Seeing Correctly
“Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.”
Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”
The other guests began to say among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?”
Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” -Luke 7:47-50, NIV
“Jesus violated social taboos to reach out to those marginalized not only racially (7:1-10), economically (7:11-17), and religiously (7:24-35) but also morally (7:36-50).” – Craig S. Keener
“She does not need forgiveness from God, but she does need recognition of her new life and forgiveness among God’s people…It is one thing to have Jesus proclaim her forgiveness in order that her renewed status might be recognized by the community; it is quite another for that community actually to accept his pronouncement and to extend kinship to her…Will they learn to view God as one who cancels debts and invites other to do the same so that all might behave toward one another with love unfettered by the constraints of past behaviors and reputation and by interminable contracts of reciprocity?” – Joel B. Green
Luke 7 as a whole is an astounding statement of Jesus’ refusal to preserve the status quo. He challenges many boundaries and seems intent on doing so. As noted above by Craig Keener, Jesus breeches racial, economic, religious and moral barriers that His culture had carefully erected and were even more carefully guarded by the religious elites. Jesus’ intention though is that He, and His followers by extension, not live by such barriers. He wants us, as he wanted Simon and the other Pharisees at his party, to enter into a new way of seeing life and how we live it. And though Luke doesn’t narrate their part of the story, we can be fairly certain that Simon and his buddies don’t adjust their standards to Jesus’ new way of understanding who is on good footing with God. My assumption on this part is conjecture but, well-grounded conjecture. Simon and his fellow Pharisees, you see, have a very different view of God Himself. They don’t see Him as a God who forgives and invites outsiders to be part of His family. They instead see hard categories of insiders (those who follow God’s law in the prescribed way) and outsiders (those who don’t). So immovable are their categories that neither Jesus or John meet them (7:33-34). So immovable are their categories that if they were honest, they would admit, they don’t even fully measure up. Here is the challenge for us, we can go from trophies of grace to Pharisees in a hot second. It just takes us meeting someone who doesn’t meet our carefully crafted barriers. Barriers you say, what barriers? Well the ones that knowingly or unknowingly gather in our cultural assumptions. The mental dissonance for Simon relative to the ‘sinful’ woman was her presence in proximity to Jesus. Jesus obviously saw no problem with her proximity or her actions because, he saw her not as she was, but as she had become after encountering God’s incredible grace. Our problem is that often, we like Simon have cultural assumptions about dress, occupation, economic status, even political affiliation which are more based on our tradition and experience than they are the person and work of Jesus. Further complicating matters are two headwinds into which the church must sail. On the one hand, we are constantly battling the culture’s portrayal of the church. We are, in their sketches and movies and books, moralistic goodie two shoes who have no compassion and no time for anyone who won’t adopt every cultural cliché of “evangelical” Christians. On the other hand, we have within the church many who are in one form or another in “image management” mode on behalf of the church. Such efforts often devolve into wholesale desertion of truths central to Christianity. In their minds, to keep from the culture’s negative portrayal we must make Jesus less offensive and church itself far more cool and relevant. So we need the music people to play a few “pop” songs every now and again or for the pastor to ‘slip’ and use some colorful language from the pulpit every so often. Or we need to shift our views on sexuality or gender so as to be less offensive. In the end, neither of these will accomplish Jesus’ purposes though. Our hope in seeing people the way Jesus does and in embracing His dearly paid for categories of who’s in and who’s out must begin and end with Him. We will fail if we compromise even the slightest on either side of this. We must push against our self-imposed, home grown categories AND refuse to compromise the truth of Scripture to ‘look better.’ And the only mitigating force is to constantly come back to Jesus. Let Him define and categorize people for you. Let Him dismantle your tribalism, your legalism, or your anti-legalism. Let Him be the organizing principle for how you see yourself and others and then finally, we are headed in the right direction. Because, when we let Jesus be the organizing principle, then and only then, do we see correctly. Again Paul, Pharisee turned devoted Jesus follower is such a great example. He goes from persecuting the church to participating in it. Further, he goes from a strict legalist to a man proclaiming Jesus and salvation in Him to all who would give it a hearing. He plants churches of Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, everywhere he can. And such communities, who had no other commonality than Jesus boggled the minds of the people in the first century. Jesus and His gospel of grace was not just their commonality, He was to them everything. If we seek to be faithful to the gospel and Jesus in our day, the same must be true of us. Let us refuse to let culture cliché us by defying their every characterization which does not fit the gospel of grace. Let us never compromise the truth of God’s Word or the standards we find there but let them stand boldly as the assertions of the gospel. We are great sinners, we are in dire need of a great Savior and (GLORIOUS GOOD NEWS!) we have been given One, Jesus. Let Him define the categories, let us willingly submit to them.
Questions for further discussion/life application:
In what area do you find the most difficulty in setting aside your carefully constructed cultural categories? (dress, occupation, economic status, political affiliation) Why do you think that is? How does the gospel of grace help you adjust your categories to fit with Jesus?
How you see yourself in relation to God becomes vital in how you see others in relation to God. What strategies do you use to help you remember how grace dependent you are?
Reflect back on your life story, have you ever felt the exclusion that the sinful woman felt? Did you also feel the welcome of Jesus? Do you need to revisit that moment and experience the welcome of Jesus? How does revisiting that moment help you in thinking of how to receive others?
What concern(s) do you have in extending welcome to “sinners” in our culture? How do those concerns highlight your carefully constructed categories? What will you need to surrender to Jesus’ good care to let grace lead?
There’s a song for that… Come to the Table