NOTES for Luk 7:36-50

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.

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.

An encounter with Jesus ends very differently for different people. The devout Pharisee Simon cannot even acknowledge Him as a prophet because He allowed a sinful woman to touch Him. The woman herself, however, 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 of life and joy, 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 is the mutual bond between gratitude and love for Jesus, each giving rise to the other. For whoever loves much is forgiven much, and whoever is forgiven much loves much.

It is difficult to fancy a person in senses who knees down voluntarily in front of someone, besides such way that this one doesn't see him, requiring and asking absolutely nothing. Not holding back his tears and seeing that they fall fortuitously on the feet of this "someone", he wipes them with his hair, and after kisses them and anoints them with a very expensive perfume. What is this - madness, superfluous impressionability? Restraint plays us a nasty trick. It is already difficult to contain in oneself the comprehension of Man-God who is Jesus; but we still try to protect ourselves from this fact by good education, common sense and decency. It is easier to feel that God is far, inconceivable, almighty Imperious, than to realize that He is at the same time God and Man. It would be impossible to hold on if only for one second we understood that we can touch His hands and feel His warmth. So, here is our God, He sits, He speaks, He eats, He is tired of the road; He is not somewhere far in the clouds, in the midst of the radiances of light. No! He is here at arm's length; it is thus impossible not to use this possibility to touch Him, but we knee involuntarily down 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.

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.