About a week ago I had what I thought was a terrific party at my house. It was celebrating a happy occasion and a great person, and over the course of an evening there were dozens of people there, everyone someone I really liked. It was a celebration of how much we all had in common, and it made me feel pretty good about the world.
Today in the gospel we have a different sort of dinner party, but unlike mine there’s a sudden drama that gets acted out in the middle of this one. A person comes in who doesn’t act like anyone else. It takes place in the home of another upright religious person, who knows, maybe like me, or maybe a little like many of us. In the middle of this gathering in what’s probably an upper-class environment and very likely an all-male one, there comes a scene that upsets everyone with its emotion.
A woman has come into the room uninvited. She’s out of place classwise and every other wise. She’s a well-known and not well regarded local character, and what she does creates an over-the-top dramatic scene. All these years later, it makes us uncomfortable to picture it too, not the forgiveness that she feels she has received, but the emotional display and extreme gestures, the hair, the oil, the broken jar, the tears, all focused on Jesus. It’s like she has broken her heart open, with some combination of repentance and gratitude. The party is interrupted with embarrassment. No one knows what to do.
But we’re meant to feel the extreme contrast between her extravagant behavior and the host’s, the up-tight Pharisee, who sees a sinner in her but not so much in himself, someone who doesn’t know he might have sins to be forgiven too, who thinks sinners are other people with sins that are obvious. He is so blind he doesn’t even realize how he’s forgotten to show basic hospitality to Jesus, since he clearly looks down a bit on him, too, just like he does the woman. Just think of the contrast between the prosperous host Simon, confused about what’s happened to his dinner, and this woman in tears, whose behavior is complete inappropriate for a dinner party, but completely appropriate for someone God has forgiven and whose life is about to start over. She has been released from prison, in a way, given back something she thought she had lost forever.
Jesus asks Simon the Pharisee, do you see this woman, do you see what’s going on here? And it’s really the question for us, too. This is a dinner where everyone has something in common but they don’t see it. They are all sinners, it appears, the woman, Simon, and his other guests. There are the obvious sinners like the woman, obvious because they sin in a completely different way than the others do, so they stand out, and there are the not so obvious sinners, which means the people who only see each other, and haven’t noticed recently that they are in need of just as much healing.
We’ve all heard other stories about the Pharisees in the gospel, and we know that they are always a reminder to us that the first thing we should have nearby when we are tempted to start talking about sinners is a mirror. They are reminders to those who think they have arrived at a state of avoiding the worst sins out there to hold off on the celebration, that life is a constant process of falling and getting back up again for all of us.
But in today’s gospel the focus isn’t on the satisfied Pharisees but on what it looks like to be forgiven. The over-the-top emotion of the woman with the jar makes it look like forgiveness might be something almost painful. I know back where I come from in the Midwest, our training is all about never showing our emotions, and someone coming into a dinner and breaking jars, crying, and using her hair as a towel would be seen as someone who at best wasn’t taught proper manners at home.
But all this emotion is there in the story as a sign to us of the hidden need we all have for acceptance and forgiveness. This is what actual release looks like. Life is filled with nothing but people like this and people like us who come up short against their own standard and against the love that Jesus has told us to live by. We avoid thinking about that, maybe because it’s tempting to think other people’s sins are so much worse, or maybe just because we think the process of cataloging our sins and fixing them would be more than we can face.
But Jesus sees the whole situation differently. For him forgiveness is the first step, for the people he meets redemption always seems to come first, in many cases without words even being spoken. He doesn’t demand our misery, he doesn’t want us to hang back out of a sense of disappointment in ourselves, he wants our joy and relief, he wants us to fall to the ground not out of shame but out of happiness that something heavy is once again off our shoulders.
Everything starts with letting our guard down, seeing ourselves as part of a great global community of the imperfect, all desperate for a sense that imperfection isn’t failure. And if you think you can’t start over, or that God really doesn’t really work this way, maybe the first reading today will remind you that we have the great luck to meet here every week in a church named for one of the great sinners in history, someone who had to start over and over in life remembering what it was to be a king. God kept taking him back, because he was a king, as beloved as this sinful woman who disgraced her town and who like King David will probably be given the gift of starting over again and again. It’s possible to push this gift away and hold ourselves apart. But today take a moment and think how great it would be if Jesus took one look at us and forgave us so quickly we made a fool of ourselves in gratitude.