Who Are You?

Many thanks to D. Mark Davis of "Left Behind and Loving It" for his insights on Biblical translation and interpretation.

JOHN 1:6-8, 19-28

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.

This is the testimony given by John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, “I am not the Messiah.” And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the prophet?” He answered, “No.” Then they said to him, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’” as the prophet Isaiah said.

Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. They asked him, “Why then are you baptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?” John answered them, “I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.” This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing.

This is the Word of the Lord.

“Who are you?”

It sounds like a simple enough question, but make no mistake: these priests and Levites are no mere emissaries on a fact-finding mission. This man, this John, he is upsetting the “natural order” of things. He is a danger. This is one ladder-backed chair and bare hanging light bulb away from an interrogation.

“Who are you?”

Judea was not a great place to live in those days, at least not for most people. It was a province of the Roman Empire, and not a terribly important one. As long as the taxes were collected and the peace was kept, Rome was content to garrison some troops and send a prefect, and divide the nominal rulership of the province among the three sons of Herod the Great. The prefect, Pontius Pilate, was an administrator, but he exercised a strange kind of control over the religious hierarchy of Judea – the prefect could appoint and dismiss a High Priest at will, and he kept their holy vestments under lock and key... they could do nothing, religious or political, without Pilate's permission.

Even with these kinds of restrictions in place, the priests were the most powerful men in Judea in many ways. After all, they oversaw aspects of Temple worship – the gifts and tithes, the sacrifices; they alone decided what was and was not an acceptable offering to the Most High God. Oh, and if you didn't have a proper offering, or happened to be fresh out of the particular coins the Temple accepted as currency, no worries. There were merchants and money-changers nearby who would sell you what you needed.

And even though John never encouraged rebellion against Rome, never once spoke of insurrection against the powerful rulers of Jewish religious life, he was dangerous, because he offered people a way to worship God, hope for salvation apart from the Temple system.

Of course, John wasn't the first person to do this. There was the sect of the Essenes, for example, which John was said to be a member of, and there were the Pharisees, who strictly adhered to every real and imaged letter of the Law.

The glaring difference between all of these people and John was this, though: whereas the Essenes had abandoned Jerusalem completely in protest of how the Temple was being run, and the Pharisees kept themselves from any possible contact with ritual uncleanliness, John attracted the attention of all kinds of people – unclean and forgotten, scared and bored, curious and needy – and he touched everyone that approached him in that muddy trickle of water that was the Jordan river, and baptized them as a sign of their repentance.

Maybe that's why John's Gospel tells us that not only the priests and Levites were interrogating John, but the Pharisees as well. Both groups saw John as a threat to their authority.

And it's no wonder, is it? Just listen to how Luke's Gospel recounts the things John was teaching:

John said to the crowds coming out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”

“What should we do then?”the crowd asked.

John answered, “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.”

Even tax collectors came to be baptized. “Teacher,” they asked, “what should we do?”

“Don’t collect any more than you are required to,” he told them.

Then some soldiers asked him, “And what should we do?”

He replied, “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay.”

That's Luke 3:7-14, by the way.

You see? John was attracting people from everywhere – big cities, small villages, they came from everywhere, out to that spot on the edge of the wilderness, out in the middle of nowhere, because John spoke of a way of living in repentance that didn't depend on the whim of greedy priests or the impossible expectations of the rich Pharisees.

If all it took to be approved by God was to treat others as you yourself want to be treated, if that's all it took to be baptized, anyone could do it!

The priests and Levites, as well as the Pharisees, saw any theology that excluded their spheres of authority as a challenge to that power, and responded accordingly.

“Who are you? What possible right do you have to speak of repentance? By whose authority do you dare to offer hope through mere baptism? Who do you think you are?”

I like to imagine John, waist-deep in the sluggish water, busily baptizing, a line of people on the riverbank waiting their turn. There, next to the line but not in any way in the line, is a small knot of very well-dressed, quite shocked-and-offended men, trying not to touch anything, and barking out questions to John, who is only really half-listening as he baptizes person after person.

“Who are you?”

“I'm not the Messiah, if that's what you're asking.”

“Well then, are you Elijah?”

“Nope.”

“Are you the Prophet that Moses foretold?”

“Not him, either.”

“Well, then, who are you? Throw us a bone, give us something to take back to the bigwigs in Jerusalem. Speak up for yourself, man!”

John pauses in his baptisms and turns to the small knot of men, crossing his arms casually and grinning a bit. “Y'all ever read the book of Isaiah?”

“What kind of question is that? Of course we have.”

“Then you know: I'm a voice. The voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’”

“Straight, schmaight, buddy-roe. If you ain't the Messiah or Elijah or the Prophet, why are you baptizing people? What gives you the right?”

John reaches down and cups some of the river water in his palm, raising it shoulder high, letting it trickle back into the Jordan. “This? This is what bothers you?”

He turns back and begins baptizing again. “This is just water. If this bothers you, then buckle up, boys. You ain't seen nothin' yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just baptize with water. There's someone here, right now, who will do so much more that I ain't fit to lace up his sneakers.”

There are a few different interpretations of this passage in the Gospel of John. Some commentators believe that the primary aim of this passage is to make it clear that Jesus is a more important person than John the Baptist, which was apparently an issue in the earliest days of the church.

Maybe that's so.

But I also think that John serves as a kind of example for those of us who call ourselves by the name of Christ.

In John's time, things were broken – and I'm not simply talking about inequity and corruption, though that was everywhere. People who were always on the brink of starvation, who worked and scraped by and who desperately needed hope – who needed to know that God was there and that God cared – looked to Jerusalem for salvation and saw that they needed money to buy things for sacrifices, they needed money to pay Temple tax and tithes and this and that and the other, they needed to take time better spent working for the day's food and go to this festival and that “feast,” and they just couldn't do it all. The Essenes and the Pharisees weren't an option, either; the demands of both sects were far beyond the abilities and finances of most common Judeans.

John offered another option. Not an easier way, necessarily, but a more accessible one. And above all, he pointed away from himself, and toward Jesus.

I wonder what all those people who came to talk to John expected to hear? Not the priests and the Levites and the Pharisees in John's Gospel, but the regular folks and the tax collectors and the soldiers of Luke's account.

Did the people expect John to tell them to follow the strict edicts of the Pharisees, or to reject their lives and families and join the Essenes out in Qumran? Did the tax collectors and soldiers expect John to tell them they were beyond hope, that because of who they were and what they'd done in their lives that God hated them?

They'd all probably heard that before. Second verse, same as the first, you know?

But what John said was different: Talking about repentance is one thing, lay aside your greed and fear and corruption and show me your repentance in how you treat one another. And above all, prepare the way – prepare your hearts and your lives for Jesus. He's the one who makes the real change. I can put water on you, I can baptize, but he's the one who brings the fire of the Holy Spirit.

Who are you? Who am I? Who are we?

Whether you and I realize it or not, people are looking to us. What are we telling them?

Do we stack demands on people, requirements they must meet in order to be a part of the Body of Christ? Do we? Do we tell people who are different – different colors, different nationalities, different traditions, different orientations – that God hates them because of who they are? Do we? Do we support a corrupt system either through active participation or through passive silence? Do we?

Or do we speak and do love? Do we offer real hope? Do we speak truth to power? Do we point the way to Jesus?

Who are you?

"A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners..."

I borrowed, heavily and unapologetically, from the work of Mick Mooney for this sermon. 

If we got as upset over the nearly sixteen million children in America who cannot be certain where their next meal is coming from (or if there will be one) as we get over Ebola being present in the United States... if we were as interested in sick people on the continent of Africa as we are about the three people in the USA who have gotten Ebola, there is no end to the problems we could solve.

It's time to get serious... to really, truly do what Jesus would do.

Matthew 22:34-46

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. and a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question: “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” He said to them, “How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying,
‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet”’?
If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?” No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

This is the Word of the Lord.

“MedecinsSans Frontieres,” or “Doctors Without Borders,” was created in 1971 with the idea that doctors and medical professionals should go where the patients are, be it a war zone, a nation stricken by famine, or a part of a continent battling a dreaded disease. “Doctors Without Borders” has treated, in its time, over one hundred million patients, in all areas of the world… including Guinea, in west Africa, where people are dying of Ebola. Supplies are short, medicine is short, protective gear is short… these doctors and health professionals, like Craig Spencer, go anyway. “Doctors Without Borders” claims no religious affiliation, and over eighty-four percent of every dollar raised goes directly to program services.

We heard none of this on Thursday, though, did we? Not a word about the selfless work of these doctors, going into harm’s way to bring healing and hope, or at least some measure of comfort and protection, to a corner of the world most people never even think about. When Dr. Spencer checked himself into Bellvue, and tested positive for Ebola, all we heard that was Ebola has invaded New York City.

Never mind that more Americans have been married to Kim Kardashian than have died of Ebola. Never mind that, if I may paraphrase humorist Andy Borowitz, Americans are more frantic about three cases of Ebola in the US than they are about thirty-nine school shootings – one of them the day after Dr. Spencer's diagnosis was announced – if you pay attention to the media hype, we have collectively lost our minds.

The calmest headlines said, “New York Doctor Tests Positive for Ebola,” but of course there was also this jewel of a headline: “Ebola Strikes New York City!” I fully expected to see “Zombie Apocalypse in Manhattan, Panic In The Streets, Film at 11” next.

I do not know Dr. Craig Spencer’s religious affiliation, if any. I do know that he worked in Guinea for about a month, earning far less than he would have in the same period at his job with Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. He didn’t go to Guinea for fame, or for the money, he went because people are dying and they need medical help. He did it in spite of the very real danger to his life.

“What is the greatest commandment?” the Pharisees ask Jesus.

Now, we can talk all day about how Jesus turned the Pharisees’ attempt to discredit him on its head, we can talk about how he proved to them that their expectations of the Messiah were far too narrow. That’s the kind of stuff I like to do. I like to pull on threads of the narrative, look at the historical context behind this polite confrontation, explore the interplay between what we think we read and the intention of the original languages. It’s fun, and in far too many ways, it’s easy.

But I want to talk about those commandments. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

I know I don’t have to remind you that love, and especially the kind of love Jesus refers to here, has nothing at all to do with how we feel. This is not a romantic, emotional, felt kind of love. This is an active, expressed, lived love. It is love as a verb. It is a love that is spelled out not by our words, not by our creeds, but by our actions.

Dr. Cornell West says, “Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.” Judging by that criteria, what can we say about the way we love? How many Americans thought that Ebola was unfortunate, but not that big a deal as long as it was “over there,” as long as it was citizens of the nations of West Africa that were dying, and not Americans… and how many are in a panic right now, spurred on by those “Ebola Strikes New York” headlines and those FaceBook posts insisting that the CDC is lying to us and that Ebola is airborne? Is it love to not really be concerned about problems on the other side of the world until the media start screaming about it being our problem?

Is that love? Is that loving God, is that loving our neighbor as ourselves?

I think Dr. Craig Spencer, and his colleagues at Doctors Without Borders, might have a different view of what love looks like.

Love is messy. Love is dangerous. Love takes us places we are not comfortable going.

Do you know why the Pharisees hated Jesus so much? Yes, partly because of his teachings – they likely were real fans of the fact that he separated the worship of God from the Temple, and emphasized the importance of worship in everyday life. That’s one of the main bones that the Pharisees picked against the Sadducees, after all. But there were a lot of other places, like healing on the Sabbath, where Jesus flew in the face of what they “knew” God wanted.

A bigger problem, though, was that the Pharisees saw how many people were looking to Jesus as the promised Messiah, but when they looked, Jesus didn’t measure up! Not as much because of what he said as what he did and who he spent time around!

Jesus did not live in a bubble of holy rollers, going through the same worship songs over and over, hiding away from society in prayer meetings and revival events. Jesus was in the midst of the party of life. He was at the center of the celebration, with people, all kinds of people, from all kinds of walks of life, with all kinds of world views and lifestyles. He went to weddings, he went to dinners. He walked and talked and laughed among those the Pharisees referred to as “people of the dirt.” He got a reputation as a “glutton and a drunkard” because of the people he enjoyed associating with.

And Jesus was in the midst of the brokenness of life. When a woman was set to be stoned for her immorality, Jesus was there to defend her from the angry religious crowd. Jesus started a conversation with the Samaritan woman by the well, a woman no one would talk to – not even her own people! And Jesus touched and healed the lepers, the ones that no one dared get close to for fear of having the sin rub off on them. He healed those who shared his religion, and those who were of other religions – the servant of the centurion comes to mind, as well as the daughter of the Syrophonecian woman.

Love is not found in demanding that there be a travel ban on the continent of Africa. Love is found, rather, in the actions of those who provide help, hope, and healing to suffering people of all races, nationalities, social castes, religions, orientations and identities. “Living Waters for the World,” Dr. Craig Spencer and Doctors Without Borders, are two very obvious examples.

In between last week's reading, where the Pharisees teamed up with the Herodians to try and discredit Jesus, and this week's reading, “Pharisees: Reloaded,” The Sadducees took their own pot shots at Jesus. And make no mistake: the whole aim of everything the Pharisees are doing here, including using an expert in the Law of Moses to test Jesus, is calculated to expose him as a heretic, a liar, a false Messiah.

The Pharisees, and for that matter their bitterest rivals, the Sadducees, saved their harshest words for those who did not practice Judaism with the fervor that they expected, who were not willing or able to attend every Temple event. They kept themselves scrupulously separate from undesirables, like Samaritans, Gentiles, lepers, prostitutes...

Jesus, to put it mildly, didn't do any of that. At all. He reserved his harshest words for the religious elite, those who used religion for financial gain, who held themselves not simply separate from, but superior to, the poor, forgotten, despised and marginalized. And he spent all of his time – all of it! - with those marginalized, despised, forgotten and poor.

To quote Mick Mooney, Jesus “doesn't just rock the boat of religion, ...he sets it on fire and then jumps into the water and swims to shore.”

I know that I don't have to spend time expounding on who our modern-day lepers and Gentiles and Samaritans are. I don't have to say that a modern-day Jesus wouldn't be in Mountain Brook very often; he'd be hanging out in Atmore or in the neighborhoods around Legion Field, the two poorest zip codes in Alabama (in order).

Jesus was a reckless lover of people, and he refused to bow down to the religious expectation of loving from a distance. He was up close, real, embracing all people, from all walks of life. He was hated by the religious elite because of his love, a love not made up of the words he spoke, but by the life he lived.

So what does all of this have to do with “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself?”

Well, let me ask: If Jesus, who the religious elite called a “...a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of... sinners” lived out these commandments in his every action, and if the ultimate goal of every citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven, everyone who calls themselves by the name of Christ, is to be like Jesus...

...what should we doing? With whom should we be identified? What should they call us?

Let us pray.

Feet Washed With Tears

This song played in my head, for some reason, when I was writing this. Perhaps it is the last line.

"Four Word Letter"

MeWithoutYou

I wrote a four word letter,
With post-script in crooked lines,
"Tho I'd lived I'd never been alive."
You know who I am - you held my hem
As I traveled blind
Listening to a whispering in my ear,
Soft but getting stronger,
Telling me the only purpose of my being here
Is to stay a bit longer. 

Stealing a bicycle chain,
As the handlebars crashed to the ground,
The back wheel detached from the frame,
It kept rolling, yeah, but aimlessly drifting around. 

Oh, doubters, let's go down,
Lets go down - won't you come on down?
Oh doubters, lets go down-
Down, to the river to pray? 

"But I'm so small I can barely be seen - how can this great love be inside of me?"
Look at your eyes - they're small in size, but they see enormous things. 

Wearing black canvas slippers
In our frog-on-a-lily-pad pose
We sewed buttons and zippers
To chinese pink silk
And olive night clothes
If you can someday stop by
Somehow we'll show you the pictures and fix you some tea
(see, my dad's getting a bit older now and just unimaginably lonely). 

Oh, pretenders, let's go down
Lets go down- won't you come on down?
Oh, pretenders
Lets go down-
Down to the river and pray? 

"Oh but I'm so afraid, and I'm set in my ways"
But he'll make the rabbits and rocks sing his praise.
"But I'm too tired, I won't last long."
No, he'll use the weak to overcome the strong! 

Oh, Amanda, let's go down
Lets go down- won't you come on down?
Mama, Nana, let’s go down, down in the dirt by the river to pray? 

You struck the match - why not be utterly changed by fire?
To sacrifice the shadow and the mist
Of a brief life you never much liked - So if you'd care to come along we're gonna curb all our never-ending,
clever complaining (as who's ever heard of a singer criticized by his song?)
We hunger, but though all that we eat brings us little relief, we don't know quite what else to do,
We have all our beliefs but we don't want our beliefs,
God of peace, we want you. 

I think that this is the cry of all creation: God of peace, we want you.

Luke 7:36-8:3

One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee's house and took his place at the table. And a woman in the city, who was a sinner, having learned that he was eating in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment. She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment. Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw it, he said to himself, "If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him-that she is a sinner." Jesus spoke up and said to him, "Simon, I have something to say to you." "Teacher," he replied, "Speak." "A certain creditor had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he canceled the debts for both of them. Now which of them will love him more?" Simon answered, "I suppose the one for whom he canceled the greater debt." And Jesus said to him, "You have judged rightly." Then turning toward the woman, he said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little." Then he said to her, "Your sins are forgiven." But those who were at the table with him began to say among themselves, "Who is this who even forgives sins?" And he said to the woman, "Your faith has saved you; go in peace."

Soon afterwards he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod's steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources.

This is the Word of the Lord.

The Pharisees have a pretty bad reputation in the Gospels. Yes, it’s a reputation they come by honestly for the way they work against Jesus at every turn. Yet however badly they turned out, the origin of the movement was sincere: to be as faithful as possible to the Law of God, as handed down to them in the Scriptures.

We’ve spoken before about how, in the context of first-century Judaism, to be a Pharisee was to be a liberal, to work against the established power structure of the Sadducees, who held power in the Temple – and who clung to that position at the pleasure of the Roman governor.

Pharisees like Simon strove to be as faithful as they could be, carefully, one might say obsessively, working to observe the smallest detail of those dietary and ceremonial laws passed down from Moses, keeping themselves separated from anyone and anything that might bring uncleanness upon them. They rejected the compromises the Sadducees made with Herod and Pilate for the sake of keeping the peace, for the sake of keeping their hold on power.

Compare this carefully pious man with the woman who came into the dining room just moments after they had reclined on their couches to eat: it was customary, by the way, for guests to lay on their left side, knees bent so their feet hung off the couch behind them. This woman, who in Luke’s account has no name, never says a word. She had her own reputation – Luke calls her merely “a sinner,” and all that means in the context of the Judaism of that day and age was that she was not faithful to God’s law. There isn’t any real point in speculating. All we know is that she had the means to buy expensive ointment in a costly box.

Simon may have heard about Jesus raising the widow’s son, or may have overheard him preaching in the town’s marketplace, we don’t know. I have read some intriguing speculation, though, that what Jesus was doing and saying, at least in the early part of his ministry, resonated with the Pharisees, especially as it pertained with their resistance to the Sadducees.

Apart from their insistence that there was no resurrection, no reward or punishment after death, and the possibility that they recognized only the first five books of the Jewish Bible, the Torah, as authoritative, the Sadducees insisted that worshipping and serving God centered on and emanated from the Temple, and the Temple alone.

The Pharisees, by contrast, believed in the resurrection of the dead, eternal reward or punishment following death, they held that the oral teachings, or Talmud, was as authoritative as Torah, and by their strict observance of Law in their daily lives, believed that worshiping and serving God must be something that was a part of daily life, not simply when one went to the Temple or sat in the synagogue.

So it is no wonder that the Pharisees heard echoes of their own beliefs in Jesus’ teachings. Perhaps, then, Simon took it upon himself to have Jesus over for dinner, so he could get a closer look at the fellow. Was he a prophet, a man of God, was he a Pharisee, or was he just another in a long line of rabble-rousing nutcases who dreamed of overthrowing Roman rule only to set himself on David’s throne in its place?

That’s what I would like to think about Simon, though I must say his actions aren’t those of someone wanting to woo Jesus into his fraternity. Judgmental, inhospitable… I wonder if the Pharisees got together to decide who would invite Jesus to dinner, and Simon drew the short straw?

Whatever the case, I think it is safe to say that when Simon invited Jesus to dinner it wasn’t about extending hospitality, wasn’t about developing a friendship. It was about seeing if Jesus measured up to the hype, to see if he was good enough. To see if he was Pharisee material. And I think Simon had already reached a conclusion about Jesus before he invited him, and it wasn’t a particularly positive conclusion at that.

This woman, washing Jesus’ feet with her tears and drying them with her hair, might have heard Jesus at the same time as Simon. She may have seen Jesus at a different time, though, speaking with her friends, eating with sinners like her; perhaps she had seen sight restored to the blind or a sick person healed by a touch from Jesus. Maybe, just maybe, Jesus had healed her, or her child, we can’t know because (like so many times in the Gospels) we aren’t given her name. Whatever the case, this woman knew that it wasn’t a question of Jesus measuring up to her expectations – the fact was that, deep down, she knew it was her who didn’t measure up, who had had no hope of measuring up to such hope and love as Jesus personified. This wasn’t about measuring up. It was about worshiping.

There are so many things in the Gospels I wish I had been able to witness. To just stand in the corner that day, watching as Simon’s servants brought out the food, probably meager fare for someone so well off as Simon, but he wouldn’t have bothered preparing the really good stuff for Jesus and his band of raggedy Galileans. Not much is said, I suppose. Simon’s friends at the table would have talked softly among themselves, eyeing the smelly and road-worn disciples, and those disciples would have been softly speaking to each other, trying not to show their discomfort. The undercurrent of tension and Simon’s disapproval would have been palpable.

She entered the dining room quietly, yet knowing she hadn’t entered unnoticed. Every eye was on her – well, I can imagine a couple of the disciples looking up, looking at one another, shrugging and going back to their food. Stuff like this happened all the time, after all, but good eats were rare.

She held that alabaster jar in both hands as she knelt behind Jesus, who was still dusty from the road. Already weeping, her tears landed on his feet as she reached behind her head, and to the shock of almost everyone watching, let her long hair fall down her back. Taking the long tresses in her hands, she used her hair to dry where her tears fell, then picked up the jar and, with a soft crack, broke it open, the perfume filling the air. Simon watched, agape, mortified, as she anointed his feet with ointment, kissing them as she wept.

There were certain things that a good host provided for his guests in first century Judea. Guests would have been greeted in the traditional Middle Eastern fashion, a kiss on each cheek. There would be water, and perhaps a servant to wash their feet. Olive oil would be provided for their hair. This is why I think Simon had reached every conclusion he needed to before inviting Jesus, why else would none of these basic expectations were met?

In that moment, Simon was convinced that his worst expectations about Jesus were correct. This man wasn’t Pharisee material – why, he wasn’t even a good Jew! How dare he allow such an unseemly display, with a woman, in his home, at his table! Why, if he were really a prophet, he’d know the kind of woman he’s allowing to act that way, and he would certainly not allow the likes of her – let alone any woman – to touch him! Horrifying!

Jesus could feel the disgust and rage radiating from Simon. I imagine Jesus speaking softly, barely above a whisper, his tone level, calm, no sarcasm or accusing edge to his voice.

“Simon, let’s talk, you and I.”

Through clenched teeth, I imagine Simon replying, “So talk, ‘teacher.’”

“There was this banker who had two debtors; one owed twenty-nine thousand dollars, and the other twenty nine hundred dollars. When they could not pay, he canceled the debts for both of them. Now which of them will love him more?”

Simon looked at him a long time, trying to figure out what he was getting at. Finally he said, “I suppose the one for whom he canceled the greater debt.”

“Exactly, Simon. Exactly.”

Jesus sits up and turns on his couch, his hand extended toward the woman, but his eyes never leaving Simon. “See this woman? She did or me what you couldn’t be bothered to. I got no water for my feet, she washed them with her tears. You didn’t greet me, but she hasn’t stopped kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Sure, maybe her sins were many, but those sins have been forgiven, and she knows it. So she shows great love. And there is the difference. You don’t think you need forgiveness, so you don’t show a whole lot of love, do you?”

That long look Jesus had been given Simon finally broke, and he looked instead at the woman, perhaps lifting her chin with his fingers until she looked him in the eye. “Your sins are forgiven,” is all he says.

Simon’s friends are of course scandalized. “Well don’t this beat all? Who does he think he is, forgiving sins?”

Jesus doesn’t even blink, never breaks eye contact with the woman, who smiles, just a little. “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

By their very nature, the Pharisees depended on their superior knowledge of the Law, their careful habits and attention to minute detail, over against the ritual and sacrifice and showmanship of the Sadducees, to keep them in a place of acceptability toward God. Since they were, in effect, doing everything themselves, there was, in effect, not much need for God to help them. They had things under control just fine, thanks. Whereas they had originally sought to please God by their piety, their efforts had in fact become a replacement for God – they could be good enough, they didn’t need forgiveness!

All too often we fall into the trap of thinking we are good enough – that because of where we’re born, or how often we attend church, or which sins we do not commit, we are somehow acceptable to God. We find ourselves thinking, like Simon, that we measure up when, in fact, we should be sharing the floor with the weeping woman, sure of nothing except the fact that we need forgiveness.

Simon thought he was good enough, thought he was part of the “in crowd.” If this was so, why not look at this woman, who needed forgiveness and acceptance and redemption and see someone who could be guided, loved, restored?

This is our task, our calling: for those who think they’ve done too much, are too far gone to be forgiven, outside of the reach of the grace of God, we who are the Body of Christ, the hands and feet of Jesus in this world today, remind ourselves that, in the words of Paul in the book of Romans, “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” and we reach out to them, shining the light of God’s grace into their dark corners. No matter who sees us, no matter who disapproves of our actions.

We love, because Christ first loved us. That is our calling, that is the Gospel.

You see, no matter where we start from, Jesus meets us, and always at the place where we lay down our right to claim social status, or religious purity, or birthright. Kneeling at the feet of Christ, crucified with Him, and yet we live and move and have our being in Jesus Christ. Like that woman, we are forgiven much, we are restored, we are alive in Him.