Fourth Sunday after Pentecost.

Reading: Luke 7:36-8:3

It’s grateful women Sunday!

The little bit of text that follows the story was often missing in the lectionaries previously, but it is not an unrelated passage. There was an entourage of Women who had been forgiven and cured by Jesus who took care of his needs on his journey. And while Jesus’ treatment of women is significant, I believe this story has more universal implications as well; perhaps surprising implications about the correlation of sin and love.

And yes, the women in these stories are all serving Jesus and one could read this as preserving the sexist status quo, but that the women are mentioned at all is significant. And in another version of this story, Jesus made sure this woman would be mentioned, as they often aren’t. Women are part of Jesus’ story and he wanted it that way.  

But before we get too caught up in the gender of the sinner in this story, let’s look at what Jesus is really trying to teach the Pharisee. It’s all too easy, especially knowing all Jesus says about the Pharisees in Matthew, to read this exchange as a reprimand. But on closer examination, it looks to me like Jesus is genuinely taking advantage of a teaching moment.

Notice that Jesus basically asks permission to speak in the first place. And perhaps all the things Jesus points out that Simon didn’t do, wasn’t what he expected Simon to do but were mentioned to illustrate all the above and beyond things the woman was doing. And while Jesus may be responding to what Simon is thinking, Simon did not say it aloud. He did not publically challenge Jesus; Simon was internally trying to discern if Jesus was really a prophet.

And so Jesus says what William James would prove through the “science of psychology” centuries later, that those who have fallen far, those who God has lifted from the mud pits of their lives, those who have had a crisis of faith, who have been lost and found again, their love and devotion reaches heights as high as how deep the depths are that they sunk to.  

What are the depths this woman sunk to? One of those “paraphrase” translations actually calls the sinful woman the “town harlot.” The assumption that her sin is sexual infuriated me, because there’s nothing in the text to suggest this, it’s pure misogyny and sexism. What else is a woman for right? To be absolutely sure there was nothing in the text, I even went to the original Greek. The word used for sin here implies sin out of one’s own agency, presumably to indicate it wasn’t biology (the sin of having your period) or parental (remember the debate about the blind man?)

But of course all of our choices are influenced if not determined by our circumstances. Yes, we have agency, but it’s limited. Circumstances matter to God. The Bible is full of stories of people doing sinful things in order to accomplish something that’s in the end God’s will; Rebekah tricking Jacob into blessing Isaac for example. In Matthew Jesus’ genealogy lists three women who transgressed in the name of the Lord, in many of these cases the woman’s very survival was at stake. In Biblical times a woman literally could not survive unless she was attached to a man, or unless she survived by unacceptable means. If even in our enlightened and “post-feminist” world women are consistently treated as less than people, how much more so was it the case in first century patriarchal Palestine?

We don’t know the specific circumstances of this sinful woman. We don’t know what she’s done. Jesus knows but in our story he never asks her to confess or repudiate what she’s done. He implies she’s already been forgiven, but He forgives her within the story. That’s a bit puzzling, but perhaps Jesus can tell I the love she’s displaying that her faith in Jesus’ forgiveness has already forgiven her. Jesus sees that she’s showing great love. In showing great love she is proving her repentance.

Because whatever our circumstances, however our choices are limited, however we justify our sins to ourselves, eventually you can reach a point where you can’t live with yourself, and any hope that you’re forgivable, even a small tiny hope that God can help you change can well up previously unimaginable love and gratitude.

Can you imagine yourself kissing Jesus feet, washing them with your tears, caressing them with your hair, down on the ground, behind Him? Can you imagine yourself abandoning yourself to such devotion? I certainly can, and I know many others who can as well. 

Maybe you’re actually lucky if you can’t imagine yourself in that position. Perhaps you haven’t been so lost, so devoid of hope that groveling at Jesus’ feet seems like a step up. I certainly would not wish the kind of life that implies on anyone. 

But for those of us who have lost to that degree and been found, who have been forgiven as much as the woman we read about tonight. We consider ourselves to be lucky; lucky to be newly alive, lucky to not have burned down quite everything in ourselves, lucky to be able to tend to Jesus with whatever resources we have left.

Or maybe, just maybe, the teaching moment opened Simon’s heart. We aren’t told how he responds. Maybe knowing that such love and devotion is possible, that such forgiveness is possible, moved him to empathy for the sinful woman. Maybe you don’t have to go to the depths to find that kind of love and devotion to Jesus. Maybe just witnessing it and opening your heart to it can get you on your knees weeping at Jesus feet, knowing the magnitude of what he’s done can mean for others.

Now I’m not saying that Jesus didn’t reconcile us all to God, he certainly did. None of us are free from sin. The plain truth is, though, that some of us sin more than others. And as far down as I have been, I can still find myself looking at others and wanting to cast the first stone. There’s a frighteningly remarkable human ability to have that kind of amnesia. And so, it’s not just for the sake of women this story needs to be told – though it does need to be told for that reason as well. It’s to remind those of us who have been her and those of us who can empathize with her –not pity her, mind you empathize with– to remind us of why we should be grateful to kiss Jesus’ feet.