(SERMON TEXT: Luke 7: 36 - 50)
Given at St. Mark’s Church, West Frankfort, IL; and at St. James’ Memorial Church, Marion, IL
“The Church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.”
Have you ever heard that before (or perhaps one of several variations on it that all begin with “the church is a hospital….”)?
It seems to fit our Gospel reading for today, Jesus’ well known encounter with the sinful woman at the house of Simon, the Pharisee.
Elements that are found throughout Luke’s gospel account are present here in this story: role reversal (the woman is forgiven, but Simon is not), a scene which takes place at a banquet (there’s lots of “eating and drinking” in Luke), and the prominent role of women throughout Luke’s writing.
But it is the nature of the sin of the righteous Pharisee, Simon, when it is compared with the sins of the unnamed woman that capture my attention as I reflect on today’s text….For “the Church is a hospital for sinners”….
We should begin with a close look at the cultural setting for the banquet that Jesus attended that day, for being able to understand the social setting will tell us a lot about the ways in which Jesus associated with sinners and the other outcasts of first century Palestine….
2,000 years ago, when dinners such as Jesus attended occurred, they were quite different from our dinners today….For example, the guests would normally be accorded a number of socially mandatory welcoming gestures (which Jesus enumerates as having been omitted when He arrived): washing of feet, a kiss of peace, and so forth. In addition, guests would eat lying down on their left side, perhaps by propping themselves up on their left arm, or on a pillow, with their feet extending outward from the mat where the food was sitting.[1]
But beyond these conventions, it was the presence of townspeople in the courtyard or house that is most striking about the differences from today’s dinner parties….apparently, it was quite common for ordinary folk to watch the proceedings, either by looking over a wall or fence, or by inviting themselves into the house to stand around the edges of the courtyard or room. That practice would explain why the woman was able to be present at the banquet, and how she was able to wet Jesus’ feet with her tears, and to anoint them with the perfumed oil.
The woman’s actions also hold a key to the potentially embarrassing position her actions created for Jesus: For a woman to uncover her head 2,000 years ago was a scandal, and to allow her hair to fall had sexual connotations. And in a culture that did not allow men to speak to women in public, for her to touch his feet was a further provocation, again with explicitly sexual overtones (no wonder that Simon referred to her sins – her actions indicated to him that she was a person whose sins were probably sexual in nature[2]).
So Jesus was put in a potentially embarrassing and compromising situation….(He must have had an enormous capacity to be “cool” in tough situations!)
But, by allowing the woman to touch Him, Jesus also became ritually unclean by the rigid standards of the Law of Moses that the Pharisees so zealously tried to maintain.
Returning to the phrase with which we began, “the Church is a hospital for sinners”, let’s reflect on today’s reading, using a medical lens to look at Jesus’ role in healing this woman….
The first reflection we might make is the attitude of Simon, the Pharisee…In medical terms, the Pharisees tried to isolate themselves by creating a “quarantine” from sin. Notice Simon’s reflection, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is – that she is a sinner”.[3]
It was Jesus’ consistent violation of the rules of Jewish quarantine that got Him into trouble…Jesus constantly sought to be in the presence of “unclean” people and “sinful” people (like the woman in today’s reading), and even touched them, or allowed them to touch Him.
Consistent with the Pharisees’ careful observance of the rules of quarantine was an attitude of spiritual superiority….Perhaps we would be accurate in characterizing it this way: “as long as I am following the ‘rules of quarantine’, I can be sure I am free of spiritual disease.” And it is this “spiritual smugness” that prevents Simon from receiving pardon for his own sins, for the truth of the matter is that, no matter how rigidly and carefully Simon might have followed all those “rules of quarantine”, the germs of sin still found their way into his spiritual life. He could not prevent his coming into contact with their corrosive effects, no matter how hard he tried, and he was powerless to heal himself from the disease that the germs of sin always produce.
The other observation we ought to undertake is a close look at the unnamed woman in today’s story…..
For her, the disease of sin has taken its destructive course, and the effects are there for all to see….no amount of pretending she is “disease-free” will cloak the reality of the grotesqueness of her spiritual condition.
Only one option is open to her: to give herself into the hands of the One who can save her from her spiritual condition.
And so she does, not trying to hide her condition or her past contact with spiritual contamination that may have led to her present condition, not seeking to avoid the discomfort of the treatment process.
It is her willingness to allow Jesus’ to heal her by her demonstration of faith in his ability to do so that, in the end (and as Jesus confirms) allows her to go away, spiritually disease-free.
Jesus’ willingness to associate with sinful people and the outcasts of His day occupy a good bit of the discourse in our Church today. People often point out His unconventional behavior and His willingness to break the social conventions of 2,000 years ago, allowing ritual contamination in the process as He violated the “rules of quarantine”.
But often, the implication is that Jesus was acting like a doctor who was willing to enter a quarantined hospital ward for the purpose of just “hanging around” sinners, without addressing their spiritual diseases., or that He ignored the true nature of their ailments, merely reclassifying serious spiritual injuries as minor ones which didn’t need treatment.
We know from Jesus’ contact with physically-diseased persons that He healed them, often by touching them.[4] Nor did He simply ignore the nature of their problems….No, there was no redefining of the sinful natures and actions which created their need for His healing presence.
Jesus displayed the same attitude when it came to spiritual diseases as well: He came to heal the spiritually sick, He did not leave them in their diseased condition.
Moreover, Jesus’ holiness and the power of God at work in Him was the agent of healing, both for the physically and spiritually diseased.
Jesus encountered people where they were, but never left them there!
As we consider our own place in today’s story, what observations might we draw as we insert ourselves into this story? Perhaps the following are appropriate:
- Our presence in Church today is an admission of our spiritually ‘sick’ state: Truly, the “Church is a hospital for sinners”, for it is here that we encounter Jesus’ healing power, both for physical and spiritual healing.
- We witness to God’s power to heal: Just like a hospital, the Church allows us to observe each other’s progress as God’s power to heal is demonstrated in our lives. Seeing God at work strengthens our faith in God’s power to heal us, as well.
- We begin to see that hiding our spiritual maladies won’t do us any good: We can pretend, like Simon the Pharisee, that “we aren’t so bad off”, or that we “follow all the rules of ‘spiritual quarantine’” (that apply today), or that “so-and-so is so much worse off than I am”, or that “that aching in my heart isn’t really ‘sin’ at all, just a normal-sort-of-pain”. But hanging around spiritually-ailing people who are willing to allow Jesus to heal them can help us to shed our layers of defensive thinking and believing, so that God can work on us through the agency of Jesus Christ.
In that sense, the Church is like a “support group”.
May God’s Holy Spirit soften the layers of our hearts, that God the Father may work through God the Son to heal us, that we may be forgiven our sins and offenses.
AMEN.
[1] If the commentators who remind us of such practices are right, then the famous painting of the Last Supper, showing Jesus sitting at a table with His disciples gathered around Him, incorrectly portrays the nature of such events 2,000 years ago.
[2] Luke does not tell us the nature of her sins, only that Jesus said her sins were “many”.
[3] Verse 39
[4] A good example is the raising of the widow’s son, read last week (Luke 7: 11 – 17).
