Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
“Do you see this woman?” Lk. 7:44
Here’s a gospel story that features many ingredients of a racy summer beach read! You can even imagine the blurbs on the cover:
… the sinful woman; a rich dinner host; the scourge of indebtedness; ceaseless kissing; bathing the feet with tears; shaming the powerful; forgiveness of a great debt; the central character described previously as a “friend of … sinners.”
And it would all be true. Everything included.
But, there’s a catch: this whole story is presented in a context that features the main themes found throughout the gospel of Luke: forgiveness, mercy, hospitality, inclusivity.
To put the central theme of this gospel story succinctly: Everyone is invited to the feast the Father has prepared for those who love him. No one is excluded.
This is also the center piece of Luke’s entire gospel as well – beginning with Mary’s marvelous prayer called the Magnificat, in which she prays: “His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.”
Jesus – the One sent by the Father as the face of God – is once again expressing heartfelt empathy towards those people generally excluded from receiving God’s blessings: the prostitutes, the tax collectors, the lepers, the mentally unstable, the poor, the widowed, the orphans.
In other words, the nobodies.
As a consequence, the message and the mission of Jesus greatly offended those who were seen as the most religious and the most privileged. It threatened them. It shocked them. It distressed them.
And it still does.
“If this man were truly a prophet,” Simon the Pharisee says to himself … then he would know that this woman is an untouchable, a reprobate, a person who should be shunned and dismissed from polite society.
Simon the Pharisee was shocked when such a woman entered his home uninvited and began bathing Jesus’ feet with tears of grief, drying them with her hair. He was appalled. He even contemptuously judged within himself as to “what sort of woman this is who is touching him.”
Jesus knows what Simon – and the others at the table – were thinking. But rather than avoid the issue, Jesus makes the uneasiness and the dismay of all those enjoying the dinner the reason to ask a single question:
“Do you see this woman?”
Jesus, reading Simon’s mind, then makes this woman causing all the unrest the subject of this winning story of forgiveness – a story that concludes with these words of utter graciousness: “her many sins have been forgiven because she has shown great love.”
This is a story of hope for all of us.
No matter how sinful our past; no matter, like Simon the Pharisee, how egregiously judgmental we have been about others; no matter how much we’ve looked down on some people; no matter how easily we’ve portrayed others as unworthy of our attention; no matter …
This story reminds us again that the enormous relief this woman surely experienced can be ours.
And there’s another striking lesson to this story that reads like a novel: inclusion.
Fr. Richard Rohr, in his book The Good News According to Luke, writes:
“If you’re lovingly in touch with the Spirit, you’ll be like a movie screen. And your screen, as when theater screens grew from regular size to cinemascope size, will always be expanding. Always. When you find your screen contracting, i.e., your perspective on life in this world and in the Lord is narrowing, you’d better ask yourself if you’re still open to the Spirit. Because your screen is designed to keep expanding and stretching. When your screen grows enough to cover 360 degrees, you’ve got the vision of the whole. That’s heaven! Starting with a tiny screen, we finally need to get to circle vision, where there is room for sinful women, diversity, intimacy, and the scandalizing of the comfortable at the Lord’s table.”
The time has come in all our lives where we are beginning to rethink our attitudes toward certain groups in light of how Jesus dealt with the woman in today’s gospel.
“Simon, do you see this woman?”
“Do you see this gay person?”
“Do you see this drug addict?”
“Do you see this homeless man?”
“Do you see this prisoner?”
“Do you see this Muslim?”
“Do you see …? ”
