In this week's gospel Christ is invited to dinner by a Pharisee and the dinner is crashed by a woman--a known sinner--who washes Christ's feet with her tears. In the midst of this remarkably calm scene, Christ asks who of two men forgiven a debt is the most grateful, the larger or the smaller debtor. The answer is the larger. Christ then says that forgiveness inspires love in proportion to the degree forgiven. So the sinner is much more grateful to Christ than the more successful Pharisee is.
There are some important ideas in this encounter, the most being that Christ readily and publicly forgives the woman her sins, a significant assumption and statement. But this idea of forgiveness as a product is unsettling. There is a physical quality about sin and forgiveness here that has weight and volume. One can see the idea of the spiritual ledger here. But it is not in the mind of the forgiver, it is in that of the sinner. The sinner who is more righteous, more independent of the struggles in life, who is less besmirched by sin, has a frightening disadvantage. The world has made God less clear to him and he is less sensitive to God's love and forgiveness. And this is true, king or hermit.
Again, the material world hangs heavy on a man.
There are some important ideas in this encounter, the most being that Christ readily and publicly forgives the woman her sins, a significant assumption and statement. But this idea of forgiveness as a product is unsettling. There is a physical quality about sin and forgiveness here that has weight and volume. One can see the idea of the spiritual ledger here. But it is not in the mind of the forgiver, it is in that of the sinner. The sinner who is more righteous, more independent of the struggles in life, who is less besmirched by sin, has a frightening disadvantage. The world has made God less clear to him and he is less sensitive to God's love and forgiveness. And this is true, king or hermit.
Again, the material world hangs heavy on a man.
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