Unnamed Women

Luke 7:36 - 8:3

These two stories are not the same.

But they speak to one another, if we’ll hear.

The first story is the one we just heard right here.

Simon, a faithful man, gives a party and invites Jesus.

A notorious woman crashes the party, and embarrasses the host and the story-teller with her lavish public display of intimacy: weeping over Jesus’ feet, kissing, anointing, wrapping those feet in her unbound hair.

It’s behavior that belongs in the bedroom.

Simon gets more and more uncomfortable, as she undermines the reputation of this possible prophet, undermines his own reputation as a public figure and good host…. Until Jesus notices, and makes it worse by drawing him into a discussion about forgiveness.

Great forgiveness elicits great love, little for little, yes, so?

And then Jesus publicly, blatantly forgives the woman’s sin, sin only God should be able to forgive, a behavior as scandalous and startling as the woman’s.

Most of us, I suspect, like Simon, are used to little forgiveness. 

To needing, giving, and accepting forgiveness for rudeness, inattention, mistakes – things that really hurt, really sting, really break relationships, but don’t make us Bad People.

You and I, in our contemporary culture, are taught to see ourselves as fundamentally good people,

capable of really screwing up, certainly, but fundamentally better than the sum of our actions.

And here we are at the second story.

These stories are not the same. But they tell truths about each other, about ourselves, and about what we see in the world, and what God does.

The second story has been all over the news media this past week, a vanishingly rare sequel to a true crime story that happens every day.

Another unnamed woman, crashing a narrative with uncomfortable public intimacy, sharing the disturbing, emotionally naked, best-behind-closed-doors details of her experience of sexual assault,

of exposure and shaming and sexual acts, and the perversion of trust and hope and the self itself.

If it didn’t make you uncomfortable, it should.

Nothing in the second story seems to be about forgiveness.

And yet these two stories, different stories, resonate with each other for me.

At the beginning of last week, I didn’t read the Facebook posts and the news stories.

I skimmed and skipped because, you know, I already know rape is bad, and devastating, and we should be mad when serious crimes aren’t seriously punished and yes, it’s also bad to destroy someone when we should want to rehabilitate them.

I know that, so why should I read more?

But I did, eventually, get drawn in.

I read her statement. And the horror I felt was not what I expected to feel.

I knew before I started that I would be heartbroken by a first person narration of the sense of brokenness, self-doubt, depression, anger, being turned inside out, that comes with being assaulted,

sexually violated. I knew I’d be mad about the minimizing of a crime when the criminal is a privileged, accomplished, attractive person – the kind of person we’d like to be, or like our children to be, if it weren’t for this crime.

And I was.

What I didn’t expect was that I would also feel the opposite.

Feel sympathy for a “good kid” who “made a mistake” and wish his life could be restored to promise and wholeness.

That I would read the victim's account of the list of questions she was asked in court:

What were you wearing?

Why did you go to the party?
Who were you texting?

Did you drink in college?

Are you sexually active with your boyfriend? 
Were you wearing your cardigan?

and actually find myself reacting as though drinking and partying and dressing in certain ways made rape and assault predictable and likely,

as though I could believe “she invited it.”

I know better. I know better.

But culture is powerful, and I’m affected.

All of us are, whether we notice it or not.

Do you know that in the first story, the story of the dinner party, generations and centuries of biblical commentators have assumed or asserted that the unnamed woman was a prostitute. A sexual sinner, who enticed men to sin.

And yet the word Luke chooses to describe her – hamartolos, sinner – is the same word Peter uses to describe himself when he meets Jesus, the same word praised for humility and right relationship with God in a tax collector’s prayer, the same word used for the undesirable people Jesus eats with over and over in the gospel stories.

She could as easily have been a Sabbath-breaker, idol worshipper, or Roman collaborator as a sexual sinner, but century after century, men – and other women – have called her a prostitute and a fallen woman.

Did you drink in college?
Were you wearing your cardigan?

Aren't you a sinner?

Yes.

That’s the problem that blinds us and the truth that reveals us,

all at once.

Are you a sinner?
Yes.

I am a sinner,

not just because I hurt people and break the promises of my baptism and slide the commitments of my faith, accidentally and on purpose; often, from time to time.

I wear skirts and heels and makeup sometimes; I drink sometimes.

And beneath my logical, feminist, pastoral commitments, 
I also sometimes believe that it’s my fault,

and her fault,

for creating conditions that lead to insult and assault.

And, my God, for that I need the great forgiveness.

Not the little forgiveness of a good person making mistakes,

but the great forgiveness of a person who has lost my grounding in God,

and found it easier to see the world through the world’s eyes than through God’s.

My facebook feed has been filled, for a week, with righteous indignation at the minimization of a horrifyingly intimate and long-lasting violation as “20 minutes of action”.

And immersed in that sense of righteousness, I recognize Simon the faithful man, appropriately offended by the behavior of an unnamed woman who is publicly and knowingly violating the rules and norms of hospitality and public/private decency.

Because righteous anger is an easy response to intimacies that make us uncomfortable.

And it allows us to distance ourselves from our own complicity,

to blame and punish one person for sins of indignity and disrespect

that are, in fact, supported by our own unconscious assumptions and conditioning.

Righteous anger sometimes does great good, but not always.

Just as often, righteous anger conveniently protects us from any need for great forgiveness.

Like you and me, Simon is fundamentally a good guy.

A good guy who makes thoughtless mistakes in hospitality, little indignities and disrespect – mistakes overshadowed, you might think, by the indecency of party crashing and public intimacy.

So Simon only needs a little forgiveness, but “the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.”

But what if Simon needed forgiveness not for the little sin of forgetting water for his guest's feet, but for losing sight of the image of God in the woman of the city, or in the rabbi he invited over to serve his own curiosity, and in himself.

What if Simon needed forgiveness for those great sins of failing our right relationship with God and God’s people, and, needing it, actually receives that tsunami of love that is God’s great forgiveness.

What might happen then?

If we only let ourselves need a little forgiveness,

that’s all we’ll ever get,

and all we’ll be able to give.

If I only let myself need a little forgiveness, I cut myself off from the ability to be unembarrassed and lavish in gratitude and love.

If we only let ourselves need a little forgiveness, for our own little sins, we’ll miss God’s lavish love for a promising athlete who both brutally broke another human being, and made a dumb drunk mistake.

We’ll miss sharing God’s lavish, generous entry into the pain of a woman waking up to a body that’s no longer hers, and a world she can no longer trust; God’s lavish, generous sharing of the pain in your life or mine that we hide from ourselves when it hurts too much.

But what if we let ourselves need great forgiveness:

for dehumanizing those other sinners with distance and shame?

for neglecting the generous image of God in criminals and victims and in ourselves?
What if we needed forgiveness with that great empty need?

Perhaps we too would find ourselves pouring out lavish, public, unembarrassed love.

Love we can’t contain,

when God unhesitatingly welcomes us with our sharp edges and inner ugliness,

to become whole and holy.

Those two stories aren’t the same.

But they speak to one another,

and they speak to my story, to yours, ours,
speak of great love

if we will hear.