Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little. — Luke 7:47
It is a dramatic scene out of America's mythical past — a Western scene of cowboys, saloons, and gunslingers; a scene of wide-open spaces conquered by fierce individualists, liquor, and true grit. It is a scene, however, a little different from the cowboy heroes of my childhood, the scenes of the good guy, white hat heroes like Roy Rogers and Gene Au-try, not even to mention the good guy, white hat hero horses like Trigger or Silver of the Lone Ranger's "Hi, Ho Silver, away!"
Yes, it is a scene unlike my childhood memories of cowboys and Indians and the Lone Ranger and his faithful Indian sidekick Tonto. The scene is more in keeping with today's Lone Ranger episode where the famous good guy lawman and Tonto are being charged by a vicious group of Indians. "Looks like we have a problem, Tonto," said the Long Ranger. And Tonto replied, "What do you mean we, white man!"
Yes, this is the tougher, harsher, gutsier scene of murder and mayhem, violence and killing, where the bad guys, if they don't win, at least don't seem to lose. I speak of the scenes in the award-winning movie, Unforgiven, starring Clint Eastwood as Bill Munny, who was "a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition." However, he married, and it is his gentle wife who bears him two children and leads him into a settled and reformed, if impoverished, life where he hangs up his six guns to raise pigs.
His wife's untimely death from small pox crippled him on his road to recovery from his addiction to violence. And so does the arrival of a young gunslinger, the Schofield Kid. The Kid announces a handsome reward has been offered by two prostitutes if someone will kill the two men who beat them badly and cut one of them. Eastwood, as ex-sharp-shooter killer Bill Munny, cannot resist. Looking at the thin faces of his poverty-stricken children, he decides to go after the reward for their sake. He decides to kill to give them a better life.
Bill Munny takes along Ned, his old killing partner, and the two of them, along with the Schofield Kid, shoot their way into town, shoot the prostitute-abusing cowboys, shoot their way out of the saloon, and Munny eventually shoots the sheriff, who lies wounded on the saloon floor.
The sheriff says to Munny, "I don't deserve this. I was building a house." Munny responds, "Deserves got nothing to do with this." The sheriff defiantly replies, "I'll see you in hell, William Munny." "Yes," Munny agrees, as he kills him. All the work of Munny's late wife toward his reformation and forgiveness was undone. Tragically, at the movie's end, violent and murderous as ever, he remains unforgiven.
Our text for today from Luke's gospel also involves a prostitute — a prostitute some 1,800 years previous to those in the movie. And unlike the prostitutes in the movie who are seeking revenge, the prostitute in the biblical story is seeking forgiveness and an opportunity to express gratitude. In contrast to the movie, the tragedy of violence and death is turned into the triumph of forgiveness and reconciliation.
One time a minister was giving a children's sermon. The topic was forgiveness. He asked the children, "What must we do to receive forgiveness?" One little boy raised his hand and said, "Well first of all we have to sin!" Or as one well-intentioned woman said to her new minister upon leaving worship after the sermon, "I must tell you, Reverend, we never really knew what sin was until you came."
Sin and forgiveness are at the heart of the church's vocabulary. Indeed, the word sin occurs 446 times in the Bible. When one minister announced in a Sunday sermon that there were over 285 different kinds of sin mentioned in the Bible, on Monday his secretary was flooded with calls asking for a detailed list!
Even though the word forgive, and its cognates appear only about 150 times in the Bible, the concept of forgiveness is even more central to the Bible than the concept of sin. If sin is the eternal enticement of humankind, the eternal yearning of humanity is for forgiveness, and our eternal challenge is to be able to forgive. Just how do we go about forgiving?
I.
The first step in the challenge to forgive is to accept forgiveness for ourselves.
Many scholars, commentators, and ministers often have alluded to psychiatrist Karl Menninger's popular book, Whatever Became of Sin? Dr. Menninger, the founder of the well-known Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, gave a series of lectures at Princeton that were expanded into this attention getting book.
Throughout the book, Menninger observes that most Americans believe many things are tragically wrong and that there is a lot of sin and badness out there. Corruption and dishonesty are rampant, hypocrisy and duplicity abound, fraud and scam schemes are everywhere, our society is in deplorable moral disrepair, and on and on.
But, says Dr. Menninger, despite all this societal breast-beating, no one ever admits to doing any wrong. People bemoaning the many sins and corruptions of America do not see themselves as corrupt sinners. People lament the decay in our moral fabric, but do not imagine themselves as contributors to that decay.
The truth is, at a certain level, many Americans are as "good" perhaps as the Pharisee in Luke's famous story. While in Christian circles it has been customary to castigate Pharisees, let us remember they were often very good people. Most of us, including ministers, perhaps especially ministers, would love to have them in our churches.
Why? For one thing, they took their religion seriously. They never missed a Sabbath service at the synagogue. You would never find devout Pharisees consenting to organized sports on the Sabbath morning. Many Pharisees knew much of their Bible by memory and to top it off, most of them were tithers, which means they gave 10% of their income to the synagogue and temple. That's why Jesus once told his disciples that unless their righteousness exceeded that of the Pharisees, they would not enter the kingdom.
Yet, for all their goodness, some Pharisees had one fatal flaw. Their goodness and righteousness often blinded them to the subtleties of pride and arrogance. Their vigorous, external law-keeping often caused them to overlook the sins in the depths of their heart and soul. Sins like greed and avarice, lust and censoriousness, snobbishness and a moral unctuousness, which made them repulsive.
Since the Pharisee in Luke's story seems to display some of these undesirable qualities, he reminds us of some of our Puritan ancestors who, in their moral and religious earnestness, were quick to sniff out sin in others, but who forgot that the greatest sin of all was lovelessness.
Simon the Pharisee may have been a kind of collector of celebrities. It may be Jesus had earlier given a stunning sermon at the synagogue and that Simon wanted to catch this rising star or perhaps even trip him up as an imposter, so he invited Jesus to dinner. But he gave him no customary kiss of peace when he arrived at the door. He did not pour cold water over his hot, dusty feet as any courteous host would do in that culture. Nor did he anoint Jesus in friendship with scented olive oil.
Simon is in many ways like Menninger's "good" Americans. His own goodness prevents him from seeing the deeper flaws in his own character that excuse him from responsibility for the corruptions of society. Characteristic of many Pharisees, many Americans, content with their personal assessment of their goodness, condone and often support an entertainment industry that exploits our every passion, elevates and applauds violence, and trivializes our most precious human experiences like sex, marriage, and family.
Americans deplore the corruptions that abound in our political, economic, and judicial systems but piously evade responsibility for confronting them. We seem unwilling to confess our complicity with deception and our easy acquiescence to evil. If the truth be known, many of us, like Simon the Pharisee, have a secret fascination and lust for the prostitute at Jesus' feet.
In his famous parable, Jesus asks Simon which of the debtors would love the Master most. Simon is no theological or ethical moron, so he answers, "The one forgiven most will love the most." "Right," said Jesus.
Ironically and strangely, we first answer the challenge to forgive by acknowledging our need for forgiveness, and then accepting it. In answer to Dr. Menninger's question, "Whatever became of sin?" we will not say, "I confess, George did it," but will say, "I confess, I did it. I am guilty of sin." Then we will know whether we are Pharisee or prostitute and that he who is forgiven most loves most. Or to say it differently, he who is forgiven much can rise to the challenge to forgive much.
II.
If the challenge to forgive means accepting our need for forgiveness, it then means our determination to see the potential good in others — even in our enemies. In other words, the challenge to forgive is the challenge to love.
That reminds me of the little girl who told her friend, "I want to marry a doctor so I can be well for nothing." The other little girl said, "I want to marry a minister so I can be good for nothing." But forgiveness means we should be good for something.
Orphaned girls often have turned to prostitution as a livelihood. Runaway American girls are sometimes trapped into slavery. Prostitutes often tell of a childhood of physical and sexual abuse only later to be abused by pimps and boyfriends as well as customers.
Prostitutes often are further abused by the hypocrisies of society that outwardly condemns them but inwardly wants them. Police can be bribed by prostitutes or can be solicited by police themselves. Politicians and judges can be bribed by prostitutes because they may be their customers.
Leading businessmen and professional people and corporations sometimes support a high-class escort system behind the scenes so that prostitutes often scoff at the external rectitude declaimed by officially righteous American society. So there is a sense in which the revenge of the prostitutes in the movie Unforgiven is understood if not justified.
The prostitute in our biblical story was more fortunate because she had met Jesus and heard his sermons about God's all-inclusive grace and love. Perhaps she had heard his classic story of the prodigal son and saw herself as the prodigal daughter being embraced, kissed, and welcomed as a whole person by the loving heavenly Father.
Perhaps she saw, as did the prodigal son, that despite the goodness of the elder brother, the heavenly Father can see the potential goodness shining through the all-too-real badness of prodigals and prostitutes.
Dr. John Shea states it profoundly when he says, "forgiveness is not magnanimously forgetting faults but the uncovering of self-worth when it is crusted over with self-hatred." Shea adds, "The graciousness of God focuses exclusively on the fact that although nobody deserves it, everyone gets it." Even our enemies. Or to say it again in Shea's words, "forgiveness reclaims the essential worth of the person" (The Challenge of Jesus, pp. 121-122).
The profound truth of those words is perhaps no more poignantly expressed than in the recollection of President Reagan's experience with his would-be assassin. Lying wounded in the hospital, Reagan said he realized he really could not pray for himself unless he also prayed for his enemy, the assassin, that God would make him whole. Reagan later wrote a kind letter to the would-be assassin's parents. Reagan could forgive because he saw the potential good even in his would-be assassin.
In our biblical story, Jesus does not make excuses for the prostitute, nor does she make excuses for herself. All kinds of sociological and psychological reasons could have been given for her behavior. Instead, she acknowledges her sin, as does Jesus. Even more, he acknowledges and affirms her infinite worth as a child of God.
Forgiveness is not easy. Many of us have been wronged, deeply wronged. Forgiveness does not mean we condone the wrong any more than Jesus condoned prostitution. Evil and wrong must be confronted and exposed.
Understanding why someone has done a wrong does not excuse the wrong or neutralize judgment of the wrong.
Let us not wrongly think that our increased insight into the whys of human behavior should undercut our courage to call wrong, wrong, says theologian Paul Tillich.
Yet, God sent not his Son into the world to judge and condemn the world because of sin. Instead God sent his Son so that he might save the world. As God does not bear the grudge against us that he deserves to bear, so he asks us not to bear the grudge against those who probably deserve it. Instead, forgive, that is, give their life back to start all over again. "Vengeance is mine," says the Lord, "I will repay."
Our task is to forgive and to work with people trying to emphasize their good after the manner of President Reagan. We are to accept their positive potential, to focus on building a new future together, rather than righting with revenge the wrongs of the past. Yes, justice must be served, but even more, mercy must be exercised, especially by sinners like ourselves.
The prostitute washed Jesus' feet with her tears and dried them with her hair and repeatedly kissed and caressed his feet as he reclined at Simon's table. She had been grasped by God's higher power, accepted by his inclusive grace, and forgiven by his unconditional love.
She poured the expensive perfumed oil of her profession on him, repenting of her past. She was, in a sense, forgiving all the men who had used and abused her, all the women who had condemned her, and all the hypocrisies of religion and society who had shunned her while secretly admiring her profession.
She could forgive much because she had been forgiven much — accepted, restored, esteemed, and made whole. When we experience that kind of divine love and forgiveness, perhaps the challenge to forgive will not be so formidable. Or as Saint Paul put it: "Be tenderhearted. Forgive one another as God in Christ forgave you" (Ephesians 4:32). Amen.
