“Faces In The Crowd - A Passionate Women”
Scripture Reading: Luke 7:36-50
Sermon Transcript for September 17, 2006
By Pastor Nancy Blevins
Once more I’m grateful for the privilege of bringing to you the word about a few faces in the crowd, the second in a series of sermons about nameless women in the Bible. TheScripture this morning comes from the Gospel according to Luke. And as we honor the Word of God at work within us living, would you please stand as I read this Scripture. I invite you to read it with me.
“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 very same 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 profit, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him as 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 $500 denarii and the other $50. When they could not pay, he canceled the debt 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.’ And then turning towards the woman, he said to Simon, ‘Do you see this woman? I am in 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.’” The Word of the Lord for the people of the Lord, thanks be to God.
Do you notice anything different up here this morning? No, Bob and I aren’t going to play a game of football or exercise. I guess I could go out for a pass. There’s a speaker named John Maxwell. He’s been a United Methodist pastor but perhaps most recently is known for his motivational speaking. His company is called Enjoy. And John says that energy stems from passion. There are a few objects up here today just to call your attention to things that perhaps you or maybe someone here could say has been a passion in your life or is a passion in your life. Oh, thanks goodness, it was less heavy than that thing on there. For many health, fitness is a passion. For some racquet ball or tennis is a way to achieve that. Or to watch as a spectator a passionate sport like the world tennis matches, or soccer, or what’s that happening this afternoon at 1:00 p.m.? An object of passion for many! Don’t worry, we won’t make you tear off your robes and garments and see that Colts t-shirt back there. Oh, and for many it’s not just a computer, a laptop, something we can hold in our lap, its work represented by the laptop that’s our passion. Or maybe it’s a new techie toy—a TiVo, DVD, games. Oh and then there is that thing called the stock market and income and money. And lest we forget, when you are walking down the block or driving, maybe you see a few of these, maybe you hear a few of these. I know churches nowadays have signs at the back when we are prepared to do a funeral or a wedding. And I’ve had some cell phones go off in both. I set mine to “When the Saints Go Marching In”. But when you hear that, if it happens to ring, will one of you saints come up and answer it? Oh, and then there is this.
Oh, there’s this—an alabaster jar—perhaps the smallest of the items up here. And that might be our focal point this morning. You say, “Well that’s not an object of passion or interest for me”? We’ll ask ourselves as we explore the text this morning, “What holds such a special place in my heart or my body or my soul?” Jesus’ narrative about this woman who speaks not a word, not only does she not have a name, she doesn’t say a word. Or does she? Mark, Matthew, and John, you can look at those Scriptures as well, and see that the setting for anointing is different there and the person is named there. But this account in Luke is placed not only geographically at a different place it is also a different person. And it can stand on its own, this one who is an uninvited guest. She comes to a formal banquet. Oh, you’ve seen them especially now at upcoming election time. There are honored guests and speakers. This one is an environment designed not only to give honor to the speaker but for that speaker to give insight on a moral or theological issue. And even though there is strain between Jesus and the Pharisees, that doesn’t keep them from inviting Him. Here they are gathered at a house, possibly a house known better as not just Simon’s house, but Simon, the leper, who had been healed. Simon, the one who was not seeing Jesus as an equal. Simon, the one who was the host of this, not even honoring Jesus as a special figure.
You know, we all have our weaknesses, don’t we. And there are places in our lives where we are all equal. I think that’s the checkout line at the grocery story. There are those items right there and they are often 75% candy. Those old favorites greet you, don’t they. Just as you are almost ready to check out and of course there are a couple of folks in front of you even in the express line. And you start looking at the shelves and you see M & M’s, Hershey bars, a Milky Way. And you wouldn’t dream of purchasing anything but that. Oh, and you have your standards after all. We all have our standards. Then you might go to Blockbuster, let’s say, and say, “Well, wow, they have blocks of candy at blockbuster. Big sweet tooths there!” I always feel a little guilty if you buy one of those—they’re the family size. So far I haven’t found it too healthy for pets to eat chocolate. Children, as Bob was talking about, they have a whole different standard of taste. And it’s replaced by standard of fun—what can we do with this package? What’s in there? What colors are in it? Are they fun shapes? And for others there is no possibility of getting too much.
We talk about passion and how these objects might demonstrate it. But I think, too, that it’s never enough for some of us. Bob and I were joking this is last year’s model. Well, maybe, it was last year’s model in 1982 or something like that. It just can’t run. But even if it was the newest model, this computer, I want more memory. I want something faster. Oh, and phones, I want that latest ring tone! I don’t want the Colts just to win one game, do you? I want a winning season! I don’t want just to retire; I want a good retirement income! How about you? If you are planning to send your son or daughter to college, you want them to have a good career or a really good career so that they can pay for your retirement?
Jesus’ passion, His passion we often think of as the very end of His life. And Mel Gibson’s movie might have led us to think that the passion of Jesus is only at the end of His life. But Jesus identified His passion early in His ministry. We might say, “My work is my passion”. But for Jesus His life was His passion. “What gives me life is to do the will of the One who sent me.” That was what His life was about. That was His passion! Well, we all have different standards, don’t we, of weighing what excites us and what we are passionate about. Different ways of determining, took what’s good and what’s bad. Standards of taste whether it comes to ice cream, candy, computers, clothes. I had a friend yesterday who had a scoop of chocolate ice cream with peanut butter in it. She said, “You see, I’m getting my protein.”
There are certain standards though that all of us might recognize as high standards or denounce them as being low. Sometimes that’s even by zip code, an address. Some time ago there was a show on TV that’s now in to reruns. Who ever heard of 90210? I finally figured out about the end of the first season that it was an address. Or Melrose Place? What’s that—where Desperate Housewives live? Or The West Wing—all those symbols of money, prestige and power and privilege. Not just indicative of an address there, of course, but also indicates the lifestyles, standard of living.
Simon, who’s finally identified in the latter part of this narrative that Luke brings us, Simon could tell. He knew this woman wasn’t up to his standards. She probably didn’t share the same neighborhood as Simon. But he knew her type. This proper, refined atmosphere was interrupted by this woman. This inappropriate figure, a woman, Simon says, was a sinner. Have you ever come late to class? Have you ever come late to church? There are no seats in the back. And it’s the day, and this happened to me, I came to a casual service, it was labeled, in North Carolina which is on a river with a boat thinking these people will be wearing shorts. They weren’t. And as in many churches, the good seats in the back were all taken. So guess who walked in all the way down to the front. I passed a few who gave me stares. They didn’t know that later I would be their pastor. Do you know who greeted me that day? I still remember her. She was a visitor.
This woman who comes in late, the guests are already reclining, who is she? You know what it’s like. You walk in the door and all heads turn toward you at that local café because you are the stranger. You are the one who doesn’t belong to the group. Everybody knows everybody else. Not only that, you are not dressed right. You are either too formally dressed or not dressed well enough. You have a manner about you. Perhaps you drove up in something less than what was normal, your car, your bicycle. This woman’s behavior was unexpected. And you might even go as far as to say it’s outlandish.
What she doesn’t say communicates volumes. Her actions. She’s unescorted. I’m used to that. I went to my senior prom and had the most fun of all unescorted. I tried the escorted part the year before and boy that was not fun. So my hair got less big and I had more fun. This woman was unescorted. In Jewish custom that was a label, to be out like she was perhaps dressed and, my goodness, approaching a rabbi alone as a woman. When we were in Israel there was a mother and the child who was being bar mitzvah and her son was on the other side of the Wailing Wall. And she had to climb up over and stand, this most dignified woman from New York City in high heels, standing up and looking over so she could witness her son being given a status in the Jewish culture of a man. To me it seemed outlandish, but to her it was normal.
And so this woman comes in to Jesus with what some might look at as perplexing behavior. And she is at His feet. See they recline, not after the meal like we do; they recline at the meal and place their head near the table and their feet behind them away from the table. She comes up and she even does the first thing of just touching Jesus. She lets her hair down in public. That was shameful. That indicated impurity by itself, scandalous behavior in a first century Jewish woman. And then there is Simon. You’ve been there; I’ve been there. “What do they think they are doing?” Judgmental! “Who do they think they are?” Not always someone of a lower standard than us, but sometimes ones that we think might be a bit snooty. And Simon comes out though with the party line judgment. Not just on the woman, did you notice, but on Jesus Himself! In says in the Scripture, “Simon thinks to himself.” What if your thoughts this morning, right at this very moment, were displayed up there for all to see? Two thousand year’s later Simon got his thoughts in print. You know, Jesus knows our hearts, everything! And those Simon says to himself, “This man couldn’t be a profit or He wouldn’t let somebody like that touch Him.” Jesus knows what Simon is thinking and feeling. Jesus, Simon thinks to himself, has just proved who he isn’t. He couldn’t be a profit!
This woman, she comes and she brings that little thing, that jar of ointment. Weeping, she washes Jesus’ feet and takes her hair and dries it. I had one child sermon and she said, “Yuck!” That was all she could think of, using your hair to wipe someone’s feet. She said, “Is that really true?” I’m a preacher, would I lie to you? This woman who doesn’t say a thing takes something that potentially would have made her very wealthy for perfume at that time in those days it was costly. Oh, maybe not as much as the latest Ralph Lauren perfume is today but then it could have set you back a pretty penny as well. In fact it was such a wealth that they often passed it down in the family as an inheritance. So when she takes that those there knew what it represented. She did too. She knew it represented her celebration of forgiveness. She knew what she had been and of what she had done. And contrary to that of Simon, she was living in the present. Not in the old way; not in the past. She was demonstrating too not just her gratitude but her pre-release state. You know, I find it remarkable that we still expect people to be changed instantaneously just becoming a Christian. Maybe we don’t warn them enough. If you go hang around with your old friends before you, friends that were there before you were a Christian, and their lifestyles, it would be so easy for you to do the leisure-free action and fall back into the pattern. Perhaps it moves you farther away instead of into the transformational way of life. This woman thought she knew. Little by little, day by day she was making different decisions but she was accustomed to self-sacrifice, potentially a prostitute. And so she gives it all.
And Jesus, though he began where she was, He didn’t leave her there. She was giving a living expression to thankfulness, to gratitude. She knew that death was behind her and life was before her in the presence of Christ Jesus. So she did what she could to show that love, to pass that love gift on. As Pastor Bob said last night after we talked about the Scriptures, he said, “Yes, she did what she could. And no one forced her.” The question that is applicable to us is, “What will we do?” We might identify with the woman and feel that we, too, have done much and still have much toward living the way of Christ.
But maybe even less appealing is Simon. Jesus told a parable after all. Not to the woman, for the woman. Jesus told a parable, a story, the point of it was right at Simon. Because Simon was a Pharisee, he knew about the Mosaic Law. He knew that the year of jubilee was something that was observed in Mosaic tradition. After seven years your debt was forgiven. You started with a clean slate. Both of the characters in this narrative needed forgiveness—Simon and the woman. The woman was demonstrating that she had already received it, perhaps most likely in a previous encounter with Jesus as she was in the street. And in response to that forgiveness, she gave a true love offering. She was giving a living example of her heart for Jesus.
And that’s the way it is throughout Luke’s gospel and that’s how it differs from the other three of the Gospels. Luke says righteousness, the essence of righteousness, is an expression of love, extravagant love. The mark of forgiven people is their love for God and their fellow human beings. Jesus was trying to let Simon know, and you, and I. We need to experience forgiveness not just know about it. One is informational; another is transformational. The love that we return to God, the love we show others, that demonstrates our own experience of forgiveness. So Jesus said, “The one who has been forgiven much, loves much.” And he says to his host, “The one who is given little, forgives little and loves little.”
I guess we each have to decide, day by day, who or what will be our passion and who will we give our love offering too. The closing chorus today begins with a solo. Listen to those words. It is only when we have emptied ourselves by the grace of God that we can then allow His love to flow through us and be a forgiving, living example, an expression of love to others.
E-mail Comments to: Pastor Nancy Blevins