A Woman After God's Own Heart

Brad Sullivan

St. Mark’s, Bay City

June 12, 2016

Proper 6, Year C

Luke 7:36 - 8:3

“A Woman After God’s Own Heart”

Imagine sitting down for dinner with Jesus at Simon the Pharisee’s house.  It’s a fairly nicely appointed house, not a rich man’s house, but you can see that this Pharisee is well off, nonetheless.  They had low tables and didn’t use chairs, so you’re sitting or kneeling at the table with several others, servants have brought bowls for you to wash your hands, and the meal is about to be brought out.  Then this woman begins weeping behind Jesus, poring her tears onto Jesus’ feet and wiping them off with her hair.  You’re getting quite uncomfortable at this point, waiting for Simon to do something, and thinking to yourself, “Well, this is awkward.” 

Jesus, for his part, doesn’t seem to mind in the least.  Apparently he likes a foot massage, and was not in the least bit interested in what was proper.  Then, rather than Simon, the host speaking up, Jesus begins speaking to Simon.  You think he’s going to talk with him about lax security around the city that this sinful woman could even enter, or possibly congratulate him on being a gracious enough host for not kicking this woman out immediately, but that enough was enough.  Instead, Jesus insults Simon for not being a gracious enough host, not offering him a kiss or water for his feet.  Pretty rude of Jesus, you think, to insult their host.  Then, Jesus comes way out of left field and says this woman’s sins were forgiven because of her rather unseemly behavior.  Didn’t Jesus know anything?  She didn’t even bring an animal to be sacrificed by the priests. 

What you didn’t know was that Jesus was reading at least the Pharisee’s mind, maybe yours too, and the Pharisee, Simon, wasn’t concerned that the woman was there, nor that she was crying over Jesus’ feet and wiping them with her hair.  He was concerned that a “sinner” was touching Jesus and that Jesus seemingly didn’t know that she was a sinner and try stop her.  Simon questioned Jesus’ prophetic powers and ministry. 

Jesus, for his part, wasn’t really concerned with social norms, nor his status in the guests’ eyes as a prophet, nor a perfect follower of the Jewish animal sacrifice system.  Jesus was interested in repentance, forgiveness, grace, and love.  He didn’t see the woman’s actions as impertinent, out of place, or awkward.  He saw a woman who deeply desired reconciliation with God.  He saw a woman who was in anguish because of her sins.  He saw a woman who wanted to repent wholeheartedly, a woman who was falling, a woman who needed grace, forgiveness, and love.   

As for the woman, we don’t know what she had done that she was considered “a sinner.”  Nothing in the text says what her sins were; Jesus simply says her sins are “many.”  Interestingly also, nothing in the text indicates that she wasn’t supposed to be there.  Simon, the Pharisee didn’t ask her to leave or to stop what she was doing.  You’d think if she was an intruding and the whole thing was totally improper, that someone would have spoken up.  Perhaps they were all too taken aback, just sitting in uncomfortable, awkward silence.  We don’t know.

We don’t know what her role was in being there.  Perhaps the Pharisee, as a religious leader, regularly had people to his house, even those he did not know, his household serving them, as part of his work in teaching about God’s law.  Total speculation on my part, but it could serve to explain why the woman was not asked to leave, or how she was there in the first place.

 

However she got there, the woman was not concerned about being improper or awkward.  She loved much, was torn apart on the inside by the guilt of whatever sins she had committed, and she desperately wanted forgiveness.  So, when she heard Jesus was at the dinner party, she boldly sought him out to seek forgiveness.  She put aside any shame she had, did not hide, or pretend, or make up some story.  She sought Jesus out wholeheartedly, brought what she had, and did for him what she could out of a deep desire for a new beginning.

She couldn’t turn her life around.  This woman was stuck in whatever sins she had committed.  Even her touch brought the Pharisee’s ire, and she couldn’t claw her way back from being anything other than what she was reported to us as being, a sinful woman. She needed Jesus’ grace and love to declare her forgiven and to give her resurrection, a new start.  The difference between this woman and Simon the Pharisee was that unlike Simon, the woman knew that she needed resurrection, knew that she needed Jesus’ grace, forgiveness, and love. 

Looking at another sinner who needed repentance, we have our story this morning of King David.  David is seen as the greatest king Israel ever had.  He was devout in his faith in God, and he led the people to remain true to God, not running after false idols as so many kings after him had done.  David was also a murderer, and adulterer, and very likely a rapist.  When David saw Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, bathing, he wanted her and being the king, he got what he wanted.  Being that he was the king, Bathsheba probably didn’t have much say in the matter.  She probably didn’t exactly figure she could just say, “No thank you, your Grace.”  So we now have David as an adulterer and likely rapist.  Then, when Bathsheba became pregnant by David, he had her husband Uriah killed by placing him on the front lines of battle and then commanding that all others draw back so that Uriah faced an army alone.  Now we have David as a murderer, to hide his adultery and rape. 

Like Simon the Pharisee, David was blind to his sin, until Nathan opened his eyes with the story he told of the rich man who took the poor man’s sheep.  Nathan was very clever in showing David what he had done, and David was completely incensed at the injustice and greed of the rich man in the story.  Then Nathan dropped the hammer on David.  “You are the man,” Nathan told David, and at once, the scales fell from David’s eyes, and he realized what he had done to Uriah and Bathsheba.  Once his eyes were opened, David repented with his whole heart.  “I have sinned against the Lord,” David said, and truly meant it. 

With all that David did, his terrible, obvious sins against God and other people, David is called a man after God’s own heart.  He obviously wasn’t during the time of his adultery/rape/murder affair, but David had been called a man after God’s own heart before he was king, and he repented wholeheartedly after his affair. 

It’s hard for us to reconcile that.  Adulterer, rapist, murderer:  forgiven.  It doesn’t seem fair, and it’s not.  God isn’t fair.  Grace isn’t fair.  Imagine King David was not a lofty king living thousands of years ago, but a regular guy, not well off, living now in Bay City.  Imagine he raped a married woman by coercing her into having sex with him against her will and then conspired to have her husband killed.  Once her husband was dead, imagine this Bay City degenerate took her as his wife, she having become pregnant by his rape of her and knowing full well that he had had her husband killed.  She’s probably terrified at this point.  Then, imagine this man coming to his senses, realizing what he’s done, and that realization cutting him to the very core of his being.  Imagine this man desperately wanting to atone for his sins, desperately wanting forgiveness, probably going to jail, and imagine Jesus declaring him forgiven.  He’d still be in prison, but forgiven by God, beloved of Jesus. 

That doesn’t seem fair.  Thankfully, grace isn’t fair.  Thankfully God isn’t as concerned with our notions of fairness as he is concerned with his beloved children.  God sees us all as both perpetrators of sin and victims of sin.  We are victims of sin, from the moment we are born.  Even those born to loving parents begin almost immediately to be broken in thousands of little ways as they grow, and as they and as all of us grown, we end up breaking others out of our own brokenness.  Whether our sins are obvious and known or hidden and known only to ourselves or only to God, all of us are sinners, broken people who break others out of our brokenness.

So back to the woman in our Gospel story today.  Unlike Simon the Pharisee, the woman knew she was broken.  She knew she had broken others out of her brokenness.  She knew she needed grace.  She knew she needed a new start, and so she sought out Jesus and humbled herself at his feet.  She didn’t try to put on a show of how good she was so that he would accept her.  She came to him full of sorrow, full of weakness, full of regret, and full of need.

Now, this woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and dried them with her hair has usually been labeled a prostitute, people assuming that the Pharisee’s description of her is euphemistically calling her a prostitute.  Of course anywhere else in scripture, when a woman is making her living via prostitution, she is simply called a prostitute, so if she were, Luke would probably just have written that she was a prostitute, but he didn’t.  Labeling any specific sin for this woman forces the reader to miss the point of the story.  If we can label her sin, then we can focus on that particular sin, and many readers can disassociate themselves from the story because they don’t share that particular sin.  The point of the story, however, is not what her sins were or weren’t.  Her sins were many just like all of our sins are many.  The woman is any one of us.  The point of the story is her repentance and Jesus’ love and acceptance of her.

Rather than label the woman with any particular sin, I recognize that the woman was brave.  She was a model of approaching God in humility and self-awareness, in authenticity, and in boldness, seeking his grace, forgiveness, and love.  She is a woman after God’s own heart. 

Jesus was never interested in people who thought they were better than others.  He had little time for those who believed they did not need repentance.  Jesus had a heart for those who knew themselves to be sinners, who knew they needed God’s grace, and who came seeking God’s grace.  Rather than thinking ourselves to be better or less sinful than the woman in the story, we need to remove the log from our eyes before judging her speck…or better yet, we need to come to Jesus with ointment and tears and the log still in our eye, and ask him to remove it.  Ask him for resurrection and the new start that we all need throughout our lives.  Following the example of the woman after God’s own heart, trusting in God’s unfair grace, we too, all of us, anyone, can approach Jesus in humility and self-awareness, in authenticity, and in boldness, seeking his grace, forgiveness, and love.  Amen.