Who is in?
Trinity 2 Proper 6
Luke 7:36-8:3
There are several wrong ways in which to read this story about the woman who washed the feet of Jesus with her tears and dried them with her hair. One of those ways you don’t hear as much these days as formerly, but it is that, if only you love greatly, then you can be forgiven for anything, in fact, you hardly need to be forgiven. There is a line in the story which seems to say that because she loved greatly, she is forgiven. From this way of looking at life we derive the concept of the person whose life is a mess, or worse, but about whom we cannot be judgemental because he or she is a loving character.
Another wrong way to read it is that Jesus just gathers in to himself every disreputable person he meets and offers them forgiveness with no strings attached. You sometimes hear that these days. The idea is that we are to include everyone no matter who they are or what they do, simply and without reservation, no demands and no judging. You could read this story in this way. After all, the woman had a bad reputation in town, probably deserved, and Jesus does not go on record as reproaching her, but rather accepting her, because she loved much.
Well, if both of these ways are wrong, what is Jesus’ argument with the Pharisee? What was the Pharisee’s problem? We can assume the Pharisee was concerned with good behavior and the health of the religious community. He knew that there was a way for this woman with the poor reputation around town to take toward rehabilitation, if she wanted it. There were laws and sacrifices and disciplines she could undergo and eventually she could be restored to full membership in the community. Of course, such a course might have proven next to impossible in practice, but it was still there. Jesus cut through all of that. He simply offered the woman reconciliation on his own authority, requiring only that she desire to be received and forgiven. He made her a full member in the community of Israel—he forgave her sins—simply in virtue of the fact that she came to him and believed in him.
That is the central issue: who was Jesus that he could simply offer forgiveness to anyone who came to him? Where did he get the authority to sidestep the laws and regulations and reconstruct the community of restored Israel around himself? This was where faith came in. You either believed that Jesus was the Messiah, the one who could restore Israel and inaugurate the Kingdom of God, or you didn’t. But if you did, then you were dealing directly with the King himself and didn’t need to go through all the secondary processes. That was Jesus’ primary offense: he claimed to act in the name of God, without being subject to the rules and regulations which God had given to Israel in the past. A new age had arrived, said he—the old ways are valid no more.
The Church is supposed to carry on Jesus’ work of proclaiming the Kingdom of God, but now after all these many years, we have nearly as complicated a system of rules and regulations as did the old Jews. We have almost the same kind of attitude towards who is “in” and who is “out” as did the old Pharisees. In reaction to this, every once in a while you hear that the Church is supposed to include the excluded, just like Jesus did. Our task is to look for the oppressed, the misunderstood, the marginalized, and announce their inclusion to them, that they are accepted and forgiven.
There is much to be said for this point of view. As communities exist through time, they tend to develop certain ways of doing things, certain codes of behavior, certain ways of behaving, that are thought to be correct, appropriate, or even moral. It starts well, I think—with a desire to care for the place one lives and the people with whom one lives. But it is tough for a stranger, no matter how upright, who doesn’t look right, or act appropriately, or speak the same language, to feel accepted. It can feel the same for minorities within these communities who never seem able or willing to fit in. It can be almost impossible for those who have had serious moral or spiritual failings to be restored. To those who are comfortable with the way things are, bringing in the outsider, the fallen, the misfit, threatens to wreck the stability of the community, to compromise its character.
I think it is fair to say that Jesus did not have a lot of patience with this point of view. It excluded too many people who could not fit in, whether because of past sins or present status. To them he announced the coming of the Kingdom where all you needed to belong was faith in him. That is something we need to recover, if we are to be loyal followers of his. The Pharisees and the Sadducees and the temple priests were fairly satisfied in their day with the way things worked. But there were a lot of folks excluded from full participation in the worshipping community of Israel who could never measure up to the rules that were made by these powerful authorities.
So Jesus welcomed to himself the prostitutes, the tax-collectors, the blind and the lame and the deaf, the crippled and poor, widows and fishermen, slaves and women. All of these in one way or another were outside the normal channels of grace in Israel. Jesus did not make them prove themselves first or set conditions for their acceptance. The only thing that they had to do was come to him in faith, that is, to come to him convinced that he was the Messiah, the One God the Father had sent, and convinced that to be received by Jesus was the same thing as being received by God.
On the other hand, that is not the end of the story. It is the point at which a lot of opposition to Jesus arose from the powerful leaders in Israel in those days, but Jesus had a lot more to say to those who came to him. We can find it in summary form in three chapters of Matthew’s Gospel: 5, 6, and 7: The Sermon on the Mount. If I understand it rightly, the process worked like this: first, you knew that all you had to do for Jesus to welcome you was to come to him, believing that he was the One sent from God. Then, once you knew that you were included in the people of God, you also knew that you were to adopt a new way of life. The One who had accepted you also meant for you to follow him. You didn’t have to be a perfect follower all at once, but you had to be on the right course. Jesus had made you a member of the Kingdom, but now you were expected to learn to live like one, which meant learning to be like him.
The Pharisees didn’t like that either. They had the old system figured out; not only that, they had learned to control it for themselves. They got to say who was in and who was out, and they rather liked that power. It is to be wondered, though, whether they controlled the community out of a desire to please God and serve his interests or out of a desire to keep things in a way that they were comfortable with. Jesus seems to have expected that his followers would always exist in this world as a group which reached out to those who were not yet included, bringing people to encounter him and trusting that he would provide the energy and the strength to maintain community life.
That is certainly an issue for us—in manifold ways—as a parish and as a community and as a nation. Of course, only those who really believe in Jesus as the unique Son of God and King of the Kingdom of God would be interested in that, but for those who are, we must confront these same issues: do we really desire to find those who have been marginalized in our culture and society and offer to them the benefits of belonging to Jesus and the Kingdom? Do we understand our own belonging in the Church to be a belonging to Jesus for his Kingdom purposes and the mission of the Gospel or do we think of the church as something we own and control for ourselves and our own purposes? That makes a big difference. Do we also understand that what may seem reasonable to us as citizens of a particular secular state may be completely unreasonable to us as citizens of the Kingdom of God? Citizens of worldly empires and countries are always trying to protect what they have won, by means fair or foul, from those who have little or nothing. Citizens of the Kingdom are always trying to reach out and share what they have with those who have little or nothing—whether spiritually, materially, morally, or socially—trusting Christ to make up the difference.