NOTES for Luk 7:36-8:3

Many teachers and philosophers of antiquity gathered a school of followers around them; many had disciples who followed them, hanging on their every word. Yet no preacher of antiquity was followed by so many women. In this passage the evangelist carefully lists the names of those who were as close to the Lord as the twelve apostles. Luke particularly notes that they had been healed or cleansed of evil spirits, thereby drawing our attention to the fact that Jesus had visibly manifested His divine power through them. While He calls the apostles chiefly by His word, He wins over the future myrrh-bearers through miracles. Mary Magdalene came to know Christ when she realized that the seven demons tormenting her had been cast out, not when she heard a call to follow Him.

Perhaps this reveals a difference between men and women in how they perceive God… The Saviour shows most of His disciples an entirely new path in life, whereas in the women He brings about a qualitative change. But these are only ways in which the Lord draws hearts to Himself, ways that are not of great importance. One thing remains central: the Kingdom of God, regardless of how your attention was drawn to it.

The Savior's earthly ministry involved journeys that, though not long (Palestine is not large), were constant. One might of course say that this was a fairly ordinary way of life for a prophet, as many people believed Jesus to be. Yet above all, this choice was naturally dictated by the need to preach the Kingdom that He had brought into the world.

His followers, however, seem to have been divided into two groups. Some preached and traveled with Him, while others—primarily women—remained at home and served Jesus, as the Evangelist says, out of their possessions. This division was of course caused above all by the need to have, if not a home (from the moment Jesus began preaching He no longer had an earthly home, and would not have one to the very end of His earthly ministry), then at least a place where He could stay for a while.

But this was probably not the only reason. Even then, during His ministry, there had to appear in the world the space of the Kingdom that church assemblies would later become. Of course, before Pentecost one could not yet speak of the Church in the full sense of the word. Yet the homes in which the Savior was awaited and where He held His gatherings became its prefiguration.

The Kingdom was, of course, wherever Jesus set foot. Yet certain homes where He could be encountered gave the Kingdom definite earthly outlines. This was important—not for the Savior Himself, naturally, but for those whom He wished to save. The homes in which Eucharistic assemblies took place later became similarly important for the Church. For they became a prefiguration of the house about which Jesus Himself said at the Last Supper that it has many rooms—so many that there is enough room for everyone.

Today's reading ends with the words "and many others, who provided for Him out of their means." Thus before us passes a line of people unknown to anyone except God, people who brought to His feet everything they had, gave Him their whole life, and demanded nothing in return. Because the only and greatest reward for them was the possibility of being near Jesus.

Again and again the Gospel tells us that there is room for everyone in the Church, that everyone can follow Christ "preaching and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God!" Everyone, regardless of one's past. Even after being Christians for a long time, we often think that the past cannot be changed. It is not so hard to believe that God holds our present and our future in His hands. We know that He knows everything about our past. But it is very hard to believe that He can change the past too: He can so change our attitude toward a painful past that it ceases to affect our life; He can heal wounds received by us in deep childhood, wounds we may not even remember, though they distort our life, our perception of reality, our understanding of ourselves, and our relationships with other people.

We see what kind of people follow Christ through the cities and villages. They are different; they are wounded, uneducated, formerly demon-possessed, sick, sinful women and sinners, and all of them can carry the Good, Joyful News, the news that the Kingdom of God is coming to earth, the news that for God time does not exist and He is able to change everything if we allow Him to enter our heart. But we can serve God not only by preaching. Others have a quieter, more silent ministry. This is not necessarily solitary reclusive prayer in a cell, or the work of a doctor or nurse. Service to God can also be something we very rarely perceive this way: "many others ... served Him with their possessions." That is, they helped materially. They fed, gave drink, clothed, and gave a place to spend the night. They may have performed no great deeds and never preached. They simply shared generously what they had.

Yes, of course, in the Gospel Christ says that "it is hard for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven." But the rich man in this sense is not the one who simply has much; it is the one who does not understand that his possessions were given to him by God, that they do not belong to him. Only by beginning to give can he enter the Kingdom. By beginning to give, he will become rich in another way. After all, one can give only what is one's own; one cannot give what belongs to another, and by deciding to tear something away from oneself, one acquires the Kingdom.

We are called to serve God with the gifts He Himself has given us: for one person this is the gift of speech; for another, the gift of understanding other people; for another, the gift of helping with one's possessions, which God also gives.

In today's passage we see Christ surrounded by women. He restored to women their human dignity, something to which Luke's Gospel bears particularly eloquent witness. We must not forget this. One of the important sociocultural consequences of the spread of Christianity is precisely this: women gained spiritual independence from men. The process, however, followed a rather difficult path. In the earliest Christian communities, when all the Events were still relatively recent, women played a very important role. They carried out works of mercy and social service; they became martyrs and, later, saints. There were many women among the first saints. By the late Middle Ages, however—the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth century—when difficult times came upon the Church and so much was happening, as we now understand, contrary to the spirit of the Gospel's preaching, something also went wrong in this respect. Woman came to be seen as a vessel of sin, and the “witch hunt” began. Trials of women were a most evident revival of the spirit of paganism, always bound up with a certain opposition and attraction between the sexes. In our own time, under the influence of secular culture, the situation is again moving out of balance, now in the opposite direction. We must simply always remember the ideal of harmony that Christ gave us.

Each person’s encounter with Jesus ends differently. The devout Pharisee Simon cannot even acknowledge Him as a prophet simply because He allowed a sinful woman to touch Him, while that very woman receives forgiveness and life “because she loved much.” The same story continues today: some fail to notice Christ, while others find in Him the meaning and joy of life, seeing and hearing what people had awaited for centuries.

What makes the difference? Must one really be a social outcast, like that sinful woman, in order to meet Him? Rather, the point lies in the bond between gratitude and love for Jesus, each giving rise to the other. For one who loves much is forgiven much, and one who is forgiven much loves much.

The story that took place in the house of the Pharisee, a man who was undoubtedly deeply religious, shows us once again how paradoxical the Kingdom and its life must have seemed to the religious mind. For a religious person, sin is something objective and absolute. To him, a sinner is only a sinner, and fellowship with that person is inadvisable for anyone striving to live righteously; sin can be caught like an infectious disease. To the religious mind, sin is a spiritual and moral classification that makes a person unfit for spiritual life as that mind understands it. Following this logic, Jesus should have driven away the sinful woman who approached Him, regardless of any repentance. All the more so because in this case the sin must have been not accidental but entirely deliberate, and its consequences insurmountable even if the sinner repented.

Jesus sees the situation differently. For Him, sin is not a person's spiritual and moral classification but his ordinary condition after the Fall. The issue is not whether a person is worthy to enter the Kingdom. Here everything is obvious: after the Fall no one can be worthy. The only question is whether a particular person can be saved, whether a particular sinner can be brought into the life of the Kingdom.

Naturally, to do this the sinner will have to cease being a sinner, and he will be able to enter the life of the Kingdom only to the extent that he can accomplish this task. Yet in principle it can be accomplished, if only the person himself wants it. The sole question is whether someone seeking the Kingdom resolves to enter a relationship with Jesus, who brought the Kingdom into the world. The woman who wept as she embraced Jesus' feet clearly had such a relationship. The Pharisee... it is hard to say with certainty. But he is plainly not drawn to Jesus as the woman in the evangelist's account is. After all, he thinks that everything is generally in order with him, not yet knowing that he is mistaken. The woman no longer thinks so; her sins are more obvious to her. She has something to ask of the Teacher.

And so, paradoxically, the one who has sinned more proves closer to the Kingdom than the one who has sinned less. Not because sin brings a person closer to the Kingdom, of course. It is simply that an evident and serious sin, once recognized, forces a person to think seriously about his destiny and to hold more tightly to the One who can help him. This really does bring a person closer to the Kingdom, despite the sins he has committed.

At first glance the situation can appear questionable: is it really the case that in order to deserve forgiveness, one need only "show love" to Christ, or, as we would say today, "pamper" Him? This would be understandable in the case of a boss at work or some official in a government office, but Christ... Does He really demand an "advance payment" for His forgiveness?

The parable of the two debtors can clarify this question: love is not payment for forgiveness; love is the natural expression of gratitude. Jesus compares the expressions of love shown by the Pharisee, a devout and respected man, and by the "sinner," probably a public woman, not in order to reproach him for callousness. He is simply illustrating His own words: "he who is forgiven little, loves little." In this light, the woman's unusual gesture means that she is already no longer a sinner: her love testifies that she has been forgiven. This allows us to read Jesus' words about her differently, as most modern translations do: "Her many sins are forgiven, as can be seen from how greatly she loves." And can this be seen in us?

The short parable Jesus told Simon about two debtors seems paradoxical at first glance: if one follows its logic, it turns out that a person's relationship, whether with God or with neighbor, becomes stronger the more that person has been forgiven. From here it is not far to the well-known folk "wisdom": "if you do not sin, you will not repent; if you do not repent, you will not be saved." So then, sin for the sake of salvation? If we were normal people, not damaged by the fall, this kind of reasoning would be completely fair. The trouble, however, is that we are not.

The parable Jesus told Simon, like some of His other parables, is told on the basis of the actual condition of fallen humanity. And here it does indeed turn out that the measure of God's love for a person and the measure of a person's trust in God are determined by how much God is ready to forgive a person and to what extent the person dares to hope for forgiveness.

It would seem that dependence hinders love. In a world damaged by sin, that is how it is. But the issue here is not dependence as such: after all, a person is dependent on God too, and truly dependent; each of us depends on Him as on no one and nothing else. He knows how to turn the situation, how to guide matters, so that we do not notice this dependence at all. We can even ignore Him completely if we wish. And the only form His relationship to us takes is love.

Therefore dependence in itself by no means hinders love, and if obstacles arise, they arise only in the fallen world, not because of dependence as such, but because of the sin that, in a world damaged by sin, distorts and perverts every relationship. In the normal case, dependence of people on one another is something entirely ordinary and natural, in itself in no way darkening their relationships. And in that case the depth of relationships can indeed be determined by the depth of dependence.

It is another matter that the laws of the untransformed world sometimes make such dependence a heavy burden for the dependent side. Then readiness to lighten this burden or remove it altogether, for example by forgiving a debt for someone who will never be able to repay it, becomes an expression of practical, effective love for the dependent person. And there is nothing surprising in the fact that the relationships here are connected with how deep the dependence was of the one who received relief on the one who relieved his burden.

Of course, in the Kingdom such a situation simply cannot exist, just as it could not have existed in our world if it had not been damaged by the fall. But in the concrete situation in which all of us find ourselves today, relationships of love sometimes take precisely the form spoken of in the Savior's parable.

Simon the Pharisee received the Teacher rather arrogantly, without showing Him the signs of respect customary in Judea. He did not offer Him water to wash His feet and did not greet Him properly; the guests were probably reclining for the meal not far from the entrance, where people who followed Jesus everywhere, and also simply the curious, seem to have been crowding. Perhaps Simon was simply talking with his Guest under an awning, sheltered from the sun.

Then this woman appeared in the crowd at the entrance, or around the awning, and the words of the Nazarene Teacher that she heard touched her heart so deeply that she began to weep. For He was speaking about God, about the true Light and the meaning of life. He was speaking about the Creator's trampled love, about our petty human betrayal, and this woman's heart could not bear it. Suddenly she noticed that her tears were falling directly on His feet, because Simon had offered Him a place not deep in the shade, but right at the edge of the awning, where the rays of the midday sun beat down. Perhaps frightened, this woman began to wipe the Teacher's feet with her hair, and willingly or not, she poured on them the ointment from the flask as well. Simon, who was angry about the onlookers crowding around his house, noticed this and doubted that Jesus was really a prophet.

In the dialogue with Simon that followed, the Lord, as the conclusion of the parable about the two debtors who were forgiven five hundred and fifty denarii respectively, approves Simon's words that the creditor will be loved more by the one to whom he forgave more. In itself this means that a person who has received forgiveness of greater sins will love God more. But then the Lord said about the sinful woman who anointed His feet with ointment: her many sins are forgiven because she loved much. This woman's heart, probably in truth far from blameless, proved capable of responding to the word of Christ, to the love of God. In essence, she proved capable of asking forgiveness, not in words, but in tears. According to Christ's word, forgiveness cannot be imagined as some formally legal act. When love and repentance are involved, rules and the justice of the law step back, and there appears room for the love and mercy of the Almighty. This is what Simon, it seems, does not suspect.

All the biblical books tell us about two spiritual paths: the path of righteousness, leading to life, and the path of sin, leading to death. And now, when the Messiah has come, it suddenly turns out that the situation is not so unambiguous, that not every sinner is walking the path of sin and not every righteous person stands on the path of righteousness as firmly as he thinks.

Yet if we think about it, there is nothing surprising here: after all, there are no absolute righteous people in the world, completely untouched by sin, except Christ. Therefore righteousness by definition is only a relative state, one that depends on the fullness and intensity of communion with God available to the righteous person. Righteousness is like breathing: it is not static; if communion with God ceases, it disappears, just as breath disappears from someone who has stopped breathing.

And then it turns out that a repentant sinner is closer to righteousness than an imaginary righteous person who contemplates his own righteousness and judges others. Indeed, in order to repent, in order to ask forgiveness for the sin committed, one must at least turn to God, and therefore establish with Him those very relationships without which there is no righteousness. And then one can consider the matter done, for God needs only to establish relationships with us; after that He will find the way and the possibility to solve all our problems. It is enough for Him simply to enter our heart, and here it no longer matters what becomes the reason for our openness to Him. Even if the reason was regret over a sin committed and repentance for it, He will find how to do in our heart the spiritual work that we need for our salvation.

Today's reading brings us back once more to the question of the Kingdom and repentance. The situation is familiar: on one side, a Pharisee, religious, respectable and confident of his righteousness (v. 36); on the other, a woman fully aware of her sinfulness, washing Jesus' feet (vv. 37–38). And two ways of judging the situation.

As a religious person, the Pharisee understands that contact with a sinner defiles. This is not a matter of some moral squeamishness, but of the idea generally accepted at the time that sin resembles a contagious disease: a sinner defiles not only themselves but everyone with whom they come into contact. Of course, no one can make another person a sinner; one can become a sinner only by sinning oneself. But a sinner can defile someone else, for defilement was then seen as a kind of metaphysical contagion which is not itself sin but hinders communion with God. Consequently, associating with a sinner, from whom one might catch this contagion, was also considered a sin. The Pharisee is quite sure that if only Jesus knew whom he was dealing with, he would simply forbid the woman to touch him (v. 39).

But Jesus sees the situation quite differently. What matters to him is not sin in itself, but the sinner's relationship with their neighbour. We do not even know exactly who the woman in the story thought Jesus was: the text says nothing about this. But she evidently understood that if he was received in the home of a respected man, he must himself be a respected man and an authoritative teacher.

Knowing her sins, she dared not aspire to much. Essentially, she did what a household slave specially assigned to receive particularly honoured guests would normally do, if, of course, there was such a slave in the house. Evidently Simon had no such slave, and he himself had done nothing of the kind for his guest (vv. 44–46). And it turned out that her relationship with Jesus had become entirely real and very concrete, which can hardly be said of Simon the Pharisee. But if there is a relationship with Jesus, then there is also the possibility of entering the Kingdom. One might have thought Simon, who sat at the same table as Jesus, would have had such a relationship too.

Simon was evidently sure that, as a religious and devout person, he was already guaranteed the Kingdom. For the religious mind judges a person by their qualities. For a religious person, as indeed for anyone else, the whole world divides into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people. The only difference lies in the criteria: religious people have their own judgements, often different from those generally accepted. For the Kingdom, however, something else evidently matters: whether a person loves their neighbour. This is hardly surprising, for the love of which the Bible speaks is neither an emotion nor a state: it is a relationship based, above all, on the will—the will for good directed towards the one you love. And if a person knows how to love, they will love Jesus too when they meet him, even despite their own sinfulness. Then their sins will remain in the past, and the way into the Kingdom will open before them.

This passage answers the question of those who do not understand how to come to love God. There are probably many paths by which one can discover this amazing feeling of love for the Creator. Some come through love for creation, for nature, for another person; others through gratitude for the life they have been given. Another path leads through suffering and the realization that God shares in our suffering. There are many paths; we cannot list them all here. But here is yet another one. It is not among the easiest: it is the path taken by the sinful woman, through recognizing the full depth of her sinfulness. Few people apply this passage to themselves. ‘What sort of sinner am I compared with today's world, steeped in debauchery?!’ But that is precisely the point: we must look not at the world, but at God. And beside His absolute holiness, each of us is like this woman.

Yet this realization alone is, of course, not enough. Indeed, having only this realization is not merely insufficient but very dangerous. We must also learn to express it in tears. ‘Never receive Communion without tears,’ says one of the Fathers. But tears are not enough either. Something else is needed. And when we reflect on what is still missing, we arrive at the very goal of this path: love. The completion of it all is a fervent love that realizes that the Lord, in all His holiness, descends to our sinfulness in order to raise us once again to His holiness.

It is impossible to imagine a person in their right mind voluntarily kneeling before someone, doing so out of sight, demanding nothing and asking for nothing. Unable to hold back their tears and seeing them fall by chance on His feet, such a person wipes them with their hair, then kisses those road-worn feet and pours very costly ointment over them. What is this: madness, excessive sensitivity?

Our restraint plays a cruel trick on us. It is difficult to take in the reality that Christ is both divine and human. Yet we also try to protect ourselves from this reality with good manners, common sense and propriety. It is easier to cope with the thought that God is a distant, incomprehensible, all-powerful Ruler than to realize that He is both God and Man.

If we understand, even for a second, that we can touch His hand and feel its warmth, it becomes impossible to restrain ourselves. Here is our God: He is sitting beside us at the table, talking about something, eating; He is tired from the journey. He is not somewhere far away in the clouds, amid a radiance of light: He is here, within arm's reach. It is impossible to resist the desire to touch Him, and involuntarily you fall to your knees and kiss His feet.

We would have hardly built this sentence in such way if it was necessary to us to express a similar idea. We would have surely said: "Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much, but who loves little, to whom little is forgiven". And everything would have been explicit and unambiguous. How deep then is what Jesus says?

Firstly, His sentence suggests this idea: "if I feel that I am a little forgiven, then it means apparently that I love not enough". So, if I esteem that my sins are little, it is just by lack of my love to God.

Secondly, something bigger appears here. A forgiven person becomes capable to love more; big love opens the door to big forgiveness and this big forgiveness to a bigger love and so on. And what we are used to perceive as act of forgiveness, is conceived as process cultivating love in us.

Among the Savior's parables about the Kingdom, the parable of the sower, the parable of the word that God sows in the human heart, occupies a special place. The Kingdom and the word: how are they connected? How is the word entering the human heart connected with the Word? The Word with a capital letter is incarnate in Christ. But what about the word of God with a lowercase letter? How does it enter a person's heart? What is this word like? The word by which God creates the world. The word that the prophets hear. The word that, as the hymn writer says, does not return to God unfulfilled. It turns out to be given to everyone. It is sown like seed in a field, with a generous hand. Only it is far from always received as seed is received by well-prepared soil.

This is understandable: the word is not simply a revelation given once. It is the instrument of God's action, which God uses in order to change a person. To prepare him for the fullness of communion with God. For life in the Kingdom. And a person does not always want this. For all sorts of reasons. Sometimes simply because he has no time. If God's word is not the main thing for a person, if God for him is somewhere beside the road along which the person is walking, the word of God will never become in his heart the instrument of God's action. But even if it does become that, this is still not everything.

After all, spiritual life is not for a day, not for a month, not for a year. It is forever. And if a person has time for "spirituality" today but not tomorrow, then his "spirituality" really does belong in quotation marks. And, of course, there is steadfastness during trials. A person who desires a righteous life, life with God, has always been an enemy of the evil in which the fallen world lies. And a Christian is doubly its enemy: he not only does not accept this evil himself, he also brings into the world the Kingdom that destroys evil without mercy, leaving it no place in creation.

It is not surprising that if this world generally hates the righteous, it hates Christian righteous people twice as much. And yet persecutions themselves are not as frightening as the everyday, organic rejection of spiritual life that marks the fallen world. Persecutions spiritually mobilize; their absence relaxes. And only after overcoming both can one begin a normal spiritual life. With the word in the heart, reflecting that very Word that became incarnate in Christ, and which, if one allows it to change one's heart, will make it capable of containing the life of the Kingdom in all the fullness available to a human being.

The word, the seed sown by the sower, contains within itself the germ of the Kingdom of Heaven. Falling into our hearts, it begins to sprout into an ear of new life. But in this parable the sower does not act alone. Without soil—that is, without us—the seed cannot sprout. As Jesus observes, the more we participate in this process, the more fruit we bear. This produces an apparent injustice: the richer we are, the richer we become. Yet the issue here is probably not spiritual wealth, but how much of our capital—our time, attention, strength, and finally our whole life—we are willing to invest in this shared process of cultivating the Kingdom.

Jesus' parables are something halfway between amusing stories from everyday life and riddles: in them He explains the inexpressible, the Message of His Kingdom, in simple human language. Many of them begin just this way: "The Kingdom of God is like someone who..." - and then He sketches a situation familiar to His listeners, revealing to them the essence of His Gospel.

So, the most famous parable is about how the Word of God, like a seed, must fall into fertile soil in order to bear fruit and not be lost in vain. The evangelist wonderfully completes the parable by giving, immediately after it, the account of Jesus' family, where He speaks to the disciples a new riddle that expresses the same Message in other words: "Whoever hears the Word and does it has entered My family".

The listeners only have to compare these parable-riddles to understand what the Kingdom consists in that their Teacher brought to earth. Through his book, the evangelist offers this task not just to the small circle of disciples, but to all readers of the Gospel.

Unlike Matthew, Luke places the parable of the sower in the context of words that Matthew records as part of other teachings of the Saviour (vv. 16–17; Matt. 5:15, 10:26–27). We can no longer say with certainty whether Luke quotes these words to remind the reader of what Jesus said on another occasion, or whether, after telling his disciples the parable, the Teacher really did remind them of something he had already spoken about. One thing is clear: for the evangelist, as for Jesus himself, the Kingdom is inseparable from witness. The parable of the sower can be read not only as a parable about what prevents a person from accepting and entering the Kingdom, but also as one about what prevents them from bearing witness to Christ and the Kingdom. Everyday cares, if we give them too much attention (v. 14), fear of persecution and harassment, if we give in to it (v. 13), and simple frivolity towards the revelation received from God (v. 12) can all hinder a faithful witness. It is not merely that all these things distract a person from a particular activity by turning their heart, and therefore their attention, to something else.

It is also that a full witness is not merely an account but a visible demonstration of what life with Christ in his Kingdom is like. Everything listed in the parable of the sower destroys the spiritual wholeness that makes this demonstration possible. It is no accident that commentators interpreting verses 16–17 still disagree about what Jesus means by the secrets that will sooner or later be revealed. Some are certain he means carefully concealed evil deeds or weaknesses that people do not usually speak of, and feel uncomfortable speaking of aloud. Others maintain that he was speaking of the Kingdom, which, though hidden for a time, will sooner or later be revealed in all its fullness and become visible to everyone.

Verse 18, meanwhile, may help settle the dispute: it calls those listening to a particular kind of spiritual attentiveness. The Gospels often mention situations in which people listen but do not hear. This does not mean that they simply let the words pass them by: Jewish culture is a culture of dialogue, not only dialogue between people but also between a person and God. It concerns what sometimes prevents someone from hearing the person speaking to them, the very thing described in the parable of the sower. The listener does not keep track of what is happening, because their attention is focused neither on the speaker nor on the words, but on something else. Without spiritual wholeness, however, a person may not even notice this, having neither the habit nor the skill of observing where their attention is directed.

Alas, such an unreflective state is normal for fallen humanity. But this kind of spiritual slackness is unsuited to the Kingdom, for what matters most in the Kingdom is relationships, and here attention, and awareness of where it is directed, become essential. Without this spiritual collectedness, a person will not gain the Kingdom they hope to receive. This is not an examination for its own sake: a spiritually slack person simply lacks the organ needed for life in the Kingdom. Or they have it, but it is so weak that even after entering the Kingdom they cannot remain there: they lack the spiritual strength to keep God and their neighbours in the focus of their attention, and without them there is no Kingdom. Then contact with the Kingdom becomes a moment of truth: what was previously hidden, perhaps even from the seeker—for fallen human beings are prone to deceive themselves about themselves—becomes evident and known to all. Then it becomes clear whether a person is ready to enter the Kingdom.