My favorite moment in this particular home movie—you’re on the edge of your pews now, aren’t you—my favorite moment happened just after the camera panned the patio and fixed on my Uncle John. He was seated comfortably, almost regally in his chair at the far end of the outdoor dining table. After that split second of self consciousness that attends the realization that one is being filmed, he said, “Would you like me to recite one of my poems?”
At which my cousin Matt steps into the frame and says, “This is a documentary about an egomaniac.”
Now, I actually happen to like my Uncle John’s poems. And he is not an egomaniac. But upon reading the story from Luke’s gospel this morning, I found myself half expecting my cousin to step into the scene and say, “This is a documentary about an egomaniac.”
Perhaps there is something mildly egomaniacal, or at least self centered about holding forth with a poem no one has requested. Which may be why the offer to read a homemade poem is received much like an offer to open a bottle of homemade wine. Our polite response is some literary equivalent to, “Well, there certainly is some fermentation going on in there. Who knew you could even make wine out of tangerines or avocados?”
Believing one’s poems or wines are great gifts to humanity are the mildest forms of egomania. But if someone declared the forgiveness of sins to a melodramatic party crasher of questionable character, wouldn’t it be reasonable to say, “Who is this that even forgives sins? Who does he think he is?”
Did anybody else here think that Jesus comes off as a first rate egomaniac in this story?
It’s not just that Jesus declares forgiveness of a strange woman’s sins at the end of the story. Before that, she barges uninvited in on the dinner party, bathes his feet with her tears, dries them with her hair and anoints them with ointment. And rather than blushing at all this extravagant attention like a person of any humility at all would do, Jesus turns to his muttering host and says, “So why didn’t you greet me like this?”
You know how everyone featured in the Sunday paper’s High Profile includes Jesus among their fantasy dinner guests? Have they never read this story? Would you like to have this guy over for dinner?
So how do we read this and believe it’s about something other or at least something more than a raving egomaniac? Well, let’s take a second pass at it.
One thing we rarely take note of is that the people who don’t quite get Jesus are the people who are obsessed with why Jesus gets to do the things he does. Think about it. In all those gospel stories, the people who respond to Jesus with a “By what authority does he…” or a “Who is this that even…”, these are not the people who find their lives blessed and healed and made whole, are they?
People can be standing in the same room with Jesus, watching him perform some stunning miracle or make some gracious pronouncement, but all it takes is a defensive “Who does he think he is?” or a “Why does he get to do that?” and people cut themselves off from the power that seems to swirl around him. They cut themselves off by obsessing over the structures in their world and their religion that determine who gets to do what and to whom. And they miss something wonderful that’s happening right in front of them.
So as egomaniacal as Jesus comes off in our gospel today, what really come to the surface are the threatened egos of everyone else in the room. Egos threatened, we should be quick to admit, just like ours would be if someone disrupted the structures of wealth, taste, education, and everything else that tell us who we are, by telling us what we get to do.
What threatens those egos is forgiveness. The other people at dinner get offended and start worrying immediately about who gets to grant forgiveness. But Jesus doesn’t go there in his response. He doesn’t tell them why he should be able to grant forgiveness. He doesn’t try to validate himself or establish his authority. He just tells them a little parable about how wonderful it is when forgiveness happens in a life.
He doesn’t bother trying to prove he has the power to forgive. He just says that forgiveness is the strangest and most wonderful of forces because its impact is only greater the more we know that we need it. He tells his simple parable about someone who was forgiven a little and someone who was forgiven a lot, and everyone who’s ever been forgiven anything knows exactly what he means. When we know the power of forgiveness, the question of who gets to forgive seems trivial. The experience of grace and forgiveness itself is the transforming thing.
And if we go back and read this story again, we’ll notice that Jesus never forgives anyone. He says to the suspicious dinner guests, “Her sins, which were many, have been forgiven.” Past tense. And to the woman he says, “Your faith has saved you…”
All Jesus really cares about is that something came alive in this woman, something like gratitude, and the structures in her world that told her what she could and could not do, the structures that designated her as a sinner collapsed in an instant of grace. And her extravagant gratitude poured forth into the world as tears and oil and joy. Now these twenty centuries later we’re still talking about her. Maybe even wondering whether we can access the power of forgiveness in our own lives.
Today is a baptism day at Christ Church. And the rite of Baptism is all about forgiveness. But especially when we baptize a child, the question arises, “Why do these little ones need forgiveness?” Surely little Anna and Mirabelle haven’t been on this earth long enough to have racked up many mortal sins. And even Dennis seems like a nice enough guy. Why all the talk of sin and the need for forgiveness? Why all the fuss?
But as understandable and important as these questions are, asking “Who needs forgiveness?” is a little like asking, “Who has the power to forgive?” It misses the point that forgiveness is something we can never have enough of no matter who we are. Jesus didn’t tell the respectable dinner guests that they needed a little debauchery in their lives so they could get an idea what forgiveness really feels like. He pointed them to a woman whose life the experience of forgiveness had turned inside out, a woman whose new life exuded gratefulness and grace, he showed them this woman as a way of saying, “Who cares who gets to forgive or who needs it most? The grace of God is forgiveness of infinite depth that our lives will never exhaust.”
The people at dinner saw forgiveness as some kind of certified transaction. They saw forgiveness as only something granted by an appropriate authority. Jesus and the weeping woman saw forgiveness as a force that can transform a life. They saw it as the force God has chosen to use to redeem and transform the world, in fact.
So the question at baptism is not, “Do these people really need to do this?” The question is “Why would we ever withhold this grace, this power from anyone? And how could we not want this power to be at work in our own lives?” And what we pray for Dennis and Anna and Mirabelle is that they will continue to delve into the redeeming grace that we celebrate at their baptisms, and that forgiveness will spill out of their lives and into our world. Spill out of their lives and into our lives.
So my uncle John. I said he wasn’t an egomaniac. But there’s more to it than that. John spent decades as a very successful physician. There wasn’t much he couldn’t do in his world. But as his career rolled onward and upward he seemed to place less and less stock in the ascent he was making in the world of medicine. And an unexpected something like gratitude opened up in himself. A gratitude for this life that spilled out in those poems. A gratitude that spills out still.
He’s now past 80 and still the poems come. The blushing, self regulating ego of a young man is long gone. So the poems come easily at the dinner table as grace. They come in chapbooks and Christmas cards. They come as unsolicited gifts to neighbors and to grandchildren, and sometimes to near strangers I imagine. They come like tears of gratitude and ointment from an alabaster jar. Like forgiveness from the life of one grateful sinner flowing out into another.
It’s a small spectacle, really. We can roll our eyes and ask, “Who is this that foists his poems on poor defenseless people?” But sometimes, when my ego’s not watching or caught napping, I wonder, “What if I lived that way too?” Amen.