Our Old Testament lesson
is a real problem.
It says that if commit
sin we will suffer misfortune
for it here in this earthly life as punishment.
That implies that if we
suffer misfortune,
it’s a punishment for our sins.
God gives us cancer or
wipes out our savings
and may even afflict our children just to punish us.
It did not take the
Jewish people long
to recognize that things don’t really work that way.
The world is not that
rational or that fair.
Good people suffer hardships
while bad people often flourish.
The idea of God punishing
sin with suffering
fell apart long before the birth of Jesus.
Jesus said his Father
caused the sun to shine
and the rain to fall on good and evil alike.
God is not in the
business of retribution.
But sin nonetheless has
its weight and its consequences.
There is a moral order to
the universe.
Great philosophers like
Kant proved it through logic.
Even atheists like Greg
Epstein insist that there is
a moral order we need to obey.
We may argue about
whether particular things are right or wrong.
But we all know there is
such a thing as right and wrong.
Otherwise we couldn’t be
having the argument.
When we violate that
moral order,
we put ourselves out of step, out of synch.
Something gets twisted
inside us
and in our relationships with others.
God may not be lurking around
to zap us with a disease
or an accident if we do something wrong.
But the very nature of
things gives sin a consequence.
Buddhists call it karma.
Secularists say “what goes
around, comes around.”
If nothing else, we
suffer a wound in ourselves.
We want to think we are
good people.
When we do wrong, one of
two things happens:
Our self-respect is broken; or
We preserve our self-respect by lying to ourselves,
or devising false justifications.
So we cut ourselves off from the truth.
You know what I miss
about being young?
It isn’t so much being
stronger, better looking,
and having more hair.
It isn’t even having so
much life to look forward to.
It’s that I was so sure
of my own righteousness.
I miss being morally sure
of myself.
Just one example from
many possible examples:
Before I was a parent, I saw
what a lousy job
most parents were doing and knew how much better
I would do.
When my children were
born, I set out to be so much better
a father than my father had been.
But I was not.
Knowing there are worse
fathers doesn’t help much.
Sometimes I was too
angry. Sometimes I was too neglectful.
Other times I was too
attentive in an anxious unhelpful way.
Often I pushed my children to succeed
at what I wanted so they’d make me proud.
I, was in short, pretty
bad at parenting.
It is only by the grace
of God my children came out
to be the good people they are today.
With the passing years,
moral and spiritual failures add up.
Regrets add up.
They add up in every
relationship and in every part of our lives.
For those who are
comfortable in their righteousness,
the gospel of Jesus Christ may not have much appeal.
They have constructed a
self that they are proud of.
They may not feel the
need of Jesus.
When I was a recycling
vegetarian politically correct young man
I didn’t feel the need of Jesus either.
But I don’t honestly
believe we can live very long without guilt.
I don’t believe even the
strongest and best of us can do that
for two reasons.
First, we have to live in
human society
and the structures of society are unjust.
The greatest American
theologian of the 20th Century,
Reinhold Niebuhr, taught us that we cannot be moral
people
in an immoral society.
For example, if the whole
world were given the chance
to consume what North America and Western Europe consume,
it would take 5 planets with the earth’s resources
to meet the demand.
How can we justify that?
The second reason we
can’t dodge guilt
is that life is morally complicated.
Often the choices we face
are not between right and wrong,
but between wrong and worse.
Even if we do our best in
those situations,
we come out with a moral remainder.
I don’t know how we can
get through life with clean hands.
So a lot of us live with
regret.
For us, the gospel is not
just good news
– it’s the best news we can imagine.
That brings us to our
lesson about the sinner woman
and Simon the Pharisee.
The woman is a forgiven
sinner who loves Jesus more than her own life.
Simon is a righteous man,
sure enough of himself
to judge the woman as sinner and Jesus as a false
prophet.
– sneering at them both from his morally superior seat.
So Jesus tells Simon the
parable of the two debtors,
which concludes that he who has been forgiven much, loves much.
He who has been forgiven
little, loves little.
Jesus does not say Simon
has sinned.
He does not accuse Simon
of being morally numb to his own failings.
He lets Simon’s
self-assessment stand. Simon is innocent.
But because he is
innocent, he has only his pride to keep him warm.
He has been forgiven
little; and so he loves little.
The sinner woman has lost
her pride but gained her Savior.
Contrition has broken her
heart open to Jesus.
Being forgiven has healed
her wounds and more:
It has given her with the capacity to love.
So what is life about
anyway – a zero defects score
on some spiritual foreman’s clipboard?
William Blake said “we
are put on earth a little space
that we might learn to bear the beams of love.”
That’s what life is
about.
We “bear the beams of love” when we can endure
them,
when we accept the love of Christ who does not set
standards
we have to meet to win his approval
but rather loves us as we are.
We “bear the beams of
love” when we carry them
to each other as merciful compassion.
That’s what happens when
we give up measuring our worth
by our righteousness.
We stop living in pride and
start living in love.
The love of Jesus is
better than being blameless,
better than moral confidence.
The point of the gospel
is just this:
It is better to be forgiven than innocent.
Every time we come to the
communion rail,
we surrender our claims to righteousness
and
accept his mercy.
God open our hearts to
receive his grace
that it may flower
in us as the love of Christ.
God grant us the gift to
forgive as we have been forgiven
and love each other as we have been loved.
