THE VALUE OF SIN

What an amazing story-book the bible is! It’s full of stories of every kind: true stories of actual happenings, completely made-up stories, stories where reality and imagination are melted inseparably together, and other writings that aren’t stories themselves but which make us aware that there is a story going on in the background.

An example of what I mean by this is the letter Paul wrote to the Galatians, of which we’ve heard a little snippet tonight. The letter doesn’t set out to be a narrative, of course, but behind what he writes, we get a real sense of the story of Paul’s mission to Galatia, and of his relationship with them as a young church of new Christian converts. Of his interaction with this little group, we get endearing insights when we read such phrases as, “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?” as he seeks to correct them without mincing words. And later on he writes, “See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand!” He seems to feel such urgency in what he has to say to them that he doesn’t go through the more leisurely and controlled process of engaging a scribe, but instead writes his thoughts directly, discovers as he does so that his writing is large, and feels moved to comment on the fact within the letter itself. And then the way he ends the letter: “Finally, let no-one cause me trouble…” So, you see what I mean, that there is a story behind the epistle which is in itself very engaging.

In the Gospel reading, we have two different types of story presented to us: we have the account that Luke gives us of the visit of Jesus to the Pharisee’s house and all that happened there. And we get the little parable that Jesus tells about the moneylender and his two debtors – a completely made-up story, told to illustrate a point that Jesus wanted to make. But under the surface there are other stories: the story of the Pharisee himself – who we know is called Simon. What led him to invite Jesus to his house? Was he open-minded or out to trap Jesus? What was in his heart when Jesus turned to him, saying, “Simon I have something to tell you,” and he replied , “Tell me, teacher.”? Again, we shall never know.

And there’s the story of the woman who stands weeping behind Jesus, washes his feet with her tears, dries them with her hair, and pours perfume on them. We know she is regarded as a so-called sinful woman. We can only presume from the clues we get that her so-called sins are of a sexual nature. Perhaps she is a prostitute, or perhaps she has a child born out of wedlock, or has been taken in adultery. We don’t know for sure. We aren’t even told explicitly why she came to the house to do what she did. We do know that she had learned that Jesus was eating at Simon’s house, and that clearly she had decided to bring this jar of perfume and approach Jesus. We know she was weeping, so something must have moved her emotions, and inspired her actions. It wasn’t just that she heard Jesus was there (which is what the story tells us): it was something in her heart (which the story doesn’t tell us, at least not directly).

Paul, as we know, tries every trick in the book to help his young churches find and follow the way of Christ faithfully and truly. He tries persuasion, emotional force, personal testimony, criticism, direct teaching and logical argument. As for Luke, most people agree that he was a doctor. From his very capable use of Greek and his very careful storytelling, we assume that he was intelligent and well-educated. He introduces his Gospel by saying how he set out to ‘write an orderly account’ in order to provide ‘certainty’. And in his ‘orderly account’ we can often find a true historian’s ability to present the facts of what happened, without too much interpretation, and often with lovely details that bring the events into sharp focus.

Let me mention one or two. Do we know what the jar the perfume was in was made of? Well, yes we do: it was made of alabaster. Now why should we need to know such a trivial detail? If Luke is such an intelligent story-teller, why does he think this unimportant fact is worth mentioning? I think it does exactly what Luke set out to do, namely to promote certainty. Take another example: when Jesus has told his parable and got Simon’s answer, Luke invites us to visualise with the utmost clarity how the situation develops. We are told, “Then he turned towards the woman and said to Simon, ‘Do you see this woman…’” and so on. We can almost feel we were there as we hear him addressing Simon, and yet facing the woman as he speaks.

I said earlier that we aren’t told exactly what moved the woman to come and behave the way she did towards Jesus, and in a way that’s a pity. But how could Luke have obtained this information? Can you imagine him somehow locating her and getting her to explain her motivation about a most delicate and personal matter? I can’t, and the fact that we are not told, actually makes Luke’s story more believable and more unbiased.

So here’s a conundrum: how does he know what’s in Simon’s mind when he’s talking to himself? Are we to believe that when he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is,’ he said it out loud enough for people to overhear? Who did Luke get this whole story from, I wonder? After all he wasn’t there at the time!

Nevertheless it is a neat little story, and obviously worth telling. Of course, Luke doesn’t tell us everything that ever happened. He selects according to what he thinks worth telling, the significant facts. He tells us how taken aback the other guests were when Jesus pronounced the woman’s sins forgiven. As that is the end of the story, the implication is that what brought her to Jesus in the first place was an awareness of sin and a need for forgiveness. She believed that Jesus was able to give her that forgiveness, and that was the desire and the faith that Jesus recognised and praised.

The point that Jesus wanted to make with his story about the moneylender and the two debtors is that a person who has received much forgiveness will be much more grateful and loving than a person who has been forgiven little; just as a person in heavy debt would feel more gratitude than a person owing 5p, if both debts were written off. Jesus teaches us that the act of sinning sets up a situation similar to that of running up a debt. With a money debt, we may have the wherewithal to repay and cancel the debt, but sin is a spiritual debt which can never be repaid. Jumping to Paul for a moment, this is how he explains it, “If I rebuild what I destroyed, I prove that I am a lawbreaker.” In other words, recompense, even if it sets right the wrong, does nothing to remove the fact of having committed the sin in the first place, in fact it just proves the guilt.

The only way the guilt can be removed is through God’s forgiveness, but Jesus demonstrated that such forgiveness could be pronounced by human lips. I imagine that when he said to the woman, “Go in peace,” that was exactly how she did go. From this man, she had received a complete and effective forgiveness. No wonder the other guests were amazed. But remember how Jesus, commissioning his disciples on another occasion, told them, “If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven.” That’s pretty revolutionary stuff, even by today’s standards.

But, if sin can be forgiven so easily and cheaply, has it lost its seriousness? Has it lost its value? Well now, that is a teaser, especially as the point of Jesus’s story might well lead us to conclude that it is better to sin a lot so we can be forgiven a lot and thereby feel a lot of gratitude, than to sin a little, be forgiven little and feel little gratitude. He makes it clear to everyone there that the woman has had her ‘many sins’ forgiven. In contrast, he makes the Pharisee out to be someone who is not in the same league where sinning is concerned, and so he has less to feel grateful about if he is forgiven. We can almost hear, coming out of this story, the very words Paul uses in his exposition to the Galatians: “Does that mean that Christ promotes sin?” Paul immediately rebuts the idea: “Absolutely not,” he says. But what about the story of the prodigal son? Don’t we have the same idea being put forward there – the idea that there is more joy in heaven over the repentance of a completely selfish scoundrel than over someone who needs no forgiveness?

The apparent injustice of treating the prodigal better than the faithful older brother has always been a bit of a problem. After all, he’s the good one, isn’t he? As he himself says, “All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders.” Surely, compared to the younger brother, he is much less sinful. And yet it’s the greater sinner who has all the fuss made over him and gets the special treats. How can that be right? Does Christ promote sin?

Well, it is possible to slip into that way of thinking: how about if I pop along to confession every week with no desire to change my ways? And what do we think of the statement made by the poet Heine on his deathbed: “God will forgive me. It’s his trade.”? Sin does indeed seem to have lost its value. But I think that comes about by confusing the sin with the forgiveness. We are told that God’s pardon is freely given, and so it is. How often we have received God’s pardon quite undeservingly! But that doesn’t mean that the sin can be freely committed. Sin – that is putting ourselves first – is very costly. And the cost is seen in the suffering and death of God’s own son.

But how can we reconcile that with the special attitude Jesus seems to have towards the greater sinner? I think we get into this difficulty mainly because we can’t help exercising our judgement about the gravity of the sin as if we were trying to assess the right length of prison sentence. In other words, we are viewing our own and other people’s selfishness as if it was measurable on a scale of one to ten, instead of viewing it as evidence of our spiritual bankruptcy and how unsuitable any of us are for a relationship with God.

And since we all do look after ourselves at others’ expense, we all share in the world’s sin. Even if our lives are otherwise utterly blameless, we are all murderers, killing plants and maybe animals just to sustain our own bodily existence. Indeed, many cultures have developed rituals to protect themselves from this very guilt, and it clearly affects many people even today. But if we are all in it together, does that mean that all sins are equal? We can judge crimes as more or less serious, but how can we judge whether one person is a greater sinner than another? How, for instance, would we compare someone who says a swearword in church with someone who knows they are more righteous than other folk?

And that, surely, does give us a clue. Seeing yourself as righteous and judging others as inferior because in your opinion they are not as moral as you – that is something that Jesus consistently has a go at. The woman in Luke’s story may indeed be described as having ‘many sins’, but he knows what is in Simon’s heart too, and although Simon may not think so, his sin of ranking himself above the woman is actually just as bad, if not worse, as his lack of love shows. As for the prodigal’s older brother, just listen to the self-promoting bitterness in his voice as he says, “Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you… You never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fatted calf for him.” Of course we can share his feelings, but what a nasty selfish, judgemental mood is in him, and how that must pain his father, as he can’t bring himself to share with him in the joy of his brother’s homecoming!

“Do not judge, and you will not be judged,” we are told. Anyone who thinks that by doing the right things he will be free from sin is deluding himself. Not only is it impossible, but it fills you with that kind of judgemental self-righteousness. Paul’s early years were full of it as he sought to follow scrupulously the law of the Pharisees. No wonder he writes to the Galatians now with such passion. “You foolish Galatians! Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort? If righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing.”

What the Cross of Christ brings us is the sort of true spiritual healing which was this woman’s overwhelming experience. In it, repentance and the awareness of the weight of sin forgiven and the desire to express love are all bound up with each other. Jesus didn’t hear a confession, pronounce his forgiveness and then she thought, “Oh that’s nice, I’ll go out and buy him a gift or something.” No, she came ready prepared with the perfume, and she was already crying and wishing to express her love and thankfulness before Jesus even said a single word to her.

So to sum up this rather complex matter, we should not think of good works as a way of being saved. Nor should we think that it doesn’t matter what we do as forgiveness can be ours anyway. It is through faith in Jesus that we may, like the woman in the story, experience such an explosion of love and acceptance, that pleasing God becomes our whole desire.