Father Stephen De Young: We’re going to be picking up in Luke, chapter 7, verse 36 because we stopped in the middle of the chapter last time. Just to very quickly get us caught up again to where we were, where we left off. We are at the point where Jesus has been continuing to travel to the villages around Galilee. He’s also been… last time he was in the city of Capernaum which, as we said, was sort of the actual city-city, the fixed city in that part of Galilee near the Sea of Galilee, whereas the villages we’ve been talking about are sort of little encampments almost that pop up at various points around the harvest seasons, around the harvesting of different crops or around different other types of work. And so they’re sort of seasonal, they’re not always necessarily the exact same place, and these are where the peasants who are sort of working the fields are working on building projects or that kind of thing, this is where they will live during the period of that labor. But it’s not sort of a place where they’re building stone buildings that we’re going to find ruins of.

Capernaum, however, is a settlement. It’s an actual city. It’s got the stone buildings, permanent buildings, and the various accoutrements of a Roman city at that time there in Galilee. And so, Capernaum is where Peter and his mother-in-law live, and the rest of Peter’s family we know from other books other than Gospel According to St. Luke that St. Peter had a wife and a daughter. So his family…. he’s a little more well to do. As we said, well to do for a peasant albeit, but a little more well to do, because he owns his own fishing boat and that sort of thing. So, he has a home in the city. That home has been found archaeologically, because later in the second and third and fourth centuries became sort of a tourist spot for Christians where St. Peter’s house was that we found, believe it or not, graffiti, because people then were a lot like people now and people sort of carved into the wall mostly in Greek sort of “I came here to see Peter.” That kind of thing. Sort of in corners and on blocks that we found, so we know which house in Capernaum was St. Peter’s.

But this is acting as sort of homebase and then Jesus will travel to the various villages and preach in the synagogues on the Sabbath and preach to people. He’s being followed from place to place as we saw by sort of a big crowd of people from these peasants. And we’ve been reading about various encounters he has had along the way. Last time, earlier, chapter seven, here we had his encounter with the centurion followed by him going to the village of Nain, which is one of these small villages, and coming upon a funeral procession and raising a widow’s son.

And then right before we left off last time, some messengers from St. John the Baptist, St. John the Forerunner, came to see Jesus to sort of clarify who Jesus was in terms of their view of the Messiah. And we talked for a good while last time and I won’t go through all that again, but there are various views in terms of the Messiah at that time, whether there was going to be one Messiah or two different Messiahs, one who was a prophet and one who was a king or one who was a priest and one who was a king. There are sort of different views.

And so, St John, facing death since he’s been imprisoned by Herod and he’s aware of the fact that Herod is wanting to get rid of him, sends these messengers to Jesus. Just to clarify, he knows Jesus is the Messiah, he knows Jesus is part of this, but exactly what part and exactly how is this going to work? And so Jesus took that opportunity to not only sort of reassure St John through his disciples that he sent, but also to speak to the crowds about who St John was and who Jesus is. And so we’re coming off of that, and the reason I wanted to sort of run through that is where we start, verse 36 here, it starts with “then”. In the Greek it’s literally “and then” so it’s sort of continuing. We sort of have this continuation.

We’ve talked before several times about how we tend to read, especially the New Testament and sort of little chunks. And while that’s helpful in terms of taking each unit and sort of trying to understand it on its own, we also have to understand how it fits into sort of the flow of the overall story. And in many cases we have things, St Luke will set things in a certain order: this happens and then this happens and then this happens. And he does that for a reason because he’s sort of developing an idea or showing two sides of something or that kind of thing. And so it’s important that we keep that context. So it’s coming off of this sort of speech that he gives to those following him about himself and about St. John that now this happens.

And what he’s just finished saying is mentioning the accusations that people have made against him that he is “a glutton and a winebibber”, which again, I just love that word. The “bibber” part of that comes from the same Latin root as the word “imbibe”, to drink. So that’s what it basically means, a drunkard, someone who’s drunk on wine, he’s a glutton and a winebibber and a friend of tax collectors and sinners. So he’s being accused of sort of associating with wicked, evil people and then guilt by association, what kind of quote/unquote “holy person” would be around all these unholy people spending time with them and eating with them and drinking with them, apparently.

So following right off of that, we read in verse 36:

Then one of the Pharisees asked Him to eat with him. And He went to the Pharisee’s house, and sat down to eat.

So this would be the other side of the coin. This would be the kind of person who the general people would think Jesus would be associating with and would be eating. Because as we’ve talked about many times before, the Pharisees were a sect of Judaism. We’re not sure exactly where the term Pharisee comes from, but we’re pretty sure the best going theory is that it comes from a root, paris, that means to separate. And so the word to be holy in Hebrew and Aramaic, kadesh, which is related to kudos in Arabic, you’ve heard it’s the same root letters, means both holy and set apart or separate, it has both of those ideas.

So the idea is that this is coming from paris that needs to separate or to be separate. And so the idea is that these are holy people who sort of hold themselves separate and keep themselves away from unclean things and wickedness and evil things. And that sort of describes their ideology. For all intents and purposes, the Pharisees looked at the problems they were having at the fact that even though the people of Judea had returned from the exile, they’ve been freed by Cyrus the Persian about a little over 500 years before this, they’ve been allowed to go back to the land, but they hadn’t experienced what they’d experienced before. Because remember, when we were reading through the prophets, the promise to them when they were in exile was that God was going to deliver them again. It was compared to the Exodus. God was going to bring them back in the land and restore them and he would come and dwell among them.

So they sort of came back to the piece of land. But when they rededicated the Temple, God sort of didn’t show up the way he had in the past. They still had the Romans ruling over them. They’re still under the power of foreign power. There’s a pagan foreign power who is oppressing them, and they were used to being peasants without rights. This didn’t really seem like the fulfillment of what the prophets had promised. And so, as we’ve said before, the various sects of Judaism came to various answers as to why this was.

And the Pharisees came to a very Old Testament-based answer. They looked at the Old Testament and they said, “Well, why did we get exiled in the first place? We got exiled in the first place, because we didn’t obey the Torah, we didn’t obey the law. God told us, ‘When I bring you to the land, here’s how you’re supposed to live. Here are the commandments, right? You need to keep them. If you don’t keep them, I’m going to throw you back out of the land.’ Well, we didn’t keep them, and he threw us back out, right, true to his word.”

So they said, “Well, if we’re sort of back, but not really, it must be because we’re still sinning. We’re still sinful, right? We’re still not keeping the Torah, we’re still not keeping the law. And so what we need to do, if we want God to send the Messiah and deliver us from the Romans, set us free, give us prosperity and wealth and all this again and return to the temple, what we need to do is we all need to keep the commandments.”

And it’s important… that “all” is important, because we as Western people think very individualistically, especially when it comes to religion. We tend to think, “Well, this is between me and God, right? Or Christ can judge me for what I did, right? As long as I’m right, I need to get myself right.” And so that tends to be how we think. That’s not how they thought. That’s still not how they think in a lot of Eastern countries and cultures, but that’s not how they thought at this time in history, because as we saw in the Old Testament, God doesn’t say to each individual Israelite, “Well, if you keep the Torah, I’ll leave you in the land, and these others who don’t keep the law, I’ll send them into exile.” It was all or nothing. We’re all together in this. Even the prophets who God sent to preach his word, they ended up in exile too. They weren’t immune to it just because they personally didn’t break the commandments. So this was a collective thing.

So the Pharisees didn’t just say, “Okay, I need to keep the law. If I go and I keep all the commandments, then God will bless me.” It was all of us together, all of us Judeans, all of us Galileans, all of us who are descended from the Israelites, we all need to keep the commandments. We all need to do what God wants us to, and then he will bless all of us together.

The problem with that is, if you’ve got one person, then who’s sitting over here and not just committing a sin, but you’ve got somebody who’s a tax collector, you’ve got somebody who’s a prostitute, you’ve got somebody who’s just continuously not keeping the commandments. It’s not just, “Oh, well, that guy’s going to hell, but I’m fine.” Its: “Those people who are doing that are the reason that all of us are suffering. Those people doing that are the reason that all of us are under the thumb of the Romans. Those people are the reason why God hasn’t sent his Messiah yet. Those people are the reason why God hasn’t returned to the temple yet.”

And so this is why the Pharisees are so hostile towards these people who they see as sinners. Because it’s not just like, “Oh well, he’ll go to hell, I’ll go to heaven”, right? It’s, “he’s preventing all of us from being blessed”. And so they just want to get rid of those people and they go back to the Torah and want to read it very literally and say, “Okay, look, if you’re doing this, you should be stoned to death. You commit adultery, you should be stoned to death. You break the Sabbath, you should be stoned to death. That’s what we need to do. We need to get rid of these people. I don’t need to just purify myself. We need to purify ourselves as a nation.”

So they become very hostile. Understanding that mindset is very important, of course, when we get later in the Gospel, in any of the gospels, and we see how they turn on Jesus and want him killed, you say, “Well, why would they want him killed? Why wouldn’t they just go around and say, ‘Hey, don’t listen to that guy, hey, don’t listen to that guy. He’s a false teacher’?”

Because it’s not just in their minds that somebody is a false teacher. He’s going to lead people astray, he’s going to set us back. God’s curse is going to be on all of us because of him, so we need to get rid of him. He needs to die so that then we can be blessed. That’s why already we’ve seen this hostility last time about Jesus eating with these tax collectors and sinners. It’s not just like, “Oh, well, he hangs around with people with a bad reputation. So you can’t believe what he says.” It’s: “he’s taking sides with those people, the people who are dragging us all down, the wicked”.

So that’s who this Pharisee, we’re going to find out his name is Simon, Simon the Pharisee, he’s the kind of person who is not only meticulously following, not just all the rules of law. We talked about how the Pharisees did what they called building a hedge around the law. And the best example of this, which is still practiced in Judaism to this day, is one of the commandments, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord your God in vain”. Well, the name by which they knew the Lord of their God was Yahweh, right? Well, if we never say it, we can’t take it in vain. So to prevent anybody from taking the name of the Lord in vain, we will just never say it, ever. We’ll just say when we get to it, when we’re reading and we get to it, we’ll just say “Lord”. Or sometimes they’ll say “name”. So “name, your God” so they never say it, right? That way you can never break it.

And so they went through… they said, “Well, we’re not allowed to violate the Sabbath day. We’re not supposed to work. Okay, well, what constitutes work? That’s kind of an ambiguous, right? How far do I have to walk before I’m working? How much work do I have to do around the house before I’m working? If I just get up, am I working? If I go dust off a table, is that work? I might have crossed the line.”

And so, they came up with hundreds of individual rules. You could walk this far. If you walk less than this distance, it’s not working. If you walk more than this distance, it’s working. If you let your donkey out into the pasture to eat, that’s okay, that’s not working. But if you go and you lead him out into it you’re working. If he falls into a ditch and you need to save him, okay, you can pull them out of the ditch, but if you move him to a different part of your barn, you’re working. So all these rules to make sure, “Okay, if we follow all these rules, then we’ll never violate the Sabbath, right? Because we have this right here’s the rule, we’ll stay way out here, we won’t come anywhere near ever breaking the rule.”

And so as a Pharisee, he’s someone who’s following all these rules, and not just following all these rules himself, but teaching these rules to people as a way of, in his mind, bringing about the salvation of the whole nation, right? We need to get everybody to learn these rules and everybody to follow these rules. And anyone who’s not interested in him and his rules is on the other side, an antagonist, is the enemy.

But so in the popular reputation of the people, for the common people, Pharisees, they really know the Bible at the time. They really know the Torah. They’re experts. They’re smart. They know all this stuff. They’re the people who they go to for advice. What do I do? Hey, you should go ask him. He knows his stuff about the Scriptures. Go talk to him. These are the ones who are living the holy lives. These are the ones they look up to. And so these are the people of the popular mind who Jesus should be hanging around with. Jesus should be with these other holy people, these other “wise” people, so they could share their wisdom with each other and help us all.

So, this Pharisee, Simon, invites Jesus to his house. Jesus comes to his house and sits down and eats.

And behold, a woman in the city who was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at the table in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster flask of fragrant oil, and stood at His feet behind Him weeping; and she began to wash His feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head; and she kissed His feet and anointed them with the fragrant oil.

Now, notice if you read this closely, it’s a little different than the way it’s usually depicted, at least in the pictures I’ve seen. Usually, you have Jesus sitting down and she’s sort of giving him a foot massage. But that’s not, if you read, she stood behind him. She doesn’t come up and talk to him or look him in the eye or address him. She’s standing behind him, weeping, and then she bends down, starts washing from behind him. She doesn’t even approach him directly. That’s the humility that she’s showing. And see, once again, she’s identified as a sinner. So she’s one of these people who the Pharisees don’t want around. Don’t want around. So her coming and walking into his house and doing this is going to be a major deal, right? Major deal.

And it isn’t hard to imagine why. If one of our bishops was here in town and you invited him to your house, and somebody who you’d seen working as a prostitute near one of the hotels in town, all of a sudden came walking into your house and started washing the bishop’s feet and crying, you’d probably think it a little odd. This would not be what you necessarily wanted to take place in your house, right? So people are shocked, as we’ll see.

†Now when the Pharisee who had invited Him saw this, he spoke to himself, saying,

Now notice he spoke to himself, that means he’s thinking, right? He doesn’t say this out loud to anybody else. He’s just thinking this. He thinks:

“This man, if He were a prophet, would know who and what manner of woman this is who is touching Him, for she is a sinner.”

This shows us a couple of things. First, it shows us why the Pharisee invited Jesus to his house. Remember the centurion, who we started out this chapter with he told Jesus, “Don’t even come to my house. I’m not worthy that You should come to my house. You just give the word from there, and my servant will be healed.” He shows his great faith in who Jesus is.

The Pharisee invites him to his house, why? To check him out, right? “We’ve heard some things about this Jesus guy. People are saying, he’s a prophet. I’m going to bring him here. I’ll judge for myself.”

And this is something that’s a temptation for all of us. It goes with sort of that individualism, is that each of us wants to be the judge of things for ourselves. We look at what the Church teaches and we go, “Eh, do I agree with that or not? I know this is what the Church teaches but this point I don’t necessarily agree with.” Or we look at other people in the church, clergy or just other people in the church, right? They sort of say, “I don’t know about that guy, right? He acts this way at church, but eh, I don’t know…” 

So, we make ourselves a judge. We’re the ones who assess. We’re the ones who decide what we want to believe and what we don’t. That shows a certain pride, I know what’s best, right? Even “I know what’s best for me” is a certain amount of pride.

We don’t approach things with, “I’ll take a look at what does God want to teach me from this and then whatever I discover, God is saying to me, I’m going to be obedient to that, whatever it is, whether I like it or not.” We approach it with, “Well, we’ll see if I agree with this or not,” right? “Well, he said that, or this verse of the Bible seems to be saying that; I don’t like that, so it must be something different.”

And the problem with doing that is then you can never be taught anything. You can never learn anything, you can never be challenged by anything, you can never grow because anything that’s uncomfortable to you or that you don’t like or that you don’t already agree with, you’re just going to reject. I’m just going to say “Meh, that’s not what I think. I don’t care for that.”

This is sort of building off of what we just saw. Remember what Jesus said about himself and St. John the Baptist? St. John came, he was preaching repentance. He was giving them the hard teaching, right? Repent. He knew God is at hand. “You’re sinners, you need repentance and forgiveness.” They said, “Ahhh, he’s nuts, he’s living out in the desert, he’s crazy”. So Jesus comes giving you the positives, the same message, but from the positive side, right? Forgiveness of sins is available to you. Look, God is delivering his people, right? God is offering us forgiveness to everyone. And they say “Ahhh, he’s drunk and hangs out with all these tax collectors and sinners.”

And Jesus’s point is, if you won’t listen to the negative side and you won’t listen to the positive side, then you can’t hear anything. You can’t hear anything God has to say to you at that point. And so, the reason we get that “and then” at the beginning is we’re about to see exhibit A. We’re about to see exhibit A of somebody who’s just like what Jesus was describing, who can’t hear either because remember, as he was going through that, he pointed out that the Pharisees didn’t go and get baptized by St. John. So this man is a Pharisee. He already ignored St. John. I don’t need to be baptized. I don’t need to repent. I’m not a sinner. I keep the Torah. I keep all the commandments.

So he’s already ignored St. John, now what? Now he sees Jesus with a sinful woman who’s in tears because of the forgiveness and the grace that Jesus represents. And he says, “Oh, look at that. Look at him. Yeah, some prophet. He doesn’t even know what kind of woman this is.” So he can’t hear. He can’t hear the gospel. He can’t change. He can’t be transformed by the power of Christ. He’s cut himself off from God. And so that’s what happens when we set ourselves up as judges. We set ourselves up as judges. We cut ourselves off from being able to hear what it is that God is saying to us.

Now notice it says that Jesus answered. Remember he was thinking, right? So again, what is St. Luke showing us? We’ve talked about how St Luke doesn’t come out and say Jesus is both God and man, right? He doesn’t say Jesus has two natures, the divine nature and the human nature. He doesn’t spell that out. But what does he do? He shows us Jesus doing God things, and he shows us Jesus doing human things. Jesus does things only God can do, and Jesus does things that only a human being can do. And that’s how he shows us, rather than telling us, well, this is one of those God things, right? He knows someone’s thoughts.

Remember that from the Old Testament. “God knows the thoughts of man and the inclinations of his heart.” So Jesus knows his thoughts. He thinks the question, and Jesus answers him:

And Jesus answered and said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.”

Notice he uses his name too. It’s important again to remember. Jesus rebukes the Pharisees a lot. We’ve already seen it in St. Luke’s Gospel and we’ll see a lot more. He rebukes them a lot, but it’s not because he hates them. It’s not that, as some people want to interpret St Luke’s gospel, Jesus is just taking what the Pharisees taught and flipping it over. The people you consider sinners and tax collectors and the poor, they’re the good people, and you Pharisees are the bad people, and we need to get rid of the Pharisees, right? What we really need is, their God and not yours, the way they think God is their God and not that of the sinners, right? But Jesus isn’t just flipping it.

We talked about that before when we talked about in St Luke’s version of the Beatitudes. Because St Luke talks about poverty a lot. He talks about the poor a lot. We talked about how he’s not coming to a culture that thought rich people were good and poor people were bad and saying, no, rich people are bad and poor people are good. He’s saying that good and evil don’t track to poverty and wealth, right? There are rich people who are wicked and there are rich people who are righteous. There are poor people who are wicked and there are poor people who are righteous. Those aren’t directly related.

So, Jesus using his name. Jesus is speaking to him, and he’s speaking to him in a familiar and tender way, because his goal is not just to “Oh, shut up, Simon, you idiot”. Right? His goal when he rebukes the Pharisees is to get them to repent and so this answer he’s going to give, the reason, he starts by using his name. And this is the first time we hear his name just as one of the Pharisees earlier. But Jesus doesn’t look at him as just one of the Pharisees. Jesus looks at him as Simon. He’s a human being just as much as the sinful woman is. And Jesus wants his salvation just as much as he wants the salvation of the sinful woman. He wants both. So he says “Simon, I have something to say to you.”

So he [Simon] said, “Teacher, say it.”

“There was a certain creditor who had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty.

And we’ve talked before about how one denarius was the standard pay for, like a peasant worker, for one day’s work. That’s how much you made in a day of full-time work. So 50, since they’re working six days a week, is about two months worth. 50 denarii is about two months wages. 500, you’re talking about a year and two thirds, right? So you’re talking about a year and three quarters, of your complete wages. So one is a much more vast sum. They’re both big sums, right? They’re both big, but one is much bigger.

“And when they had nothing with which to repay, he freely forgave them both. Tell Me, therefore, which of them will love him more?”

So He says neither of them can pay it back, even though the 50 is much less if you got zero, can’t divide by zero. So nothing is nothing. Neither of them can pay him back what they owe. So he just writes it off, both debts. He says, which one is going to be more happy about it? Right? Which one is going to thank him more? Which one’s going to love him more for forgiving the debt.

Simon answered and said, “I suppose the one whom he forgave more.”

Well, yeah, probably, unless he’s a real jerk. The one who was forgiven the 500 is going to be even happier than the one who was forgiven 50.

And He said to him, “You have rightly judged.” Then He turned to the woman and said to Simon,

.

Now notice he turned to the woman and said to Simon, meaning he’s talking to both of them. He’s talking to both of them. He’s addressing both of them as equals, which is wonderful to her. And Simon would not have been happy about treating them as equals.

Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave Me no water for My feet, but she has washed My feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head. You gave Me no kiss, but this woman has not ceased to kiss My feet since the time I came in. You did not anoint My head with oil, but this woman has anointed My feet with fragrant oil. Therefore I say to you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little.”

Okay, so a couple of things here. He’s not just taking a shot at Simon for poor hospitality, but he’s pointing back to the reason why Simon invited him there. Simon didn’t invite him there because he was convinced Jesus was the Messiah, and he was excited to have the Messiah in his house or this great prophet. He didn’t invite him over because he wanted to see what Jesus had to teach him. Jesus coming to his house was not going to be this life transforming moment. Why? Because, again, Simon’s there to judge him. Simon is there to decide. Simon the expert is there to judge whether Jesus is a legitimate prophet or not, right? So he’s pointing out, whereas this woman comes and just everything she has, all the love she has, she offers to Jesus.

Now, notice a couple of things, though, and that there’s a little turn here at the end of the story. Notice he doesn’t say, “I say to you she loves much because her many sins have been forgiven to her.” That’s not what he says. That’s what you expect from the story, right? You figure for the story, “Okay, she’s the one with the 500 and he’s the one with the 50”, right? So she loves him more than Simon does because she’s had more forgiveness. But that’s not how Jesus ends this. Jesus says her sins have been forgiven her because she loved much, and then says, but to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little.

So what’s he saying to Simon? He’s not saying to Simon, “Oh, well, you have forgiveness, too, it’s just you didn’t do that much that was bad”, right? One way, Simon might have understood what he was saying, right? “Oh, you’re saying that she loves you so much because oh, yeah, well, yeah, you had to forgive her a lot more than you had to forgive me. Okay, that makes sense, right?” Because that’s not Jesus’s point. That’s not the point he’s making. It’s not like, “Oh, come on, Simon, she’s a sinner and now she’s forgiven. You’d be happy, too if you were a sinner like that and you were forgiven.” That’s not at all what he said. What he said to Simon there at the end is “Because you love little, she loved much, and so her sins were forgiven. You love little, and so you’re not going to receive much forgiveness.”

So, we have to keep that in mind, right? Today was Zacchaeus Sunday. The story of Zacchaeus, we see the same thing and we’ll be getting to Zacchaeus here later. But you notice it isn’t just Jesus comes to his house and he’s excited and happy and says, “Oh, great, clean slate. All that bad stuff I did is gone. Now I can start over. Now I won’t be accountable for any of it.” No, he says, “I’m going to take half of what I possess and give it to the poor, and I’m going to give back anybody who I stole from,” meaning a lot of people since he was a tax collector, “anybody who I stole from, I’m going to give them back five times what I took.” And it’s after he says that that Jesus says salvation has come to this household.

We need to remember this because this is the way St. Luke is presenting salvation to us here. We have to remember that as we go forward, not only in St. Luke’s Gospel, but also into the Book of Acts, because in certain of our Christian friends’ theologies, they tend to take St. Paul’s sermons and the first half of St. Paul’s epistles and sometimes argue, sometimes just discuss how we’re saved. And it’s all based on basically what you have to do to then say you’re saved, right? Well, we’re saved by faith. So you believe in Jesus, boom, you’re saved, you’re good. You go to heaven when you die instead of going to hell, right? And we’re going to see St. Paul preaching in Acts, he’s preaching evangelistic sermons, where he’s coming… this is the first time they’ve heard about Jesus. He’s coming and telling you about Jesus that he died, that he rose again, that now there’s forgiveness of sin, right? And saying to them, now you need to be baptized for the forgiveness of sins. But that’s not the end of what St. Paul says, because we have St. Paul’s letters, and those letters all have a second half. What’s interesting when you read the second half of St. Paul’s letters, is he tends to go on and on about how people should live their lives, tell them things they need to stop doing, the things they need to start doing. And the biggest one in all of St. Paul’s epistles, every single one of them is love. Love for Christ, love for God, and then love for your neighbor.

So from the perspective of St. Luke. What we’re seeing here and in the Zacchaeus story, from the perspective of St. Luke, who again is learning from St. Paul and from the perspective we’ll see in St. Paul himself when we read his letters. If a person’s life isn’t being transformed, if who they are and the way they live and what they do isn’t being transformed, then it doesn’t matter what kind of theological construct or argument you want to make, that person is not experiencing salvation. Because salvation for St. Luke and for St. Paul is not a question of getting your ticket punched so you know which way you’re going when you die. As we’re going to talk about more, when we’re getting to St. Paul’s epistles. He doesn’t even think you go somewhere when you die, necessarily. What St. Paul talks about what happens. He focuses on what N.T. Wright, the New Testament scholar, calls life after life after death.

Paul talks about the resurrection. He talks about life in the new heavens and the new earth. He doesn’t talk about going to heaven or hell when you die. For him, that’s sort of this… yeah, there’s this brief period between or there may be, depending on when Christ returns, this period between when you die and when Christ returns. But not only St. Paul, but pretty much no one in the New Testament is really interested in telling us much about that period. We know very little about it. What they’re interested in is the fact that Christ is going to return and what our eternal life is going to be like after that.

And so with that in mind, again, it’s a very different view of salvation. When Jesus says to Zacchaeus today, salvation has come to this house, He’s not saying you’re about to die and go to heaven. Salvation is something that is happening to Zacchaeus there at that moment and then for the rest of his life. Salvation is something that’s happening to this woman at that moment. Forgiveness of sins does not just mean her sins are getting… you know God has this big list of all the sins, and if you don’t repent of them all, you go to hell, right? Like he goes down the list, right? Or he’s got a list of good things you did and a list of bad things you did, and if the good list is longer, then you’re okay.

It’s not about crossing things off a list. This woman is experiencing forgiveness. She’s having the experience of having the sin, the evil in her life, the corruption in her life, the sadness, the corruption that she’s brought on herself by living the lifestyle she’s been living, the depression, the darkness that are real things to her. It’s not just theoretically something on a list somewhere. This is her everyday life. This is the bleakness and darkness of her everyday life. She’s experiencing that darkness going away and being replaced by light. She’s experiencing, and that’s why she’s weeping. The happiness and the joy that comes with that. Salvation is happening to her. And so from the perspective of St. Luke, salvation is something that happens to us. It’s something that we live out every day in our lives. Or we don’t. Or we don’t.

And here this woman, right, despite being, quote-unquote, “a sinner”, is living it out and experiencing it, and Simon is not. Simon is not. Simon has no experience of his sins being forgiven, because he won’t even admit he has any, first of all, right? But he doesn’t see that he’s living in darkness just as much as this woman was, because he and his pride has set himself up as the judge of things, and he’s judged himself to be righteous. He’s judged himself to be righteous and this woman to be a sinner. So that’s what Jesus is getting at here.

Then He said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” And those who sat at the table with Him began to say to themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?”

So the rest of his guests aren’t much better than Simon because you notice they’re not happy. Isn’t it wonderful that this woman who has been a sinner, who has lived in this horrible darkness, that she now is being forgiven, isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t this something we should celebrate? Isn’t this something we should rejoice about? Shouldn’t a Pharisee understand that? Even from a Pharisee’s perspective, what’s the goal? The goal is that everybody be righteous. Well, if this woman has been forgiven of her sins, she’s now righteous, right? She’s now righteous. She’s now part of the solution, not part of the problem, from the Pharisees’ perspective. But Simon can’t see that. Simon can’t see that because he doesn’t understand. He hasn’t had the experience himself, so he can’t recognize it when he sees somebody else having it.

Notice again, this is Jesus doing another God thing, right? Only God can forgive sins, as we heard earlier in St. Luke’s Gospel. Remember, they challenged him, and when they challenged Jesus about it, Jesus didn’t argue with them and say, “No, I can too.” He agrees. Yeah. So who does that mean Jesus is? God, right?

Then He said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”

Because he still knows Simon’s thoughts, and He still knows the thoughts of the people sitting around the table, and he knows that they’re not interested.

Interlocutor: So is this just a setup? By Simon?

Fr. Stephen: Well, I don’t think he would have colluded with the woman. I think the woman is genuine.

Interlocutor: And where’s Paul at this time?

Fr. Stephen: Well, Paul is a Pharisee, and he’s probably working out of Damascus at this time, but he’ll show up in the Book of Acts here, volume two of St. Luke’s work.

Interlocutor: Do we ever hear of Simon the Pharisee again?

Fr. Stephen: Nope. That’s why I say… from St. Luke’s perspective, he’s just one of the Pharisees, it’s not really important. But as he records, from Christ’s perspective, even one of the Pharisees, even one of the Pharisees who isn’t interested in the gospel, who isn’t interested in having anything to do with Christ from Christ’s perspective, he’s Simon. He’s this person who he created and who he loves.

The other thing to notice here, since we were just talking about salvation, is that sometimes I talk to a lot of people in confession who this is an issue for, because their view of salvation isn’t quite sorted right. They’re looking at it from this sort of list perspective, right? God’s got this list of sins and he’s angry, I need to clear the decks or I need to be good to a certain level to get in there. We have this idea that there are people out there, maybe including ourselves, who are trying really hard to be good and trying really hard to be righteous and trying really hard to do what God wants, and like, we’re going to die and find out we didn’t quite make the cut, right? Like the qualifying time for the mile was 8 minutes and you were 8 minutes and 2 seconds, so sorry, you didn’t make it, right? You go to hell.

You notice it isn’t that Simon is like trying really hard and not quite making the cut. Simon isn’t interested. Right? Simon isn’t struggling to find salvation and forgiveness and not making it. Simon doesn’t want it, right? Simon doesn’t want it. He doesn’t think he needs it. And so we need to realize the fact that we’re struggling, trying to work out our salvation makes us like this woman. Not like Simon. Simon is the one who’s walking around confident that he’s going to be fine. He’s confident that when God judges Israel, he’s going to be one of the people on the right-hand side because he’s righteous, right? It’s the woman who’s struggling. It’s the woman who realizes she’s a sinner. It’s a woman who’s in tears. It’s a woman who’s pleading with Jesus that’s the one. Who’s really been forgiven. That’s the one who’s really found salvation, that’s the one. And so this should be an encouragement to us. It should be an encouragement to us. Unless we’re like Simon, unless we’re walking around thinking, “I’m a great guy, I’ve got this all locked up, right?” I’m not like those other people. If you’re walking around like that, then rethink, please, if you are like Simon. But if we’re struggling, if we are sinners like this woman and we’re struggling and trying to find forgiveness and beseeching Christ and loving Him as best we can, making whatever attempts we can to love Christ falling down at his feet, then we’re on the right track. Salvation isn’t that far off from us. If that’s where we’re at…