Forgiveness and Coloring Outside the Lines
A significant part of worship is how we experience God’s love. I believe that our view of his love in our life is related to our own sense of gratitude for his grace and forgiveness. In Luke 7 we find the story of a woman who anointed Jesus feet and wiped them with her hair. The Pharisees were upset because the woman was known to be sinful. Jesus says this remarkable thing:
Luke 7:47
[New Living] “I tell you, her sins—and they are many—have been forgiven, so she has shown me much love. But a person who is forgiven little shows only little love.”
Is Jesus saying that people with a sordid past have an “inside track” to loving God? Is it necessary to fall into the depths of depravity in order to fully appreciate His love?
It sounds ridiculous, but the dynamic between forgiveness and love is a point that Jesus illustrated often. The story of the lost sheep (Mathew 18), the prodigal son (luke 15) and the hired laborers (Mathew 20) are all about God's grace to the undeserving and his "unfairness" in lavishing that Grace on us. Jesus loved to highlight the fact that God's grace was not a matter of merit or prestige. He explicitly says of the woman who washed his feet that her gratitude was great because she had sunken so low and yet she was forgiven.
How do we deal with this tidbit of knowledge? Should we envy those who have been saved from "extra" depravity? Should we seek out selfish actions and egregious sins to more fully experience God's grace? In fact, warning against this is the very point that Paul makes in Roman's 6 after his discussion of sin, the law and grace. He says in Romans 6:1:
"Well then, should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more of his wonderful grace? 2 Of course not!"
Isn't that just like us? Here is this wonderful truth. God can forgive any heart no matter how dark and stained. Yet the danger is that we use his grace for our own selfish ends. Like Manut Bol at the buffet line we feel like we can eat anything we want with no consequences.
In fact, in this story as in many of the parables and stories related to grace, Jesus is targeting a spirit of religiosity. In the case of this woman the Pharisees were insensed at the fact that Jesus accepted her attention. They saw themselves as too good to be in the same room with her. This is the attitude that Jesus is pointing out - a self righteousness bigotry that puts people into categories of sinnish, sinfuler and sinfulest. How silly! Jesus is pointing out to these fancy-pants (or fancy cloaked) religious leaders that the humility of the forgiven sinner is a doorway to a deeper understanding of God.
This must have struck the Pharisees rather hard. They had made a lifestyle out of following the letter of the law with their feet so that their hearts and minds would be free to participate in hatred, lust, jealousy and envy. They had carefully crafted a rule book of accepted behavior - but the law brings death because it liberates us from the necessity of connecting with the heart of God. The more we make the rules important the more calcified and impenetrable our heart becomes toward Him. Following the law makes us like the rebellious teenager who says, "I cleaned my room and did my homework, now leave me alone!"
Isn't that how we treat God sometimes? We try to keep the rules in order to get God to leave us to our own devices. "Hey God, I'm faithful to my wife, I tithe, I show up at church, I smile and sing and I even read my bible a couple times a week. Now please don't lean on me too much. Let me get on with life down here." We use the law as a stand-in for real relationship with Him.
Can you see it? The line between being "pretty good" and being an "awful sinner" is really non-existent. Hatred is as bad as murder and lust as bad as adultery (Mathew 5). The problem with us is that, like the Pharisees, we don't see ourselves as too bad. We aren't filled with the gratitude of this woman in Luke 7 because we have convinced ourselves that we are better than she. That's the real point Jesus makes time and again. He exalts the lowly and humble who are real and genuine and he lays low the pretentious Pharisees. The truth is that her condition is our condition. Like her, we are perpetrators. That's tough to hear isn't it? We are "offenders" and "perpetrators" of sin. This is where our thinking needs to change. We have such a benign view of sin. We think of our sinfulness as if we are toddlers coloring outside the lines. It's pretty good. It's mostly right. It's just not quite good enough. But sin is more than just art-work that's not quite worthy of the fridge. Sin is a matter of willful disobedience.
In spite of the fact that we are rebellious, persnickety, willful, petty and downright selfish we still manage to think of sin as some external force that impacts us against our will. We consider ourselves good people who are victimized by evil, as if sin is a hurricane that roars into our lives, or a ditch that we fall into "accidentally". We talk about men of God "falling" and the "mistakes" that all of us make. Our language for dealing with sin is really a suave to help us blunt the force of our own responsibility. Looking at my own life, the times that I have fallen, I didn't trip and I wasn't pushed. I dove into sin like a penguin leaping for open water after wintering on the ice.
Thinking back at the most memorable sins that I've committed I'm struck at how often God would put obstacles in my way to try to keep me from sinning. I was literally "hell-bent" on sinning. In order to sin I would have to take risks, discount advice, ignore accountability and sometimes even scheme and plan to arrange my sin. Sin isn't an accident. God did not say in Romans that "while we were accidentally estranged from God through sin he died for us". He said that "while we were His enemies He died for us". The picture of our estrangement from God is the prodigal son - a willful, selfish squanderer.
Of course we don't like to admit we are selfish. But without that acknowledgment our relationship with God cannot reach its full potential because we will have a less than complete view of his forgiveness. It short changes our relationship with God. This was Jesus' point about the woman in Luke 7. He was telling the Pharisees, "she gets it and you don't". He was letting them know that as long as they insisted on the value of their own righteousness they would never be able to experience God's love in that fresh and personal way that this woman was able to experience.
The same is true of us. In order to be fully exposed to God's love in our lives we must also be willing to come face to face with our own sinfulness. When we see ourselves as offenders and not as victims then God's love, grace and forgiveness take on a deeper meaning. We can love much because much has been forgiven.
Choir Director, singer, piano player, technologist and erstwhile blogger.