Reading Luke Together #23 – Out of the Box

Since we’re “Reading Luke Together,” find a Bible (or you can google these things!) and read Luke 7:36-50. Don’t hustle through it, or think Oh, I know this one. A slow pace, picture the scene, the people, hear the words and sounds.

A very important man invites Jesus to dinner. Why? He’d heard amazing things and wished to see for himself? So he could tell his friends? To find fault? If we’ve read much of Luke, the mere words “He asked Jesus to eat with him” is a signal that a jarring surprise is on the way, that the asker is about to be asked the toughest questions of his life.

An uninvited guest finds her way in somehow. She is “a woman who was a sinner.” All women and men are sinners! Sizing her up as “a sinner” is what the host and his friends did. After this woman, armed with an alabaster flask of ointment has washed Jesus’ feet, the shocked, smug host says “If he were really a prophet, he would have known what sort of woman this is touching him.” But obviously you don’t need prophetic powers, as this host has her all figured out!

And notice the text tells us “He said this to himself.” Ah, the loud torrent of judgment that is unleashed in the privacy of our own heads! Jesus understands what he’s thinking though, not because Jesus has prophetic powers but because he knows people, especially the good people, and how they bolster their own egos by belittling those beneath them. Moral superiority isn’t very clever at hiding.

Instead of denouncing the guy’s hypocrisy, Jesus – typically – tells a story. Two debtors, one owing much, the other a little, are forgiven what they owe. Who loves more? The host can only answer “The one who owned more.” I bet he was thinking “I’m the one forgiven very little, or maybe nothing at all!”

But Jesus shifts the playing field from sin and debt to love. This woman loves, but this smug, very good man knows nothing of love – except love for the one he was sharing his judgmental thoughts with privately: himself. Richard Rohr preached a lovely little homily on this moment, naming for us that “because you are forgiven, only then do you know how to love.” It’s all about always being “humble and grateful,” and “leaving judgment to God, since our judgment simply doesn’t matter.” It only eats us up from the inside, and harms those we judge.

Rohr finishes by reminding us that “leaving judgment to God is good news. When we judge, we put the judged person into a box, like this woman. Jesus lets her and the others out of the box every time. When God forgives, God is saying his relationship with you and the others is more important than being right. God would prefer a relationship far more than God being right and you being wrong.”

What was wrong with her anyhow? Jesus slips a little clue into his story, hoping we’ll realize it’s not numbers of sins. How would we count, anyhow? My problem isn’t that I’ve committed 7, or 43, or 216 sins plural. I am rather a sinner. I didn’t mess up. I’m a mess, and I live in a mess like the rest of us. We’re all broken, all entirely lost without God. We don’t get to God’s love by doing good, but by humbly, gratefully receiving the love.

And then we return the love. This woman brought oil, but the beauty in her lavishing love on the one who loved her and also his host is in her tears. Are they tears of sorrow, regret? Or tears of love, so overwhelmed and moved – like tears at a long awaited reunion, tears on hearing surgery was successful, tears shed when a long embittered relationship finds the way to tender reconciliation?

Luke 7:36-50. Lovely. Yet one more variation on Jesus’ core theme: “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:32). Good thing, too, for this woman, this host, and all of us reading about it.