"SPIRITUAL MOBILITY"
A homily by Fr. Gene Tucker, given at Trinity Church, Mt. Vernon, Illinois, on Sunday, June 13, 2010.
Are you spiritually mobile?
Today’s gospel text has everything to do with spiritual mobility . . .
Spiritual mobility has to do with being able to see a change in our relationship with God. Or, put more clearly, to be able to come into a better and closer relationship with God.
Before we tackle some of the aspects of spiritual mobility, let’s take a moment to look at the incident that Luke describes for us today, which happened on the occasion of a dinner party that Simon, a Pharisee, had given, and to which, Jesus had been invited.
Some aspects of this event won’t make sense to us unless we unpack a little of the cultural setting of the times, so we should take a moment to look at these aspects of the account, in order to better understand how the actions that took place would influence our understanding of the matter of spiritual mobility.
We should begin by noticing that the woman who spent so much time bathing Jesus’ feet with her tears isn’t considered to be an intruder necessarily. In biblical times, it was the custom for people who weren’t invited to a dinner party to come and watch those who were. If the dinner party took place in an outside courtyard, then they could watch the proceedings there. But, it seems as though they could also come into the house and observe. Today, of course, we would regard anyone who hadn’t been invited to be a “party crasher”. Not so in biblical times.
Next, we should notice that the meaning of the woman’s actions as they would have been seen in the context of the culture of Palestine 2,000 years ago….
For one thing, a woman would not have let her hair down in public. Nor would she have uncovered her head in public.
For another, the woman touches Jesus’ feet. In the culture of the day, such an act had sexual overtones. (Apparently, the woman was able to touch Jesus’ feet because He was reclining on His side, eating with one hand, while His feet were stretched out, away from the mat on which the food would have been placed.)
Perhaps it’s this last point that leads many scholars to think that the woman was a prostitute, though Luke never explicitly tells us that that is the sin of which she is guilty.
It is safe to say, however, that the woman’s actions bring disgrace upon herself, on Jesus, and on Simon, the party’s host.
That Jesus would have tolerated her actions would have heightened the sense of indignation that Simon and others who shared his convictions would have felt.
Now, let’s turn our attention to the matter of spiritual mobility….
And we should begin with Simon, the Pharisee…
The New Testament gospels don’t paint a very flattering picture of the Pharisees. The image we get is of a group of people who were rigid and judgmental. They seemed to go around, sizing people up, trying to figure out if they were “in” or “out” with God. Of course, they themselves, were definitely “in” with God. It seems as though they thought they were really “in” with God. If they thought of themselves in that way, they probably did so because they tried to be so diligent about keeping even the very smallest aspects of the Law of Moses.
We see some aspects of the attitude that many Pharisees has of others in some of the thoughts that Simon had about the woman…He reminds himself that, if Jesus had really known what sort of a woman this was who was misbehaving so badly, He would really be the prophet everyone thinks He is.
It seems clear that Simon thinks he knows everything there is to know about this woman: She is a sinner, pure and simple, and she will always be a sinner.
Simon has no place in his scheme of spiritual understanding for mobility. His is a spiritual caste system, in which people are where they are in his estimation of how God sees them, and they will always be in that very same place.
Put another way, Simon seems to think that God is incapable of forgiving a past misdeed, of moving people up the spiritual ladder.
Of course, Simon probably didn’t apply that rule to himself, or to other Pharisees, or to others who scrupulously tried to keep all the laws that the Mosaic covenant demanded. No, it might be safe to say that Simon thought that he could lift himself up by his own spiritual bootstraps. Therefore, Simon might have thought that he was spiritually mobile. Too bad that he, and many of the Pharisees, didn’t apply that same degree of generosity to others.
But Jesus did extend His generosity to the woman. We can see this in His response to her actions, for He did not stop her from doing what she was doing, even though it made Him unclean to come into contact with her (by the standards of the Law of Moses), and even though those actions brought dishonor to Him and to her (by the cultural standards of the day).
As I reflect on it, I think Jesus’ forgiveness of her sins, and His acceptance of her, began with His reaction to her, and that would have been awhile before He told her verbally that her sins had been forgiven. Jesus’ knew the true meaning of the woman’s actions, for He went beneath the surface appearance of those actions to the motivations that undergirded them.
In this regard, Jesus is entirely different from Simon. Simon looks only on the outward appearance, while Jesus looks on the heart. Simon sees the scandalous behavior that only seems to confirm his already-formed opinion of the woman, while Jesus sees a willingness on the woman’s part to make a fool of herself for the sake of seeking forgiveness and acceptance.
Now, let’s return to the question with which we began: Are you spiritually mobile?
As we consider that question, I think we might begin by assessing our own attitudes toward our past life. We might ask ourselves these questions:
- Do we have an attitude that seems to tell us that we are unacceptable to God because of something in our life up to this point that fails to meet God’s standards of holiness? If so, we are in league with Simon, the Pharisee.
- Do we underestimate God’s power to forgive and to accept? If so, then we may be thinking that our sins are more powerful than God. If so, then we, like Simon the Pharisee, are putting some aspects of our life beyond God’s power to deal with.
If we come to the conclusion that we have been thinking in the ways that these two questions indicate, then how do we adopt a different attitude toward God, so that we can accept God’s forgiveness, God’s acceptance, and God’s love?
Two steps are necessary, and we see them both in our gospel text for today:
- We must demonstrate our willingness to seek forgiveness. That was the true motivation of the woman’s actions, as Jesus makes clear near the end of the account before us today.
- God extends His forgiveness, even when we may not be aware of it. At least, that’s what I make of Jesus’ acceptance of the woman’s behavior. His forgiveness is apparent, it seems to me, long before He ever forgave her verbally. His willingness to be embarrassed, along with her, confirms His acceptance of her.
Nevertheless, Jesus’ entire life and teaching demonstrates that God sees each of us as spiritually mobile persons, who are capable of being received into a more intimate and loving relationship with Him, through the work of Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord. For we serve and love a God who is far more willing to hear than we are to pray, and who is far more willing to forgive than we are to ask for forgiveness.
Thanks be to God!
AMEN.
