Where little has been forgiven, little love is shown. A sentence from this morning’s Gospel reading. Last weekend and into the beginning of the week, before all the storms began, we had the sort of days where you could sit outside, or if not you could keep the doors wide open. Last Sunday I was remembering a communion service I took at the district church of Cristo Redentor, in the San Juan de Miraflores area of Lima in Peru. The service had been due to start at 7 pm, so by about twenty past seven I was beginning to get a bit agitated. “Shouldn’t we have started?” I asked the deacon. “No,” he replied, “there are not enough people here yet!” In fact some of the congregation had gone to an event at the cathedral, and they were a little late getting back. But we began, with the double doors to the little church wide open to the street, and people wandered in and joined us as the service went on.
I mention this because it would have been a bit like that at the house of Simon the Pharisee. The meal to which he’d invited Jesus would have been eaten in a room open to the street outside, and that was partly the point. It would reflect well on Simon, that he’d invited this new preacher to be a guest at his house; so he wanted people to see it, and maybe even to stop and listen.
Having said that, I don’t suppose he’d reckoned with the woman, a woman of dubious character who may have been Mary of Magdala herself, who not only stopped but wandered in; and not only wandered in but began to act in a manner that was certainly not in accord with the strict rules that governed such social occasions. For a woman to be present at all would have been strange. For a woman to have her hair down would be almost scandalous. For a woman to be anointing this man’s feet and washing them with her tears, and drying them with her hair . . . Simon must have been mortified. And how come this great and perceptive teacher hadn’t cottoned on to what kind of woman this was?
Not all the Pharisees were fierce opponents of Jesus, not at this stage in his ministry anyway. Some of them were very interested to know more about this new teacher, and Simon may have been one of them - in which case, he must have been quite perplexed. Or maybe he had invited Jesus in the hope of trapping him into saying something heretical or subversive, in which case he would have been rubbing his hands together with glee. Either way, he had a lesson to learn.
I came across a quote the other day, which reads: “Be like Jesus. Spend enough time with sinners to ruin your reputation with religious people.” Well, this story is a good example of that. My theory, for what it’s worth, is that in fact Simon the Pharisee’s eyes were opened, and he became a follower, a disciple - but that’s based on nothing more than the fact that we are told his name.
Friends give. Two words that express a fundamental truth. It’s been well said that to have a friend you must be a friend: to surrender yourself to the other person. I suppose there are degrees to that surrender, and therefore degrees of friendship; not every friend is a best friend. Simon’s initial invitation to Jesus hadn’t been one of friendship. It was all about Simon, all about Simon looking good, being the first to get this interesting new teacher into his house. He’d done very little to welcome Jesus and to make sure he was comfortable - it was all about getting on with the show.
And then in comes this woman, this notorious woman. “Simon,” says Jesus, patiently but firmly, “she could not and would not be doing this unless she really wanted to get rid of her old life and start again. More than that, her heartfelt prayer for forgiveness has been heard, and answered. What she is doing is her thank-offering for what she has been given.” The unsaid coda to that is, perhaps, “Simon, you have been forgiven little - not because you don’t need forgiveness, but because you haven’t asked for forgiveness.”
And therein is Simon’s wake-up call, which perhaps he heard. Being a Pharisee, he was totally hooked on keeping every detail of the Law, a Law that had been broken down into many many detailed rules, one to cover every action, every decision, every event. To keep the Law is to be pure, to have merit, to be worthy of heaven; or is it? The way of the Pharisees had consigned God to a bit part, a spectator’s role. All God had to do was to look on and approve, as these holy people kept his Law to perfection.
Jesus tended to do better with sinners, people who knew how horrible they were and didn’t want to be like that any more. The sheer abandonment with which the woman anointed Jesus and wept over his feet must have caused scandal and consternation to those who looked on, but she was giving, simply giving, in a way Simon hadn’t managed to do at all. And that maybe he learned from.
Some years ago I went with friends to a meeting in the quite palatial setting of Darlington Street Methodist Church in Wolverhampton, to hear the American evangelist Nicky Cruz. You may well know his story, but briefly, Nicky Cruz was born in 1938 in Puerto Rico, and at the age of about fifteen sent to live with family in New York. He soon ran away from home and established his credentials within the gang culture of the day, becoming the leader of the notorious Mau Mau gang. A young preacher named David Wilkerson had felt called to take the Gospel to these gangs, and he spoke to Nicky Cruz, whose reaction to this attempt at conversion was a very serious threat to kill David Wilkerson. But the preacher didn’t give up, and Nicky Cruz came to realise just how fundamentally he hated the life he was living, and yet he was trapped in that life and not able to escape. The patience and persistence of David Wilkerson led eventually to Nicky Cruz and several of his gang members being converted. At the age of 77, Cruz still travels the world telling his story, and working for Christ.
David Wilkerson, who died in a car crash five years ago, told the story in one of the best selling Christian books of the last century, “The Cross and the Switchblade”, while Nicky Cruz also wrote his own account, “Run, Baby, Run”. There are many stories like this, of people who came to know Jesus in situations of degradation and despair and self-hatred, who perhaps couldn’t know Jesus until they reached the point where they could fall no further. John Newton’s greatest hymn, “Amazing Grace” tells the same story. As does the woman in the house of Simon the Pharisee.
I sometimes wonder why it is that we as Church fail in mission. The words we have are words of life and truth, so how is that every heart is not instantly persuaded? It’s not a new problem. Jesus told the parable of the sower in response to it - the seed still has to be sown, in order that some of it at least can grow and be fruitful. So maybe we fail because we don’t speak, seed isn’t being sown as it should be. But it’s also true that in a world that is as comfortable as ours is, here in the safe and wealthy west, no-one much is looking for forgiveness, no-one much is aware of need. A nod to God from time to time is as much as we need, if that.
When David Wilkerson first told Nicky Cruz that Jesus loved him, the response he had back was a threat to kill him, which would not have been the first murder performed by the Mau Mau gang. Wilkerson’s response was to say that if his body was cut up into a thousand pieces and laid out across the street, each piece would still love Nicky in the name of Jesus. There is true Gospel fervour; there is a person in whom Jesus was alive. The spirit more of the woman who just came in and gave than of Simon the Pharisee who - up until that point anyway - really wanted mostly to look good himself, and so was careful to ration what he gave. So where are we in this story, where am I? Challenged, I hope. Let me just leave you with two lines from a song that came into my mind: “The Spirit lives to set us free - walk in the light.”
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