A Tale of Two Sinners

Sermon for Sunday, July 5

Luke 7:36-50

Have you ever been disqualified from something? In the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, nineteen year old Swedish heavyweight boxer Ingo Johannsson entered the ring for a championship final match against eventual gold medal winner Ed Sanders. Johannsson circled the ring, avoiding Sanders’s punches. As he ducked and dipped, the crowd began to turn against Johannsson, urging him to fight. Three minutes into the third round, the referee called off the match and Johannsson was disqualified. At the medal ceremony there was no athlete standing on the silver medal platform. Johannsson would claim for the rest of his life that he was trying to wear Sanders out for a third round onslaught, but we will never know. He eventually received his medal thirty years later.

We will never know what would have happened in that third round, because we can only see what happened in the first and second. We can only see what happens in front of us, and sometimes that leads us to jump to conclusions. In today’s story from the gospel of Luke, we see a man who jumps to conclusions about a woman, and about Jesus, and these conclusions lead him to avoid questioning certain things about himself.

At the house of Simon the Pharisee, Jesus encounters someone who hasn’t figured out who he is. We aren’t even given Simon’s name until Jesus says it. Remember, we learn who we are from Jesus! But Jesus is at Simon’s house for dinner, when a woman comes in, uninvited. She’s a “known sinner” in the city. Now we don’t know the nature of her sin, but we know she has a reputation that kept her from being invited. In those days, you could come to a fancy dinner uninvited, as long as you were content to sit by the wall, not eat anything, and not say anything. You see, dinners like this were for conversation. After dinner the guests of honor would dialogue or debate each other, and perhaps answer questions from the other invited guests. It was kind of like a talk radio show. 

In verses 37-39, it’s as though we have Simon’s perspective:

•  “Oh, there’s that sinner... I wonder what she’s doing here?”

•  “What’s that she has? Ointment? Expensive... I wonder if she’s going to give that

to the teacher?”

•  “Why is she crying? What’s she doing? She’s getting his feet all wet!”

•  “And now she’s... drying them? With her... hair? And she’s rubbing the ointment

into his feet?”

•  “If he were half the prophet everyone says he is, he would know that she is not

worth his time or energy. Being in her presence is sure going to make his

stock fall with the other teachers. And letting her touch him like that! Have you

ever heard of such...”

And here Jesus cuts into his thought process. Jesus says, “Simon...” And Simon thinks, “Oh here we go. This friend of sinners is going to give me a what for. I can’t wait until this yahoo goes home. Some teacher, carousing with sinners!” But Simon says, “yes, teacher.” And Jesus tells a parable. It’s just a short one, but it deserves our attention.

“A man had two guys who owed him money. One owed fifty days’ wages, and another owed five hundred days’ wages. Neither of them could pay, so the creditor forgave them. Which is going to love him more?” I love parables because they get their hooks in you and you have to twist and turn and move things and thoughts around until you find your way out of them. Jesus helps Simon out by asking him a simple question: “Which one is going to love him more?” And Simon answers rightly, Jesus says: “The one who had the greater debt canceled.” But why?

See, here’s the thing about debt. It can be discouraging. I remember when I signed my mortgage my dad told me not to look at the amount of principle I’d paid off for at least five years. Just keep making payments, but don’t look at that number. Well, I looked after two years. With a calculator in hand I totaled up how much I’d paid in mortgage payments, and it was a lot. Then I looked at my statement to see how much principle I’d paid off, and it was... a little. When you get behind, or you are struggling to keep up with payments, it can feel like dog paddling in the deep end after a long day of work. Your mouth is just above the surface of the water, and every now and then you sink and swallow a little bit.

Sin is like that. You take on a little bit more, and then a little bit more, and like a ship out at sea you have to keep pumping out the bilges. But if you get behind, or a new leak starts, no amount of frantic pumping will remove the bilge water from the ship’s hull. It’s overwhelming. One of the debtors in Jesus’s story starts out a month and a half behind. The other guy starts out a year and a half behind. When their debts are forgiven, its easy for the first guy to look at the second guy’s debt and feel like his was no sweat. The second guy though, he knows his goose was cooked. He was never going to get out of that by his own power. So he brings gifts by at Christmas, and calls the creditor every year on the anniversary of his forgiveness. Meanwhile the first guy, who owed less, just goes about his life.

But here’s the rub: neither of the two could pay their debt. They were both hopeless, just one of them hadn’t figured it out yet. It’s easy when you can see people worse off than you, to think you’re doing okay. It’s easy when you see people who sin more than you, to forget you’ve ever sinned at all. And it’s easy, when it’s been a while since you were forgiven, to forget you ever needed forgiveness in the first place. We imagine that Jesus keeps a ledger of all of our sins, weighted by their value, and so we honor the people who we think sinned less, and tell those who have sinned more to sit near the wall and listen. But Jesus doesn’t set value the way we set value. Jesus doesn’t keep score and Jesus doesn’t make lists. When someone comes to Jesus in repentance, Jesus assigns one value to forgiveness: everything. Jesus pays everything. Your whole debt—canceled! If you can’t understand that liberation—that freedom, just know that it’s available to everyone, all you have to do is ask.

So how do we respond to Jesus? For Simon the Pharisee, he just accepted Jesus like any other guest. He gave him a seat at the table and some good food. But he didn’t go any further. A host was supposed to offer his guests water to freshen up, greet them with a kiss (like shaking hands— remember when we used to shake hands?), and maybe give them some oil for their faces, like a hot towel on a long flight. Simon didn’t put himself to any trouble. But this woman... this so-called “sinner in the city,” she knew what Jesus had done. She’d listened to John the Baptist’s sermons, and she knew the forgiveness she had received in the waters of baptism had Jesus as its origin. So she pampered him and loved him the best she could.

Her love for Jesus didn’t earn her forgiveness. Her love for Jesus showed Jesus she already believed. And that she’d already been forgiven. How do we respond to Jesus? Acts of love and care. Doing for others. Loving people. Hospitality.

What Simon the Pharisee couldn’t understand was that there were two sinners in the city. One of them had been forgiven, and presumed to thank the one who had bought her forgiveness. She thanked him with her voice. She thanked him with her tears. She thanked him with her hair. She thanked him with her alabaster jar. The other sinner in the city was much closer to Simon— as close to him as skin. That sinner was so hung up on evaluating this woman that he missed his own chance for forgiveness. He missed his own chance to love.