The Third Sunday in Pentecost

The Gospel according to Luke
Chapter 7:36 - Chapter 8:3

Theme: To have no illlusions about ourselves, to realize who and what we are, and at the same time know that God accepts us, is to taste the kingdom of heaven.

A theme constantly in Jesus' teaching and obviously very near to his heart was the necessity for forgiveness in human relationships. The day the disciples asked him to teach them to pray, Jesus put the issue of forgiveness at the heart of our relationship with God. In two simple and inseparable petitions he teaches us for all time that forgiveness is conditional. We cannot find forgiveness unless we ourselves forgive.

I mention this because something very like that is the heart of this episode. At a meal given in the Graeco-Roman fashion in affluent Jewish houses it was customary for the guests to lie on couches while strangers were allowed to stand around the edges of the room. Because this part of the space was covered it would also be shadowed. The people given permission to stand around could be poor or they might have some other need, something about which they wanted to attract the attention of a prominent guest.

In this case there is a woman in the shadows who wishes to express gratitude to Jesus for something she has received from him. Luke recalls how she does this effusively and passionately. Jesus' host is appalled by her behaviour and our Lord notices this.

From what Jesus says, we can assume that he and this woman have had a previous encounter. She is known in the community as a sinner. It is possible, though we have no evidence, that this could have meant prostitution. Whatever the woman's struggle, it is obvious that Jesus has made all the difference in her life, perhaps making it possible for her to deal with the angers and resentments, perhaps even the self hatred, that may have been part of her daily struggle.

Anger and resentments - even self hatred - are part of the lives of many people. To get across his point Jesus tells a story of a debtor who, having been forgiven a great amount, turns and refuses to forgive a tiny debt owed to himself. Jesus' message is quite simply that the greater someone's sense of being forgiven, the greater his or her gratitude will be. Jesus then applies that to our inner lives. The key statement he makes is in verse 47 - "I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little".

This theme is central for Jesus. We hear him speak of it again in the parable of the Pharisee and the publican in the temple. We hear it again in the story of the two sons, the story we often mistakenly call the parable of the prodigal son.

In every case, what Jesus seems to be trying to get us to understand is that to realize without illusions who we really are, to realize how little we can claim to be, yet at that same moment to realize that we are accepted by God precisely on these terms, is to discover the secret of inner freedom and self acceptance. To taste this is to taste the Kingdom of God.

This is the Good News for this week.

Second Sunday after Pentecost

The Gospel according to Luke
Chapter 7: 11-17

Theme: There are times in our lives when we feel dead, when our Lord bids us to come alive again and gives us the grace to do so.

As we encounter Jesus and his work in the Gospel story, we are constantly faced with two things. The first is the Jesus saw his vocation very largely in terms of healing. He spent a great deal of time healing people of every description and of every kind of disease.

We always want to know how Jesus did these things. There is no harm in the question as long as we realize that it will never be fully answered. In Jesus of Nazareth we encounter a person who possessed an extraordinary gift of healing. What is important to realize is that our Lord has shared, and shares, this gift with many men and women in every age. Such people, far from being mysterious or exotic, have often been quite ordinary. What they have in common is a complete absence of any illusion that they themselves are the source of healing. They know themselves to be mere channels of their healing Lord.

With our Lord I think we must go further. Luke writes "The dead man sat up". There are occasions in the Gospel, such as this one, that are told with the immediacy and the simplicty of absolute factual truth. How are we to respond? I think we can say one of two things, each of which gives glory to our Lord. We can conclude that the young man was indeed dead and that there stood beside his bier the one actual conquerer of death who has ever walked this earth. On the other hand we could believe that among Jesus' healing powers was the capacity to tell death from coma. William Temple, one of the great and devout Christian minds of the last century, remarked of another such incident, the healing of Jairus' daughter, that he could never understand how people presume that incident to be a raising of the dead when Jesus categorically said that the child was not dead but asleep.

There is a further way in which a passage like this can speak to our lives. What does it mean for our lives when Luke says that the young man was "carried out of the city dead". What would it mean if we spoke of ourselves as being "carried out of the city dead"? Could it mean those many occasions when we head home in the evening, parts of us in a sense dead, perhaps numbed by a hurt done to us, a cutting remark, a threat made, a mistake we could not avoid, a harsh confrontation, hours of tension. Sometimes we can use the privacy of the journey home, or the affection of those who welcome us home, to allow Jesus to touch us by his loving compassion. We can experience him calling us to come alive again.

This is the Good News for this week.