Your sins are forgiven. What beautiful words to hear from Jesus. That has got to be one of the most powerful statements that Jesus makes to people: “Your sins are forgiven.”
That statement, in its many forms, in this liturgy, in the rite of reconciliation, as we read it in scripture, should evoke a fairly significant response in us. It should be something we yearn to hear because it is such a huge human need for us since we are sinners, and it is God’s hope we would because he knows our lives depend on it.
We hear it stated or intimated throughout the whole of scriptures. I would guess there are hundreds, maybe a thousand references to forgiveness in the Bible; God promising it, people pleading for it, Jesus giving it.
In the Old Testament the Lord God proclaims to Moses:
The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation. And Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped.
The Lord spoke through the prophet Isaiah to his people:
Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord:
Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. If you are willing and obedient,
you shall eat the good of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be eaten by the sword; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
In the New Testament we find Jesus giving it. He says to the Pharisees in one place: But I want you to know that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the paralyzed man, “Get up, take your mat and go home.”
As he teaches his disciples about prayer he prays: Our father…..forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.
And from the cross as he hangs there, he prays for those who put him there: Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.
In the Gospel we heard today, Jesus speaks these words to a woman of some iniquitous background; a prostitute as most commentators understand.
Scripture speaks very strongly against sexual sin as a great act of rebellion against God and a rejection of his will, with harsh consequences. Adultery and prostitution in particular, were consistently used by the prophets to describe the condition of God’s people when they were in rebellion against him.
There is no understanding of how she got into this business, whether it was a choice or whether life situations thrust it on her but it seems obvious she desperately desires a career change; a life change.
And so this notorious sinner barges into a Pharisee’s home at supper time, which in and of itself would be an outrageous thing. She kneels weeping at Jesus’ feet. She pours her very expensive perfume on his feet, washes them with her tears and dries them with her hair and kisses his feet. It is an act of worship and repentance.
She literally takes her life in her hands, and completely humbles and humiliates herself at Jesus feet.
Why?
Well, Jesus gives us the interpretation of this woman’s action: She is repentant of her sin. The weight of her life, her behavior has so demeaned her, so crushed and imprisoned her; her conscience is so disturbed knowing that what she is doing is wrong, hurting herself and separating herself from God that she seeks to be forgiven, to be washed clean, to be made new, to change. And she has nowhere else to go, except Jesus.
Human beings do have the remarkable ability to change their lives but not to redeem their lives; not to be made clean from past sin, not to wipe the slate clean of guilt. This is Paul’s point in the reading from Galatians.
But she knows Jesus is the one to do that.
God has wired us for a right life. He set us up to know that right life. That is the work of the conscience, to be a warning system. Through interior pain and discomfort it warns us that something is wrong spiritually.
If you suddenly began to feel pain in your left arm, and you started to sweat, and you began to feel short of breath, what would you do? Get help, I hope, because your body is telling you that your heart is sick.
Just like the symptoms of a heart attack, the conscience warns us; the pain and discomfort increase until death unless something is done.
Now there are some people who don’t get these warnings. Somehow they can have a heart attack and never know it. Something is wrong with the warning system. It does not tell them when they are in jeopardy.
In that kind of situation we have others who can warn us. We have doctors, and wives and friends that can constantly harp on us about losing weight; eating healthy, getting exercise, quitting smoking – not that I have had that experience!
In the Old Testament God had his prophets that would harp on his people about getting their lives straight. It’s too bad we don’t have the time to compare the two recommended Old Testament scriptures for this Sunday because they both talk about particular sinners, one king David, the other king Ahab – the prophets that God sent to them when their warning systems failed. Elijah to Ahab, Nathan to David, and their different responses to that warning resulting in life for one and death for the other.
This Pharisee in the gospel seemed to be one of those whose warning system did not work. For most Pharisees, just fulfilling the outward requirements of the law were enough to guarantee spiritual health. It would be described as meeting the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law, as Jesus pointed out in the parable of the Good Samaritan.
In some cases the Pharisees would reinterpret the law – fit the law to their wills – to relieve them of responsibility, as Jesus pointed out to those who would not financially support their elder parents in lieu of dedicating the money to God. They are thus able to anesthetize their conscience so they are oblivious to its warnings. They disable the warning system, unplug the smoke detector.
That is why Jesus at one point says to some Pharisees: “I tell you the truth, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you for John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did. And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him.
The prostitutes and the tax collectors feel their consciences. They know they are doing wrong. They feel their separation from God and turn to Jesus to be forgiven to be given a life change.
This woman did. And Jesus says to her: Your sins are forgiven, your faith has saved you; go in peace.
You can almost imagine her jumping up, wiping her tears away. You can almost see the pained and sorrow filled face transformed into a radiant and glowing smile as she drank in Jesus’ forgiveness, and the weight of her sin, the weight of her shame evaporated. It is implied in the story that she then continued to follow Jesus, walking out her changed life.
Do we know that kind of life changing forgiveness? We do if we take sin seriously. We do if we take Jesus seriously. We may not be actual prostitutes, but maybe spiritually we are in particular areas of our lives where we refuse to be obedient, where we compromise ourselves to get what we want, where we rule and not Jesus.
Maybe we have switched off our warning system, disabled it by rationalizing our behaviors and actions. We don’t have any big sins just little ones. That’s like rationalizing that it’s only a little cancer, a little heart attack, nothing to really worry about.
Maybe God has sent us a prophet to warn us, a Christian friend who comes to us or maybe scripture itself that questions or challenges our actions, catches us, finds us out.
Jesus forgives. Jesus changes lives. We are sinners. We are broken. We need his forgiveness but he can’t forgive that which we refuse to acknowledge as wrong. He can’t fix that which we fail to give him.
So we are presented with a choice today, a comparison of two lives, two responses to Jesus; two responses to sin: The Pharisee and the prostitute.
The broken wounded soul seeking Jesus, his forgiveness and his life or one who has – in self-deceit – perfectly justified his own life and really has nothing to ask Jesus for.
The question our gospel leaves for us today is: Which we will choose to be?