Sermon of July 1, 2007

July 1, 2001
Luke 7: 36-50
Mary Vance, Preacher

Forgive us our Sins

Sometimes when I read a Gospel passage that I’m going to preach from, my first thought is what is this about? Sometimes, like the passage we just heard, I wonder how do we decide which of the many lessons here should we explore? Brant taught me a long time ago, not to try to say everything that could be said. We need to focus. So this morning I’ve narrowed the subject to two basic issues: Sin and forgiveness. We should be able to do these justice in an hour or two of preaching—Actually, we couldn’t even begin to scratch the surface about sin and forgiveness in an hour, but maybe we can give ourselves some food for thought. Hopefully, not just thought, but action also.

First let’s look at what is going on in the Gospel passage. Jesus is having dinner at the home of a Pharisee. This is not one of the bad guys, he’s clearly someone Jesus is comfortable with. There is nothing sinister about his being there.

You know how it is at a dinner party—if you have more than 5-6 people present, pretty soon you have more than one conversation going on at a time –mostly you’re talking to the person on your left or right, while somebody two places down from you is talking to somebody else on their left or right. Sometimes, you are trying to pay attention to the person your talking to, but you know this other conversation going on is interesting or you kind of start to realize they’re talking about you so your radar goes up.

And that’s probably how it is this evening at Simon the Pharisee’s house. Now, we would be mighty surprised if we were sitting at a dinner party and some uninvited woman came in and started washing one of the guests’ feet, but that part of the story is not what seems to have gotten the tongues wagging.

What happens is that the woman comes in and goes to work on Jesus and Simon makes a sort of casual remark that is laden with all kinds of presuppositions and implications. Jesus can either pretend he didn’t hear it and let it pass or he can seize a teaching opportunity. Well, he is the great teacher after all, so he takes the opportunity to show us that a lot of what we just take for granted can be a cover up for hurtful prejudices and just plain wrong thinking—wrong in the sense of understanding who and what God calls us to be.

Simon’s comment shows its not what she is doing that is sinful or even inappropriate behavior, it is the fact that the person who is doing it is a sinner.

This raises one of the issues of prejudice. Because she is a woman and she’s called a sinner, there is this presumption that her sin is sexual—she must be a prostitute. Interestingly, when there is a reference to a man being a sinner, the presumption is usually that his sin has to do with money or power. The big sinner example in the Gospel stories is always the tax collectors, presumably because they were corrupt and cheated people out of their money.

But a lot of the time, like in this story, we don’t really know what specifically is the sin-- or what are the sins-- that makes this woman "a sinner."

My brother the infidel, has an intellectual interest in what he calls "all that religion stuff." He has asked me before whether some sins are worse than other sins. Is murder a "bigger" sin or a "Greater" sin than stealing? It is one of those deeply philosophical issues that has been the subject of endless debate and consideration. Intuitively, most people are going to say of course murder is worse than stealing. But the question gets harder—what is worse, sexual sin or fraud and corruption by a person in power? So, is it correct to say there are differences in the severity of sin and therefore the level of any given person’s sinfulness or sinful state?

I don’t want to keep you on your seats about this so I’m going to tell you I don’t have the answer to the question.

What I would suggest is that while it is a fascinating academic question, it really is not an essential that Christians need to resolve in order to go about being Christian.

When I told my brother that I was going to preach this week about sin and forgiveness, his first question was—are you going to define your terms? What is sin after all. There are different ways to say it, but essentially sin is "human deviation from the expressed will and desire of God."

So, my brother and I got into a big discussion about what you might call "passive sin." Sins that don’t directly hurt another person. He named the 7 deadly sins, which is not something reformed theology is obsessed with, but he suggested that if you are sitting in a room all by yourself thinking about how to amass great wealth (greed) or plotting to get revenge for some offense you have suffered (wrath), but you never actually do anything but think about it, he doesn’t see how that is a sin. I said well that is an easy one. If you are wasting away the precious gift of life that God gave you obsessing or dwelling on ways you might be able to deviate from the will of God, then you are deviating from the will of God.

So next my brother said, well who knows what the will of God is. That is a harder question. I read an article this week [Mark Gallie, Christianity Today] reminding us that God is too great and wonderful for us to fully grasp—"To know God is to know that God is unknowable." But we are called into relationship with this unknwowable God. Out of all God’s creation, only humans are called to respond appropriately to God’s love. As one theologian puts it: only human beings are morally accountable for appropriate responses –only we are endowed with that accountable freedom (Ogden 98). Only we have the freedom to be accountable.

Because God has called me, I know the joy that comes with responding to his call. I also know that I am constantly choosing an inappropriate response instead of the appropriate response. So, I am a sinner. And that’s that. Whether I’m a big sinner or a little sinner is not important in terms of my own relationship with God. Either way I fall short of the response that I want to make to God.

Fortunately, because of the Grace of God I can repent—I can realize that I am a sinner and I can choose to change my ways.

And, like the woman who washes Jesus’ feet, I know that my sins are forgiven. Unlike the folks at the dinner party, I also know that Jesus can do that. He can and he does forgive me.

Jesus says something kind of strange in this passage when he starts talking about forgiveness:

Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love.

The NIV says it this way:

Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven-- for she loved much.

This sort of sounds like her sins are forgiven because she loved much and that is a little misleading.

Maybe this is a case where the Message says it best:

I tell you, her sins—and they have been many—have been forgiven, so she has shown me much love.

The point is that she knows the grace of God—she knows the joy of forgiveness and that is why she is able to show Jesus great love. At this point in her life she is responding appropriately to God’s love.

But apparently, it is Jesus’ concluding remarks that really sets the tongues to wagging at this dinner party. That’s when he tells this woman that her sins are forgiven.

Everybody’s saying "who is this guy?" Because we all know that only God can forgive sins. There are people who say the whole point of this story is Jesus’ self-disclosure of his divine nature. That may be a point of this story, but I don’t think he concocted the whole episode just so he could drop a subtle hint about who he is—there are plenty of places where he is quite intentional about revealing himself. And I don’t think Jesus said what he did because he wanted the story to be all about him.

[Well of course in one sense it is all about him, but that’s another subject.]

It is true that what Jesus does here is not within the realm of ordinary human ability to forgive others for what has been done to them. This sinners’ transgressions were not directed at him in his human character, they were sins against God. And Jesus does make it clear that he has the right to speak for God in matters of judgment and forgiveness. He possesses that authority himself so his forgiveness of her is not presumptuous or blasphemous.

This is not very revolutionary thought to most of us who read the story from a post-resurrection perspective because we start out with our own understanding of Jesus’ authority as God the Son to forgive.

What is remarkable is that we don’t know what this woman’s sins are. We don’t know if it’s just sexual sin or murder or both. Whatever they are – we do know they are many—they are all forgiven.

We don’t have that authority that Jesus has to judge sinners. But Jesus also tells us to forgive others. When we pray the prayer Jesus taught us, we say "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." [Mat. 6:12] Or, as Luke puts it:

"Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us." [Lk.11-4

As Paul tries to explain in his letters, Christ lives within us. He loves us and he gave himself for us out of that love. It was the ultimate act of forgiveness. So the rhetorical question becomes, if Christ lives in me, if Christ loves me in spite of my sinfulness—which we know from the Gospel that he does, how can I harbor resentment and animosity toward people who have offended me? There is no room inside us for both the life of Christ and the ugliness of unforgiveness.

This is what we acknowledge when we pray the Lord’s Prayer. We don’t say God , if you will forgive me, I’ll forgive them. It is not a bargaining situation. We are acknowledging the wonder of immense love that goes along with God forgiving us. We acknowledge that because we receive that great love, because the love of Jesus Christ lives within us, we are able to respond by also forgiving those who have sinned against us. Ultimately then, our forgiveness of others is a response to God’s grace-filled forgiveness of us. Forgiveness is a gift from God whether it is God forgiving us or our ability to forgive others. Either way it nourishes us, strengthens us and makes our lives better—both in this world and the next.

-- Mary Vance is a Candidate for the Ministry of Word and Sacrament in the Presbyerian Church (U.S.A.). She serves as the Ministry Intern at First Presbyterian Church.

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