We must acknowledge
that God is present in, with, and under all creation.
Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary—Year C by Dennis Ormseth
Reading
for Series C: 2012-2013
The Fourth Sunday
after Pentecost
2 Samuel 11:26—12:10; 12:13–15
Psalm 32 (5)
Galatians 2:15–21
Luke 7:36—8:3
A noticeable lack of discussion of the concept of forgiveness of sin in works
of ecological theology implies an irrelevance of this Sunday's readings to care
of creation, since forgiveness of sin is the
theme that binds these readings together. While all theological loci
clearly cannot be made relevant to our concern for care of creation, this lack
is troublesome in view of the fact that for those traditions in which the
forgiveness of sins is the defining issue of spiritual life, the Lutheran
tradition obviously among them, care of creation easily falls into place as
only one among many issues with respect to which the forgiven person might
exercise their “faith active in love.” Our aim in this comment is to challenge
this appearance of “irrelevance.”
Emphasis on the reality of personal faith as the
basis for forgiveness of sins typically focuses on the relationship between the
individual and Jesus or God. So here in this Sunday's Gospel reading, one might
focus on Jesus' word to the woman “Your sins are forgiven” as his response to
her faith, faith that is expressed in her extravagant acts of hospitality. David
Tiede, for example, uses Luke's contrast between the woman's actions and those
of his host and the others at table to show how the encounter reveals both her
faith and his lack of faith in this “prophet.” Tiede avoids the trap of the “debate
about whether her forgiveness was a ‘result’ of her faith or her love was a sign
of her previous forgiveness” as a “scholastic confusion of the story.”
Nonetheless, he wants to assure his readers that “the 'loving” and “forgiving”
that occur in the encounter “are all bound up in the kind of trust in Jesus
which is truly saving,” and that her “implicit faith” in him “does not wait for
the word of forgiveness (v.48) before displaying an extravagant love” (David
Tiede, Augsburg Commentary on the New Testament: Luke. Minneapolis:
Augsburg Publishing House, 1988; p. 161).
What such interpretation generally leaves out of
consideration is the impact of the conflict over her actions on the occasion in
which they are all engaged, the banquet sponsored by Simon the Pharisee. With
regard to this meal, we might ask, what exactly about her faith and Jesus’
response is “saving”? Over against the faith, or lack thereof, on the part of
the Pharisee and his company—also implicit—the exchange is, at least in the
first instance, seriously disruptive. It exposes the deep rift that divides
those gathered. As Luke Timothy Johnson notes, the event fulfills the prophecy
of Simeon in Luke 2:35 that Jesus would reveal “the inner thoughts of many:” “That
a prophet can see the heart is axiomatic (see John 4:19). The irony here is not
only that Jesus does know the woman's heart, but also shows that he can
read Simon's thoughts!” And those
thoughts, we might observe, have as much to do with the significance of the
meal as they do with whether or not Jesus is God’s prophet.
Indeed, the significance of the occasion of the
meal and Jesus’ identity are two aspects of the larger question, one embedded
in the narrative, of who is acceptable to God. As Tiede points out, questions
about table fellowship
. . . are important to both Jesus and the
Pharisees. As will become even more crucial in 14:1--15:3, the discussions
about banquet etiquette are fundamentally about who is acceptable to God. Who
are the “elect” on the guest list of the messianic banquet? The tension in the
story over the behavior of the woman and Jesus is more than the violation of
propriety, as if that were not enough. The separation of the elect from the sinners
of the world is challenged by this “prophet” who knows full well what kind of woman
is touching him (Tiede, p. 160).
Concern for faith gives priority to the woman's
acceptance of Jesus. As Johnson points out, "in the sinful woman we
recognize again a member of the outcast poor, rejected by the religious elite
as an untouchable, but like the poor throughout this Gospel, showing by her
acts of hospitality that she accepts the prophet Jesus" (The Gospel of
Luke. Collegeville, Minnesota: The
Liturgical Press, 1991; p. 129). At the same time, however, in Jesus' act of
forgiving her sins, we see God's acceptance of her, an acceptance which
so startles those at table as to provoke them into wondering about Jesus'
identity.
In contrast to the woman, as Johnson also notes, “the
Pharisee invites Jesus to table, but violates all the rules of hospitality, and
thereby shows (as he does also by his thoughts) that he does not accept Jesus
as God's prophet.” Nevertheless, we further note, “those who were at table with
[Jesus] began to ask among themselves, ‘Who is this who even forgives sins?’”
(7:49). The import of the question will be recognized by the reader of Luke's
Gospel, who at 5:17-26 would have encountered an earlier exchange concerning
the power to forgive sins, also with "Pharisees and teachers of the
law," in connection with the healing of a paralytic. “Who is this who is
speaking blasphemies?” the Pharisees ask. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?”
To which in response Jesus asserts his “authority on earth to forgive
sins" as Son of Man. Whatever the
specific meaning of the title "Son of Man” has for Luke—an issue the
complexity of which prohibits our discussion of it here—the irony of the
exchange cannot be missed, nor will it surprise a Christian assembly that it
occurs in Luke within the context of a meal. God's presence in Jesus,
characterized here by Luke in terms of his role as prophet, is what affords the
woman's awareness of being forgiven her sins. Participants in Christian assemblies
gathered around the table of the Lord will recognize themselves in her, even as
they acknowledge the presence of God in Jesus, and his authority to forgive not
only her sins, but theirs.
It is worth noting that a similar dynamic is
involved in the accompanying two lessons. The prophet Nathan speaks the word of
God to David, first to uncover his sin by means of the parable of corrupted hospitality of the rich
man, but then also more directly in the voice of God to assure David of the
forgiveness of his sin. God is present in and through the action of the
prophet. So also in the controversy reflected in our second reading from Galatians.
Again the question is, who is acceptable to God, as manifest in shared meals:
those who do works of the law or those who have come to believe in Christ
Jesus? In Paul's view, it is those who have faith. It can't be those who do
works of the law because “no one will be justified by the works of the law.”
Those “acceptable to God” are instead those in whom Christ lives by of virtue their
faith in the Son of God, “who loves them and gives himself for them” (Galatians
2:20). Again it is the presence of God in and through faith in Jesus that makes
the person of faith acceptable in the company of God's people. Though lived “in
the flesh,” such a life is clearly lived in the presence of God (Galatians
2:19-20).
The significance of the exchange in the Gospel for
care of creation comes into view in light of further consideration of Simon's “thoughts
of the heart,” namely the criteria by which Simon and the Pharisees would have
judged her presence at the meal as unacceptable. In the background of the
Pharisee's concern is the Levitical principle of unclean touch, according to
which “when you touch human uncleanness—any uncleanness by which one can become
unclean—and are unaware of it, when you come to know it, you shall be guilty”
(Leviticus 5:3). Jesus knows that in Simon's mind, he has indeed transgressed
on this principle; as Luke emphasizes in vivid detail, he has allowed her to
touch him: “She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his
feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing
his feet and anointing them with the ointment” (Luke 7:38). On the other hand,
in Simon's view, if Jesus was aware of the woman's uncleanness, as he would be
if he is God's prophet, he as according to this understanding himself become
unclean and therefore unacceptable to God until he has participated in the
temple ritual of atonement (Leviticus 5:5-6). We are reminded that central to
the faith of ancient Israel was their access to God in the temple. As Walter
Brueggeman puts it, in the mercy seat above the ark of the covenant, Yahweh had
astonishingly provided “a vehicle whereby Israel's sin is regularly and
effectively overcome, both to make Yahweh's presence possible in Israel and to
make communion between Yahweh and Israel possible.” (Brueggeman,Theology of
the Old Testament, Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1997; p. 666.). But
equally astonishing, Luke's claim in this narrative is that in the person of
Jesus God has now done the same thing for the world beyond privileged access to
the temple, where a woman such as came to their meal could not go. Here is the
sharp division of the house that pervades the text: In Simon's view, the touch
initiated by the woman’s washing of Jesus’ feet, kissing and anointing them
with oil is a source of contamination. In Jesus' view, on the contrary, the
woman's touch is an expression of her trust in him, and her actions were an
expression of her joy of being in the company of God. Such joy as is expressed
in Psalm 32, appointed for this Sunday's worship.
Which is it, here at this meal? Whose perception of
what happens is correct? By what criteria would one come to a decision? Or is
the reality perhaps only a matter of perception, that of Simon and his
friends over against that Jesus and the woman? Is the distinction perhaps
finally a matter of a purely subjective "faith," and not reality? How
does one tell? Answers to these questions, it strikes us, are relevant to both
the relationship between members of the human community and the larger
community of creation, otherkind as well as humankind. If such human touch
would render Jesus himself unclean, and indeed threaten the purity of the
entire company, it is important to note that also other kinds of touch could be
a source of uncleanness as well, “any uncleanness by which one can become
unclean,” as specified in Leviticus 5:2: “when any of you touch any unclean
thing--whether the carcass of an unclean beast or the carcass of unclean
livestock or the carcass of an unclean swarming thing--and are unaware of it,
you have become unclean, and are guilty.” What Jesus has run up against in this
meal, in short, is the notion that things in creation, whether human or other
kind, can be divided into clean and unclean. Contact with them can accordingly
also either contaminate or purify. Which it is rides, by analogy with the
corruption of human relationships, upon whether God is truly present in and
through the actions and the elements involved in those actions, here the
woman's tears and her alabaster jar of ointment: If God is present to the situation, there
cannot be a contamination; if God is not present, there can. How then, lacking
the weighty power of sacred space and covenantal tradition attached to the
temple, are we to decide the question?
In our comment on last Sunday's readings, we
discussed a principle that is at least the beginning of an answer in the
pattern manifest in the life of the people involved in our readings: It is the
pattern discerned in last Sunday's readings, the “drama of brokenness and
restoration, which has Yahweh as its key agent,” and which “features
generosity, candor in brokenness, and resilient hope, the markings of a viable
life.” The pattern is that which the Apostle Paul identifies both with Jesus'
life and his own that of death to sin and resurrection to new life (Galatians
19:20). It is the pattern which, as Walter Brueggeman observes, is also the
pattern that the Christian church claims for itself, albeit too often in
supercessionist mode, in its view that Jesus is God's new “sacrifice of
atonement” (Romans 3:25), whereby alienation is overcome And it is finally the pattern encountered by
a Christian congregation at worship in the presence of its risen Lord and placing itself under the authority and
within the sacramentally enacted dynamic of his death and resurrection, which,
in Brueggeman's apt summary, “like ancient Israel, affirms generosity
over scarcity, brokenness in the face of denial, and hope in the
place of despair” (Brueggemann, p. 563).
Within this pattern, the forgiveness of sins is
significant as that moment in the relationship between God and people when, as
Psalm 32 indicates, the community, through its leaders, acknowledges “its
communal pathologies,” without which acknowledgment “healing is impossible and
death comes” (Brueggemann, p. 254; cf. our comment on the readings for last
Sunday for a fuller development of this theme). The point to emphasize here,
however, is that the pattern applies to the relationship both between people
and between people and all God's creation, a coupling that regularly takes
place when we are at table with Jesus in worship. Our incredible communal
pathologies in relationship to God's creation cannot be truly and fully healed
apart from full acknowledgment that God is present in, with, and under all
creation.
For
additional care for creation reflections on the overall themes of the
lectionary lessons for the month by Trisha K Tull, Professor Emerita of
Old Testament, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and columnist for
The Working Preacher, visit: http://www.workingpreacher.org/columnist_home.aspx?author_id=288
