The Cure to What’s Broken
Notes
Transcript
One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee’s house and took his place at the table.
And a woman in the city, who was a sinner, having learned that he was eating in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment.
She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment.
Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw it, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him—that she is a sinner.”
Jesus spoke up and said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” “Teacher,” he replied, “speak.”
“A certain creditor had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty.
When they could not pay, he canceled the debts for both of them. Now which of them will love him more?”
Simon answered, “I suppose the one for whom he canceled the greater debt.” And Jesus said to him, “You have judged rightly.”
Then turning toward the woman, he said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair.
You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet.
You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment.
Therefore, 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.”
Then he said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”
But those who were at the table with him began to say among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?”
And he said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”
On October 2nd 2006 a milk truck driver named Charles Roberts pulled his truck into the school yard of the West Nickel Pines Amish School in Nickel Pines, Pennsylvania. He entered the school, which housed 28 children and 3 adults, heavily armed.
In the next 30 minutes he took 5 lives, injured 5 others, and then took his own life. The news was shocking. It seemed that evil had found its way into the most unlikely of places — that even the most rural and remote schools could succumb to school shootings. The world watched in horror as the news broke, and an entire community grieved the losses that they had faced.
It is in moments like this that we are most likely to ask ourselves the questions of why and how? Why would someone do something like this? How could this happen? Surely these questions floated around in the hearts and voices of the Nickel Pines Amish community. How could they not? And yet, these wouldn’t be the most important why and how questions that they would ask.
Today we continue our journey through the book of Luke in our series “Follow Me” where we are looking at the radical life that we are called to when we answer the call to follow Jesus. I know that it’s been a couple of weeks since we last sat with Luke and his story of Jesus, so here’s a reminder. Jesus called the first disciples to follow him and told them that he would teach them how to catch or fish for people… which was an ancient way of saying “i’ll teach you how to gather people who follow my way of living.”
We had a challenge, to keep an inventory of how much time we spent being formed by Jesus — prayer, reading scripture, serving others — vs how much time we spent being formed by other sources like our phones and our TVs. So maybe you don’t have raw data, but I’m sure you have an idea. How did we do? Some good, some growth areas?
I drove up to Lake County and preached to middle school students every night for a week. So I had an unfair advantage.
The point of this all though was to get an understanding of our own situation. Are we following Jesus or just going through the motions. Are we Cultural Christians or are we apprentices of Jesus, learning how to live the Jesus way of life?
The next few weeks will be spent looking at marks of the Jesus way of life, starting from the very beginning of our journey — or new beginning of our journey.
Our text for today begins with a very strange scene. And to understand the strange scene that we encounter, it’s important for us to know what has happened prior to it. If you’ve been keeping up with the reading plan then this is all going to sound super familiar.
First, Jesus heals the servant of a Roman Centurion. Now this is really important because… well Roman Centurions were really important people in the Roman Empire where Jesus was ministering. Jesus is asked by some Jewish authorities to help this man out because he has been kind to them.
Then immediately after this, Jesus heals the son of a widow. Widows were some of the least important people in society. No longer linked to a male family member, the woman was facing complete social collapse.
So Luke has shown us that Jesus has regard for those high in society and those low in society. There’s no one that Jesus isn’t concerned for — and I think that’s a word for some of us all in itself.
But then we move to our strange text. Jesus is in the home of some very important people — religious elites called Pharisees. And in walks a woman — who is particularly singled out as “a sinner.” This is an incredibly strong term for Luke to use, and what he’s point us toward is the fact that this woman is seen as an outsider, a social outcast, a pariah. And here she is in the home of the most honored people in the land anointing the feet of the person she believes to be the long sought after messiah.
The pharisees object to what is happening before their eyes, because, well, she’s a sinner. So Jesus does what Jesus does — he tells a story.
“A certain creditor had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty.
When they could not pay, he canceled the debts for both of them. Now which of them will love him more?”
Simon answered, “I suppose the one for whom he canceled the greater debt.” And Jesus said to him, “You have judged rightly.”
Jesus’s question is honestly one that I struggle with because it seems as though he is proposing some kind of economy of Grace, as if the more you messed up the more love you have for God when you finally find God. And maybe in some ways we see this. Certainly when those who have had lives in which their sin is most obvious and has had the most clear consequences have a life transforming encounter with the God of the Universe, they are over the moon.
But does it mean that they are naturally more in love with Jesus than anyone else who has faithfully served God? That’s not for me to decide. I don’t think that’s the point Jesus is trying to make.
Jesus is trying to open the eyes of his hosts to one fact: They don’t get to decide who is worthy of Jesus’s attention, forgiveness, and grace. They too are worthy of it, but they do not yet see a need for it. This woman is reckless in her pursuit of Jesus.
Were the Pharisees sinless and less in need of Jesus than the woman? Doubtful. But they were unwilling to be honest with themselves and with Jesus about themselves.
This is the first step to following Jesus — Recognizing that we need Jesus. That Jesus is worth following — in every aspect of our lives. The second step is realizing that we don’t get to decide who gets to join us in this journey. We aren’t the ones who decide who is worthy of washing Jesus’s feet.
The Amish community of Nickel Pines, in the wake of extreme grief and tragedy, asked themselves why and how. They asked “why should the widow and family of Charles Roberts suffer?” They asked, “how can we show them the love of Jesus?”
Almost immediately the community reached out to his family to offer their condolences that the man that they had loved, the man who had taken their daughters away from them, was gone.
Six days later, when most non-Amish neighbors stayed away from Roberts’ burial, the Amish did not, and ended up being half of the mourners present, and again hugged his family and cried together. They included Amish parents who had just the day before buried their own daughters.
About the same time, the ad hoc Amish committee set up to oversee the money that poured in from around the world for the shooting victims announced that they would be diverting some of the money to a second fund for the Roberts family.
This my friends is not how humans naturally act. This is how people who are deeply formed by the person of Jesus, who follow Jesus closely and have experienced deep transformation act.
Did this killer’s family deserve their love? Probably not. But they also didn’t deserve the social ostracism that they encountered from the rest of society. They were shown love, because in the hearts of the Amish, their loved one, who had taken their loved ones from them was forgiven. The Amish forgave Charles Roberts. That’s wild.
Jesus invites these Pharisees to take a deeper look at themselves, and a deeper look at how they view the world around them. The amish invited the entire world to do the same thing.
And we are invited to do the same. It’s almost second nature to us to try to qualify or decide for ourselves who deserves our love and our care. It’s easy for us to grow callused to the people who are generally innocent casualties of the mistakes that those close to them have made or the life circumstances that they have been born into.
But you know what changes everything? When we don’t try to qualify people. When we don’t try to decide who deserves our love and care. When we don’t grow callused but rather grow in more perfect love for people — regardless of their circumstances or their story.
And the proof that we can do this is right here. look at this. Look at this outpouring of love. This is a deeply inspiring scene. It may just look like backpacks, but this is the people of Jesus breaking the mold. This is the people of Jesus who see people the way that Jesus sees them, who sees underserved children as not the sum total of their parent’s mistakes but rather as people who are worthy of encountering the love of Jesus.
Jesus ends his encounter with the woman by telling her that her faith has saved her, go in peace. The price of the woman’s way of life in the city has been removal from the very institutions that carried the resources to restore her. The one place where she is welcome is the street, among people like herself. What she needs is a community of forgiven and forgiving sinners. The story screams the need for a church, not just any church but one that says, “You are welcome here.”
What we must strive to be, as individuals and as a community, is forgiven and forgiving sinners who recognize that we are vessels of the cure to what is broken in the lives of those we meet and in our broader world,
Jesus invites us to a life that follows him in extending grace and love to the least and the lowly just as we do to the high and mighty. Following Jesus is an invitation to see others in the worst of their circumstances, because we know that Jesus saw us in the worst of ours and said to us “Your faith has saved you, Go in peace.”
