Very Risky

Text: Luke 7:35—8:3

You might call it balanced: our need for stability and our longing for adventure. You might see timidity, caution, and prudence as virtues that promote our survival—and they do. But we cannot stand in one place for very long. We cannot walk without propelling our bodies forward precariously.

We want to protect and conserve what we have. Risky moves are threatening and cause anxiety. But the things that give us the most pleasure are the most risky. Having a child (or another), leaving home for school or changing jobs, starting a new venture. And in our faith lives, too: entertaining a contrary notion or a unfamiliar practice, praying in the shadow of deep doubt, serving unlikable others, being extravagantly generous.

But while we try to maintain a balance in our lives between security and risk, Christianity is not so balanced. In its commitment to the kingdom of God, Christianity has at its core a preference for risk. We follow a man who risked his life for others and who has called his followers to risk theirs.

The story we heard today from Luke appears in all four Gospels, a rare and sure sign that something in it was at the heart of the experiences of the first Christians. In all the versions, though least in Luke, the act of the woman is considered extravagant. She brings an alabaster jar of perfume, which is sometimes described as worth a year’s salary, and anoints Jesus with it.

This is an outrageous endeavor. In every story, she is uninvited—you might say she barges in—and in Luke’s version she is evidently an outcast because of some publicly-known behavior. In every story, the invited and upright citizens (or authorities) condemn her. In every story, Jesus reprimands them. What the woman has done is good, he says. He celebrates her actions as a joyous event.

The critics in the different versions of this story object to what the woman does for various reasons. But they all boil down to the same conclusion: what she is doing is unexpected and disruptive and hard to figure out. Simon the Pharisee objects because the woman is a sinner who risks ridicule or worse and who appears disturbingly among what Simon implies are a crowd of non-sinners like him—as if there were such persons.

In response, Jesus tells them a parable. A creditor in the parable forgives two debtors. One owes a lot of money and the other owes a very lot of money (about $50,000 and about $500,000 in today’s dollars). In any case, more than either can pay.

One way to look at this is to compare the extremely different amounts. That is how Luke sees it. But there is something odd about that view. Luke presents this parable as a story about people’s response to being forgiven. A great sinner is forgiven more and therefore responds more energetically. But in fact both debtors are forgiven completely. And the complaint Simon has is not so much with the woman—though he does not like her—as it does with the welcome that Jesus gives her (“What kind of prophet is this guy,” he asks under his breath).

It seems, therefore, that Jesus is telling us—as he usually does in his parables—telling us less about the ingratitude of Simon and more about the nature of God. He is telling us that God is as extravagant with forgiveness as the woman was with her perfume.

The woman has a freedom that Simon does not. It is customary to imagine that she is poor, and that for that reason her actions are amazing, but not so helpful to us. She has less to risk, by this reasoning. Unlike Simon who has much. As some of us do. A kind of: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” But that sentimentalizes and trivializes a difficult choice that she makes. There is no reason to assume that the woman is not just like us. With conflicts and responsibilities and a need to be frugal. She just isn’t frugal at the moment. We can imagine her making the same kind of decisions we make when considering risky undertakings.

What gives her—or us—freedom to take risks is not that we have nothing to lose. It is that we are able to deny power to what we do have. It is not that we have nothing to bind us, but that the loss of those things is no longer determining. It is not that we will not mourn for what we give up, but that our grief—though real and powerful—does not paralyze us.

Jesus forgives the woman neither as payment for her actions nor as a cause of them. That is, her gift of expensive perfume was not a fee to buy his forgiveness, nor was it a consequence of his forgiving her. The relationship in time between the two events is ambiguous in the text. He forgives her for the same reason that the creditor in the parable forgives the debtors—Jesus’ and the creditor’s forgiveness are gifts. Given for no reason at all. Or rather, just because that is the nature of God revealed in this moment in Jesus.

Free forgiveness for no reason at all is risky behavior. To forgive another risks being made a fool of. You might be exploited. You might reward the undeserving and unrepentant. You might weaken—as we talked about a couple of weeks ago—the controlling power of shame that you hold. You might have to give up resentments, regrets, and reasons that explain how things are with you right now. Yet, it is Christian behavior.

We are followers of Christ. He is our teacher and example. He has taught us how to forgive others. And he has taught us how to take risks in life, to act bravely for justice and peace, to deny the powers of authority and property. A tall order.

Yet we are able to take these risks and to forgive others because Jesus has shown us how. We are compelled to because he has commanded us to. We desire to because of the joy it brings us. And we are free to do it because we are promised that nothing can separate us from the love of God.