obviously bad advice. “You
better plant them seeds so you can fix that seeder”. We have a
problem with those, but do we have a problem with this piece of
advice, “You better love God so he'll forgive you.” Christ our
Lord has a problem with that advice, and teaches us what's true in
today's Gospel reading.
Because where is Jesus in today's reading? He's at the house of a
certain Pharisee. Why? To eat, but not just to eat, because this is
a Sabbath meal. The closest thing for us would be an annual luncheon
– it's a big event, and there's often a speaker. But a Sabbath
meal would often have a teacher come and the topic would be something
from God's Word. So it looks like Jesus was invited to be the
speaker at a big time occasion.
But what's the surprise? It's the moment when everyone would have
said, “What's this person doing here?”. And that's the moment
when “a
woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was
reclining at table in the Pharisee's house”
came to where Jesus was. Whatever this woman has done, it's public,
and it has made her ceremonially unclean, so that the Pharisees
wouldn't eat with her. But the point here is that Jesus is the
honored guest in the house, but who treats him like one? An honored
guest was supposed to get all the things Jesus mentioned – water to
wash his feet, a kiss of peace, and an anointing with oil, so
everyone there knows who the special guest is. “Hey, where's that
nice smell coming from?” “That guy, because he's the special
guest, so I anointed his head.” But the Pharisee didn't give any
of that to Jesus. Yet what does the woman give? She washes his
feet, with her tears, kisses his feet, and anoints his feet with very
nice smelling myrrh. Even if the Pharisee had done all the things he
was supposed to, they still wouldn't compare with the love that this
woman showed him. Why is that? Jesus explains, “Therefore
I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven-- for she loved
much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little."
”
And there's a problem with that, because you'd rather not be a big
sinner. But between the woman and the Pharisee, who does that
resemble? The woman knew whatever she had done had made her life in
her community hard, in some way she had cut herself off from the
people around her. So she had that wrongdoing before her all the
time. The Pharisee's sins were smaller in the eyes of the community,
but not before God. The Pharisee didn't want to be a big sinner, and
that's seen by the result of him not loving Jesus by even bothering
to be a good host. It's this woman, whom the Pharisee identifies in
his head as a “sinner”, that treats Jesus as an honored guest.
So if we're talking about results, does that mean when it says,
“Therefore
I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven-- for she loved
much.” that because she loved Jesus he forgave
her? Isn't that the bad advice from the beginning of the sermon? Is
that what that means? No. The results for the woman were the
anointing and washing of Jesus' feet. The cause was hearing of
Jesus, his rebuke of sin and his promise of forgiveness as the thing
that makes it all okay. That's what Jesus taught. He taught the
forgiveness of sins. And so that phrase is identifying the cause by
its results. That's because the forgiveness is invisible, we can't
see her forgiveness, but the resulting love wasn't, it was the
visible evidence.
You can see the same thing with the Pharisee. The results of the
Pharisee were being a bad host and “just knowing” that Jesus
wasn't a prophet or he wouldn't go near this “big sinner” - as it
says, “If
this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of
woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.”.
The cause was hearing Jesus and not being a big sinner. You
couldn't see what the Pharisee was thinking to himself, you could see
the result which would have been the rude look on his face. But
Jesus knew his unbelief and so told a parable that showed the results
of his unbelief. That's how you can deduce the cause – from the
results!
It takes a boldness to be a big sinner, and we don't understand it.
To be a big sinner isn't to go knocking over banks, it's to trust in
the forgiveness of sins, to hear the Word of God and repent. Little
sinners either won't take any reproof of their big sins, or despair
when those sins are seen in the community. That's why we confess our
sins. Confess means “to say the same thing”, and here we're
saying that what we say about our sins is what God says about our
sins. We always are big sinners, but when we repent we confess our
sins to be what they really are.
But it's a very good thing to let the Bible itself explain the
phrase “Therefore
I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven-- for she loved
much.” for us. That's a lot better than just
taking that one sentence out of the text and getting confused by it.
There are two places in today's Gospel itself that prove that the
woman's love didn't cause Jesus to forgive her. The first is the
parable Jesus told, which is central to the reading: “A
certain moneylender had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii,
and the other fifty. 42
When they could not pay, he cancelled the debt of both. Now which of
them will love him more?" 43
Simon answered, "The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the
larger debt." And he said to him, "You have judged
rightly." ” In this
parable, what happens first, the moneylender cancelling the debt, or
the debtor loving him? First he cancels the debt, then they love
him. First Jesus forgives you your sins, then you love him.
The second place is the very next sentence in v. 47: “But
he who is forgiven little, loves little.”
What comes first there? First the forgiveness, then the love. And
the problem for the Pharisee is that he didn't love at all, so what
does that say?
This is also illustrated by the sentence “Where there's smoke,
there's fire.” This is the same thing Jesus is saying – seeing
the results allows you to trace them back to their cause. We don't
say that smoke causes fire, but the other way around. Smoke is
evidence of fire. Your love is evidence of faith.
This is important so that we may imitate the woman's faith in the
right way, and not imitate the Pharisee. This woman is overcome with
gratitude and love because of Jesus' teaching, so much that she
begins to weep, and in weeping she rains down tears on his feet. She
doesn't think of how it looks, so she just takes her hair down and
uses it to wipe up the tears (which was culturally shameful). She
takes the expensive flask of myrrh and anoints Jesus' feet, which is
very unique in Scripture. She violates all the things you should do
for an honored guest. But while the Pharisee is disdaining her,
Jesus says to her “Your sins are forgiven”. He praises her
faith, and bids her to depart in peace. The highest worship of
Christ is to seek forgiveness from him. (This reading is also
important for when you don't see that you have any love. If there
isn't love, you have no way to produce those results again unless
they come the same way that they came before – as a result! So
it's not “I’ve got to get more love”. It's “I've got to
repent and trust God's Word about my forgiveness from Jesus.”)
There is a lot to be said about the cause of this love: Jesus
reproves sin, Jesus fixes everything he came to fix by forgiveness.
That's the fix. That forgiveness leads him to say “depart in
peace” - the same thing we hear at the communion railing. This is
not an accident. He's so in the business of forgiving big sinners
that he puts his forgiveness in mouths, from any Christian who finds
a terrified conscience and speaks what Jesus has done, and in the
public worship service by a pastor, that you may hear “In the stead
and by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ I forgive you all your
sins.” That's not an accident either.
The cause of your love is the word of Christ's cross for you. Pure
and simple. You're a big sinner? Good, because you have a Savior
who's a big forgiver of sins, so big that he died on a cross to wipe
away every sin for you.
The results of Christ's love are when we're blessed to sit in our
local Lutheran congregation and see big sinners, but none bigger than
the one in the mirror (and then to trust what God's Word says about
big sinners – that Christ died for them).
The results of Christ's love are when we're blessed to see what our
works of love do for the community. We see what our sin does to the
community. But we see what a Christian who trusts God by loving the
neighbor does, and we praise not ourselves, but God who forgives.
Love follows only when Jesus forgives great big sins.
We're blessed to see the results of
the love of God acting in love for our neighbor. But they are the
results of Christ's great love in dying for you. It's God's Word and
grace that make you happy to be a big sinner who gets big
forgiveness. Amen.
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