Missing the Mark & Missing the Point (Luke 7:36-8:3)

It is a study in contrasts:  the Pharisee and the woman labeled “sinner”.  Jesus encounters the religiously observant and the religiously written-off, two people who could not be more different, more disparate in the eyes of religion and society, and yet to whom Jesus speaks an astonishingly equal word about God’s forgiveness.

The Pharisee’s household smelled wonderful all day as the meal preparations were underway.  It was to be a grand evening, with the guests going away with full bellies and slightly dizzy from the ever-flowing wine.  The Pharisee liked throwing a good party.  After all, your good party meant that your guests were obliged to return the favor.

Planning the meal was left largely to the servants, though the Pharisee oversaw the guest placements himself.  He liked figuring out where guests would be seated, spending his idle time during the day arranging where each person would sit.  Half the battle of a first-century meal was the food.  Guest placement, if chosen without skill, could ruin a meal before the main course, if you placed people together who should not be in the same room together, let alone seated side by side for several hours. 

The one guest the Pharisee had no trouble placing was the upstart rabbi from backwater Nazareth.  He had no great authority, especially among his Pharisee brethren, yet it was “polite” to invite him (and all the better to keep an eye on him as well).  The Pharisee placed Jesus at the table where he could be seen, but not readily heard around the table.   Best place for ‘em, the Pharisee thought, and he chuckled a bit.

The dinner itself went without a hitch.  All of the guests showed up promptly at the invited time.  Each serving came out with appreciative remarks about the taste and presentation of each plate.  The stewards never stopped in their questions of “Would you like more, sir?” 

Reclining around the table, the Pharisee listened with grace to a variety of stories regaled by his guests.  The upstart there in the corner made some light conversation, yet he was not at the center of the room.  The Pharisee had planned things well!

Later, as food eating slowed, but the wine did not, the Pharisee was about to announce “last call” when there was some disruption.  Into the room strode a woman bearing a large jar.  The guests paid her no attention at first, thinking she was a servant wandering through.  The Pharisee, ever the host, was a bit puzzled.  He knew most of the servants, and she did not look like any of them.

About that time, the conversation suddenly died.  In the corner of the room, the woman placed herself before Jesus and started removing the lid to her jar.  She began rubbing Jesus’ feet with a fragrant ointment (fairly pricey from the smell), wiping his feet with her hair.  And in the stunned silence of the dinner party, she wept as she anointed Jesus’ feet.

The men glanced around the room, somewhat perplexed by the spectacle.  The Pharisee felt all of the eyes of the room move from the passive Jesus watching as his feet were anointed and then back to the Pharisee.  It’s his party.  What’s he going to do about this?

As for himself, the Pharisee, trying to keep his rage down, had another brain puzzler to sort out.  How could he get this woman out of here (and better yet, send Jesus along with her!)?  Was this staged?  The only thing the Pharisee knew for certain:  he didn’t know who she was, but he knew what she was: a sinner!

So now the scene is set:  the “pillar of the community” Pharisee meets the sinner from the wrong side of the tracks!   Indeed, the Pharisee capitalizes on the situation. If Jesus is all that he claims, why hasn’t he distanced himself?  It’s one of the older political tricks in the book:  guilt by association.  Short of a camera phone and a TMZ-style website, this Pharisee has a golden opportunity to discredit Jesus.  All he has to do is say all of this aloud to his dinner party guests, nearly all of them his intimate friends and fellow religious establishment leaders.

As he begins to clear his throat, ready to break the silence and hopefully Jesus’ credibility as well, Jesus asks to say a word.

Rather than a word of bluster, Jesus spins a parable.  It might be considered deflection or a skillful misdirection, yet the parable of two debtors fits the situation.  Jesus sees two people who are unequal in the eyes of most, yet in the way of the world as God sees it, these two people have similar standing with one another.

At the dinner party, the Pharisee is the person whose righteousness is unquestioned.  The uninvited woman sticks out in this room of fine, upstanding citizens.  The history of interpretation of this passage suggests a variety of reasons why she was a sinner, however, for Jesus, her status as sinner is not the issue at hand.  In the parable, he indicates the Pharisee and the “sinner” have more in common than either of them can imagine.

Two debtors:  one owes more than the other, but both of them still owe something, and they are not likely to pay it off.  The parable sounds quite familiar, and perhaps even more painfully so in a credit crunch world with foreclosures rising and stock markets spiraling.  Debt is that one thing we don’t want to think about, yet the average U.S. citizen carries all manner of debts, great and small. 

Debt forgiveness has been known to happen, however, most of us think, “Yeah, right!” when we hear the term.  The old story goes:  You don’t get out of debt.  You just get in deeper.  How can anyone ever consider themselves “out of debt” or “forgiven”?

While I make no claims to be a financial advisor, may I offer you a word as a theological advisor?  The good news of the gospel is quite simply:  no matter who you are, or what your life experiences have been, you are never too far (or too far gone, for that matter) to receive forgiveness from God.  Indeed, read the Gospel of Luke for a number of good stories about how everyone is treated equally in Jesus’ eyes.  You may be a person of means or a person of no means, you may be any number of things, yet at the end, nobody’s beyond redemption. 

            The first step towards this truth is the same for Simon the Pharisee as it is for the anonymous sinner.  To sin means “to miss the mark”, or to act in a manner that keeps you from living into the fullness of the love of God and neighbor.  The rich and the poor, the young and the old, the “insider” and the “outsider” have no claim to greater privilege or status in the Reign of God.  The sinner and the saint in the eyes of the world (or the Church) shall receive equal opportunity to be forgiven.

For this scene of Pharisee indignant and woman contrite, we learn a different sort of outcome than that of the Pharisee, or perhaps better said, the religiously religious.  The Pharisee follows a view that the woman is already a lost cause, and he wants people to know that there’s something wrong with Jesus not reacting the same way.  The woman thinks of herself as separated from the goodness she seeks yet she earnestly wants to be forgiven.  

The Pharisee is likewise a sinner in the eyes of God.  Unlike the woman, he has forgotten what she has been reclaiming in her life.  Her faith and her love are commended by Jesus, which in turn he demonstrates are conspicuously absent in the life of the Pharisee, who was not ready to show hospitality, let alone humility before Jesus and those assembled.

For the Church, the people called to be shaped and schooled by the gospel, we have the challenge of setting our own household in order.  Should a church (or a denomination) spend most of its energy (and years) defining exact lists of sinful behavior in the quest for purity?  What sort of church would emerge if the question of sin was framed differently than it tends to be?  

The humorist Garrison Keillor refers often to his upbringing among very conservative Christians, who called themselves “the Sanctified Bretheren”.  Keillor once lamented that in such a fellowship, you never knew that you were forgiven, just merely on parole.

I recall sharing that line with a congregation in Kansas City, a Baptist tradition church with many persons who grew up in fundamentalist churches.  They laughed long and hard.  It was cathartic for some, as they found themselves growing distant (or being held at arm’s reach) by the churches of their upbringing.  Such churches spoke of sin with stern look and ironclad belief.

Here in this place, they found the welcome of the gospel they thought otherwise absent.  More often than not, I recall tears of joy in that congregation’s worship.  Such is the life of the forgiven!

The Pharisee and the woman labeled “sinner” offer the Church character studies in the choice we make speaking of sin.  We should not shy from reflecting on how we “miss the mark” or impair our relations with God and neighbor.  These are just as essential to the gospel as the declaration of forgiveness and mercy, justice and hope.  By avoiding the Pharisee’s ways and understanding the woman’s ways, we learn the ways of Christ, whose hospitality knows no end, and who awaits us with the banquet feast where the many shall gather, all beloved guests, welcome at the Table of our Lord.