Sermon by Stuart Pike
Photo Credit: Christina B Castro on Flickr.com
Today’s Gospel lesson reminded me of a story I read which was shared by Tom Webster about his college days. He writes:
There was a college student named John who had wild hair, wore a T‑shirt with holes in it, jeans and no shoes. This was his wardrobe for his entire four years of college. He was a bit strange but very bright, and he became a Christian while attending college.
Across the street from the campus was a well‑dressed, very formal church. They want to develop a ministry to the students, but weren't sure how to go about it. They decided to have a dinner after worship and invite all the students on campus.
The big day was here. Every member of the church showed up to see what would happen. All of them dressed in their finest. The meal prepared. The time for the service came, but not one student showed up.
They started the service, began singing and guess who walked in? John! He saw the advertisement and decided to go. He walked in wearing, you guessed it, no shoes, jeans, his holy T‑shirt, and wild hair. John started down the aisle looking for a seat. The church was completely packed and he couldn't find one.
The people began to look a bit uncomfortable, but no one said anything. John got closer and closer and closer to the pulpit. Then he realized there were no seats, so he just squatted down right there on the carpet. In his defense this is perfectly acceptable behavior at a college gathering, but nothing like it had ever happened in this church before!
By now the people were really uptight, and the tension in the air was thick. The pastor looked back and realized that an elder was slowly making his way down the aisle toward John. Now the elder was in his eighties, with silver‑gray hair and a three‑piece suit. A godly man, highly respected, very elegant, dignified and proper.
He walked slowly toward this young man, and everyone was saying to themselves, "You can't blame him for what he's going to do. How can you expect a man of his age to understand some college kid on the floor?"
It took a long time for the man to reach John. The church was completely silent and all eyes focused on the elder. You couldn't even hear anyone breathing.
The elder finally got to the young man and with great difficulty he lowered himself down and sat next to John and began to sit with him on the floor to keep him company. When the minister gained control he said, "What I'm about to preach, you will never remember. What you have just seen, you will never forget."
I can imagine the gathering to which Jesus had been invited was just like such a formal event. Certainly Jesus was the local celebrity. Some people were calling him a prophet, and Simon, the Pharisee, wanted to check him out for himself. And there appears to be a table-full of other guests who are sitting there and are just as judgmental as Simon. I can imagine that the look of judgment exuded from Simon from the angle of his neck to the scowl or sneer on his face.
Certainly, Jesus can read Simon like a book, and so he tells him a parable about two debtors whose debts were forgiven. Just so you know, a denarius was about a day’s wage and so one of the debtors was forgiven a month and a half’s wages and the other was forgiven a year and a third’s wages.
The analogy is impossible to miss. The woman, whom Simon has judged as a sinner loves Jesus more, because she has been forgiven more. We don’t know what her sin was. It is impossible to say. But it is safe to say that whatever she did, she was known publically to be a sinner.
Just this week we watched the movie Anna Karenina, which is a very artsy presentation of some of the key moments of Leo Tolstoy’s novel. Many key scenes
