We Are All Captives
Once upon a time, a worshiper approached me to express their discomfort with a weekly prayer of confession. They were uncomfortable engaging in confession because, as they put it, they didn’t do those things that we were confessing – they didn’t sin like that.
I have been sitting with that conversation for a long time.
I mean, at some level, I get the discomfort. I don’t like to think of myself as someone who sins. Confession must mean I have something to confess, right?
And as an 11th grader sitting in my literature class, I was so appalled by Jonathan Edwards sermon about sinners in the hands of an angry God that it put me off church for a chunk of my early adulthood.
I felt like pleasing a God as Edwards described was impossible. If God, per Jonathan Edward’s teaching, is a vengeful God, then I should be particularly concerned with being sin-free.
Perhaps more than when I was 16, I now know that sin is complicated. There are sins – murder, adultery, lying – and there are sins – failing to see the God in another, failing to do justice and mercy, failure to do all I can to save the orphan and the widow. There is racism, sexism, classism, ableism. I sometimes fail to love my neighbor. I sometimes fail to seek God in the midst of a really busy world.
And if I understand sin as a very human tendency to be separated from God, I’m pretty sure being sin-free is impossible, so…. I might be inclined to avoid the topic. Confession tends to remind me of my human frailty.
But here’s the thing. I believe that we are not called to wallow in our sinful nature – I believe deeply in a grace-filled and loving God. I believe we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God as Paul writes in his letter to the church at Rome. I believe that in our baptism we renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers in this world and repent of our sin.
And I believe that we have a way to acknowledge our sin (I’d argue pretty regularly) to be understand that we are forgiven – to receive our forgiveness.
And I believe that God, who is just and merciful, embraces us with love – even before we can speak words of confession. I believe that I huge part of God’s choosing to walk with us as a human in Jesus was to demonstrate the mercy, the compassion, the unconditional love that God has for every human – regardless of how they are perceived by me or anyone else.
The gift of grace, of forgiveness, of unconditional love is HUGE.
I wonder if it is possible to feel the bigness of that gift of God’s grace if we don’t recognize our need for it every day.
One of the values of confession is recognizing my need for God’s grace and having the opportunity to be grateful for that grace.
Our text from Luke’s gospel takes us right to that point.
For those keeping track, we are STILL in the seventh chapter of Luke’s gospel. Last week’s text ended with Jesus remarking on being labeled by those around him as a friend of tax collectors and sinners.
Today, we find Jesus reclining for a meal at the invitation of a Pharisee named Simon. Throughout Luke’s gospel, we have seen how the Pharisees are set up as a foil – a way of setting up contrasts in the storyline. Therefore our ears should perk up at another Pharisee-centered story.
(For the record, this is Simon the Pharisee, not Simon Peter….two different Simons.)
During the meal, a woman enters the Pharisee’s home. The text tells us she is a woman from that same city who was a sinner. Now…if you look in some bibles, you might find a section header here that reads something like “Jesus and the Harlot,” because in a world where MEN translated and organized the stories of the bible, women who were sinful were almost always characterized as sexual sinners. But there is nothing in the details that would suggest a specific sin.
I digress, sort of. But I mean, isn’t it human nature to want to avoid being associated with sin when sexual sin is the only sin women seem capable of in scripture?
But onward. As Jesus reclines at the table, the woman comes behind him with a jar of ointment and begins weeping, bathing his feet with her tears, taking down her hair to dry them. The text describes the way she kisses his feet and anoints them with ointment.
Let’s take this in for a moment. In this era, men would have gathered at tables by laying on their side, propping themselves up on their left elbow so that they could eat from a spread of food with their right hand. Imagine the men “fanned out” around the table with their heads close in and their legs lounging away from the table – that makes coming up behind Jesus to wash and anoint his feet more understandable, I hope.
It’s interesting that the Pharisee’s response is written as inner dialogue – “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…’”
And Jesus speaks. There is some good humor right there, right? Simon says something to himself (presumably NOT out loud) suggesting Jesus would know if he were a prophet, and Jesus addresses him directly with a response to what he is thinking.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Jesus responds with a parable about a creditor who had two debtors – one whose debt was the equivalent of 500 days wages and another whose debt was the equivalent of 50 days wages. When the creditor forgave the debt, Jesus wanted to know who Simon believed would have more gratitude.
Simon “supposes” it is the debtor with the larger debt.
Affirming Simon’s answer, Jesus turns to the woman but proceeds to speak to Simon about how her act of foot washing and anointing demonstrated deep gratitude – doing things that Simon did not do for Jesus. And Jesus declares her sins, which are many, to be forgiven.
The story ends, of course, with some murmuring around the table about this man who has been so bold as to forgive sins.
When we talk about sin, we have to talk about forgiveness. In fact, Jesus seems more interested in forgiveness here than in sin.
It might be that Jesus has had a prior encounter with this woman – because she has shown up at the pharisee’s home prepared to express what we now can see as her gratitude. I wonder what that encounter was like.
Perhaps there is something going on here with Jesus’ teaching – a thread that we can pull through from earlier in the story. A clue lies in Greek work used for “forgiven” as Jesus speaks to the woman. It is a different word that the Greek used and translated as forgiven in the parable about a debt that is canceled. The Greek used when Jesus proclaim’s the woman forgiven is a formof ἀφίεται (ah FEE ay-mee). The word means to send away, to forgive, to release. The same root word is used when Jesus quotes Isaiah in the Temple in Luke 4:18:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release (ἄφεσις - AH-feh-sis) to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
What Jesus proclaims for this woman is what Jesus has come to do in “proclaiming release” to the captives.
You have to know you are a captive to be released, right?
And so there is something to this awareness. Someone like Simon can perhaps not see their role in oppression, or in failure to love God, or in a failure to create and nurture wholeness in community – within the context of the Law, perhaps Simon cannot see their role in the undermining of Shalom. Simon doesn’t see himself as a captive – or at least he’s not ready to admit that yet.
In last week’s text, we had John directing his disciples from where he was imprisoned to ask Jesus if he was really the one. Let’s slow down and think that through: We have John, a literal captive, asking if Jesus really meant to set him free. Can’t you just imagine Jesus banging his head against a wall – they just can’t seem to get it.
In this week’s text we have Jesus acknowledging that he has “released” this woman from her sin by forgiving her. She is no longer a captive.
And she knows that and her reaction is beautiful, abundant, radical gratitude in the form of gifts and service, acknowledgement and love.
It’s hard to be grateful when you can’t recognize the gift.
But oh, when we are aware, when we can see God at work in our lives, when we KNOW that we are all captives set free, how much easier is it to give thanks and praise? To enter into this space and say Alleluia! Thanks be to God.
And, how much easier is it to look at those around us and know the secret – we all need this gift of grace…and we’ve all got it! We are all captives, and we are all freed by God’s love for us.
Our act of asking for forgiveness helps us to receive forgiveness and to give thanks for that forgiveness.
And when we are freed from the sense of a need to hide, or when we are freed from a sense of indebtedness, I believe we are better able to be channels of gratitude and mercy and compassion and grace with those we encounter.
What if we found joy in our confession? Maybe not at first, but over time?
How might we express that gratitude to God?
What if we rejoiced in a God who hears the truth and loves us still?
How do we live out or gratitude for that grace?
What if embracing that grace is part of the way that we share salt and light in a bland and dark time?
What if we live in daily gratitude and that brings the Kin-dom just a little closer?
May it be so.
Amen.
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