FINDINGS II
Proper
6 - C - June 13, 2010
2d Samuel 11: 26-12: 10, 13-15 and Luke
7:36-8:3
 By Harry T. Cook
6/7/10
RUBRIC
The subject is sin -- i.e. unintentionally doing wrong, or
deliberately doing wrong, or failing to discern and then to do that which is
right or aiming at but being unable to hit the mark -- and what to do about it
when it comes to light.
In 2d Samuel, the prophet Nathan names it for what it is
(which is why he is called a prophet - in the Hebrew "nabi," from Akkadian and
Arabic verbs meaning, as near as we can tell, "to speak out" or "pronounce.")
In the Luke reading, a woman" who was a sinner" is
pronounced "forgiven" of some great sinfulness, and she has responded by loving
greatly.
The actors in the 2d Samuel story are David and Nathan, with
the dead Uriah hovering over the drama and his wife Bathsheba whom David had
stolen. In Luke's story, the primary actors are the Pharisee who hosts the
dinner party; Jesus, an unlikely guest; and "a woman in the city, who was a
sinner."
The action in 2d Samuel concerns David's terrible sins of 1)
taking sexual advantage of Bathsheba and impregnating her, 2) of attempting to
break Uriah's will to abstain from sexual intercourse during wartime, and
failing that, 3) indirectly but deliberately causing Uriah's death in battle to
cover up David's own crime.
Of what "sin" or "sins" the woman of the city was guilty one
can only imagine. Whatever they were, she had found forgiveness of them
evidently through some experience with Luke's Jesus not vouchsafed to us and
pours out her love-filled gratitude upon him right in the middle of a formal
dinner. Only Luke the novelist could create such a scene.
Both the 2d Samuel story and Luke's narrative should give
anyone pause before acting inappropriately on natural impulses (David) or prior
to judging another's wrong doing (the Pharisee). Both stories feature
absolution, suggesting that one can recover from the fallout of one's own
wrongdoing and, chastened, move on.
A note about the Pharisees: The term "Pharisee" is of uncertain origin, but thought by
the main body of scholars to have something to do with the idea of "self
separation." The term "perushim" denotes a group of people who stood apart from
others in post-Exilic Judaism in their close and meticulous attention to Torah.
The Torah was what the exiled had in their exile between the first and second
temples. The Pharisees as depicted in Mark, Matthew and Luke as compulsively
concerned with jots and tittles. In John, they are often called simply "the
Jews." In reality, the Pharisees were the precursors of the rabbinical class of
post-Second Temple Judaism -- Jews sufficiently knowledgeable about the
literary tradition of Torah and Talmud to carry their people through the Roman
period and the Diaspora. The term "Pharisee" in the synoptic gospels is usually
employed in an unfair and disparaging way.
WORKSHOP
In the gospel reading at hand, Luke confected for us a
deeply human drama that was clearly meant to illustrate redemption.
The setting is, as had been noted, a Pharisee's dinner
table, and already the discerning reader knows what Luke's Jesus will be up
against. Luke is hard on the Pharisees as a type and does not appear to
appreciate that they were innovators and the real brain trust of first century
C.E. Judaism (see note above). As such they were attentive to law first and
custom afterwards, probably as a defense against criticism that they innovated
too much. Pharisees, for instance, helped bring belief in an afterlife to
Judaism. Martha is depicted in John 11 as responding to Jesus' note of
condolence ("Don't worry, your brother will rise again") by saying, "Yes, yes.
I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day." In effect,
she was acknowledging the Pharisaic teaching with its roots in Daniel 12:2:
"And many of those who sleep in the dust shall awake . . ."
This story of the Pharisee's dinner party is a set-up for a
confrontation. Jesus, who is in this story more the iconoclast than the innovator,
accepts an invitation to dine at the house of a Pharisee later identified as
Simon. Luke appears not so subtly to have joined his own version of a story to
one that appears at Mark 14: 3-9 with a parallel at Matthew 26: 6-13 in both of
which Simon is said to be a leper. If Luke knew of the two previous versions,
was his changing of the host from leper to Pharisee a wry literary twist? The
Gospel of John has its own anointing story at 12:1ff.
The Mark-Matthew version has the woman anointing Jesus'
head. Luke's woman and John's Mary of Bethany anoint Jesus' feet. There may be
some kind of common source, but in fine and typical style Luke elevates the
incident to a sublime plane in which love, forgiveness and peace are primary
values. Luke has Jesus point out in 7: 44b-46 the social slights Simon visited
upon him, suggesting that the hospitality of the table was false and shallow.
Eating together in the Mediterranean culture is to this day a sign of high
fellowship.
So from the beginning the scene is surreal. It is made the
more so by the surprise entrance of "a woman in the city, who was a sinner." A
few commentators suggest she was a deliberate plant by Simon to tempt and/or to
discredit Jesus, but nothing in the text seems to support that speculation.
The presence of the Greek "kataklithā" in the text (meaning
"to recline") tells us that the meal was a formal banquet as reclining at the
table was a custom reserved for such an occasion. That would have had Jesus and
the other guests lying, side of head on elbow, feet extended away from the
food. The woman is depicted as coming up from behind him and letting her tears
(of sadness? of penitence? of relief? of joy?) fall upon his feet. She lets her
hair down -- a most forward act -- and uses her tresses to dry his feet. A more
sensual scene is not to be found elsewhere in the New Testament. She then
anoints his feet: a mark of honor for one who is considered important.
Simon thinks that Jesus ought to know from her brash
forwardness what sort of woman is touching him. Simon must have given his
thoughts away by the look on his face, because Jesus confronts him, telling him
an on-the-spot parable about a creditor and two debtors. The parable is
preceded by Jesus' announcement: "Simon, I've got something to say to you." In
our own contemporary idiom it would sound as if Jesus is exasperated. Simon,
undaunted, responds, "Teacher ("didaskalos"): speak your mind." "Didaskalos"
like "epistata" (master) should be a term of great respect. I think we are
entitled to hear it as if Simon spoke it with a sneer, as in, "OK, wise guy,
what's on your mind?"
The parable's twist is that one to whom much is forgiven
will love the agent of forgiveness more than the one to whom little is
forgiven. That would depend, of course, on a debtor's perception of his debt.
Certainly, a great debt suddenly forgiven can produce in the debtor a great
show of relief and gratitude. So we may infer that the unnamed woman was
carrying around a great burden. She was, after all, "a woman in the city, who
was a sinner," obviously known widely as such. What Luke appears to want us to
think is that in some way the woman had already been shriven by some prior
contact with Jesus, or that he could not fail to be moved to forgiveness by
extravagant penance. Forgiveness is a large issue for Luke (see 15:11-32).
In Luke's imagination, Simon's other guests were wondering
how such a "sinner" could be let off the hook so easily. When Luke depicts
Jesus saying to the woman "Your sins are forgiven" the Greek used is the term
"apheōnātai," meaning approximately that her sins had already been forgiven and
therefore in the present remain forgiven. Luke wants to leave the impression
that Simon's friends perceive that Jesus himself has pronounced absolution.
The RCL adds the first three verses of chapter 8, which are
thematically unrelated to 7:36-50 in what I take to be a deliberate attempt to
connect Mary Magdalene to the dinner story. She is named in 8:2 as one of three
named women who joined the twelve in following Jesus through the next set of
towns and villages. On the other hand, it may be simply that the lectionary's
editors wanted to emphasize that some of Jesus' early followers were women.
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
One story is that the great Judean king was forgiven for his
abuse of power and position. His life was preserved. That of the child of his
assignation was taken. Lurking under the story line is the idea that David was
"too big to fail," as we might say in our time, and so was bailed out.
The other story is that a woman who may well have been a
victim of male abuse of power was forgiven, as if she may have had a choice in
the matter of her violation. Perhaps without that public show of forgiveness,
she would have met the end that many Middle Eastern women meet even to this day
for having been raped: public humiliation, beating and possibly death.
If that was her story, she had not "sinned much" but had
been much sinned against. In any event, her forgiveness (that is to say,
restoration to the human race) was as great in the positive as her degradation
would have been in the negative.
Whatever forgiveness is, it is certainly not the act of an
invisible deity. It is, rather, the embrace of wrongdoers or of the
wrong-done-to. It is the reaching out to the offender and the offended alike in
an effort to sew the tattered garment of the human community back together into
some semblance of wholeness without which life is mere existence in
diminishment.
For a very long time, Roman Catholics were forbidden receipt
of communion if they had not had their sin slate cleared by priestly
absolution. The ecclesiology was that the holy table was a place for the holy,
and the unshriven sinner was unholy. In theory, that is good ecclesiology. In
practice, not so much. Sometimes it is the fellowship of the table, however
gained, that discloses the state of forgiveness -- or so the tale of the "woman
in the city, who was a sinner" coming to dinner at the Pharisee's house
uninvited suggests.
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