If an "inappropriate person" came uninvited into a private party you were hosting, and proceeded to monopolize the guest of honor, making a spectacle of herself, weeping on his feet and using her unbound hair to dry them – how would you feel? Few of us like having our plans upended by strangers, especially socially challenging ones. For the host in our story, this turn of events would have been especially difficult – this woman was an affront to moral purity under the the Law on several counts. Yet Simon's judgment is directed less at her, whom he already condemns, than at Jesus.
Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw it, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him—that she is a sinner.”
He feels this episode reveals Jesus as a fraud, not the prophet or holy man people take him for. But Jesus proves even more disrupting than the woman. Jesus knows what Simon is thinking, and calls him on it. He tells him a parable about a creditor who forgives a small debt to one who owes him, and cancels a huge debt for another. He asks, “Now which of them will love him more?” Simon answered, “I suppose the one for whom he canceled the greater debt.”
Clever man. But not as clever as Jesus, who compares the love shown him by his host, and that shown him by this notorious sinner. He suggests that his host, who feels he has nothing for which to be forgiven, is chary with his hospitality, holding back even social obligations like washing the feet of his guests. But this woman, in her experience of God's' forgiving love in Jesus, lavishes care upon him.
Jesus suggests that the experience of forgiveness releases our generosity - and that the impulse to give generously and sacrificially can be constrained in the self-sufficient and self-righteous. Self-sufficiency is the enemy of the gospel – it closes us to the enormous grace God wants to shower upon us. Receiving releases our desire to give.
This invites a very different motivation for giving than the one we commonly employ, when we appeal to generosity on the basis of need. Asking people to give because a need is great sometimes works, but often results in impulse giving that is not sustained and is rarely sacrificial. But when someone is aware of how much they have received and how little they deserve, they are released into a generosity that is holy and ongoing. I finally began to tithe not after years of hearing that I should, or even how life-giving it had been for others. I I decided to tithe at a church conference where I experienced incredible grace and joy in the Lord. It was receiving that released me to give.
When have you felt yourself the recipient of unearned generosity, or unmerited love, or deep forgiveness (which, by its very nature, is never deserved…)? Recall a time when you were released to give more than you thought you would. Is anything holding you back now?
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