FINDINGS VII By Harry T. Cook
 
Proper 6 - C - June 12, 2013
2d Samuel 11: 26-12: 10, 13-15 and Luke 7:36-8:3
    
Harry T. Cook
By Harry T. Cook
6/6/16

The subject is sin -- i.e. unintentionally doing wrong, or deliberately doing wrong, or failing to discern and then 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 pre-emptively 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 were 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 in the Diaspora. The term "Pharisee" in the synoptic gospels is usually employed in an unfair and disparaging way.
 
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 CE 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 one 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 ("You gave me no water for my feet . . . you gave me no kiss" (of peace), 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.
 
If the meal was a formal affair, the guests would have reclined to partake. 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, (διδασκαλε) speak your mind." 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," perhaps in Luke's imagination one who would have been 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 Jesus 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
αφεωνται, meaning approximately that her sins had already been forgiven and therefore in the present remain forgiven. Luke apparently wanted to leave the impression that Simon's friends perceive that Jesus himself has pronounced absolution. Joseph A. Fitzmyer says the forgiveness was in the present tense. (The Gospel according to Luke. The Anchor Bible. Vol. 28, p. 692).
 
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.
 
As to David: 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 not 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 or merely consented to sexual pressure: 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.
 

Copyright 2016 Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
 

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