“Beginning Again” Luke 7: 36-50

One of the things I am most proud of writing while in seminary was a letter to the World Council of Churches about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In 1996, it was found that a large number of people had been mistreated prior to the end of apartheid in South Africa. Victims were encouraged to talk about their experience in public hearings. 

But these hearings were quite different than what we think about hearings today, because at the end of the hearings, there was an option to grant amnesty to the perpetrators. Why in the world would this be a form of justice? Because many victims wanted to move towards reconciliation - starting to rebuild a new life together.

Now were these hearings one hundred percent successful? Of course not. Like everything else in society, it faced criticism. Nor was everyone granted amnesty. But what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission started was a new way to envision justice in a broken world.

We are now in the final week of our sermon series for Lent around forgiveness. We’ve talked about why it can be hard to forgive. About how God forgave us. We’ve explored those areas in our lives where we need to examine ourselves more and confess our sin. 

This is Palm Sunday. The day we traditionally celebrate Jesus riding into Jerusalem before the events that will come to pass this week take place. The final meal with the disciples. His arrest. Trial. And sentence to death on a cross. But shortly after Jesus’s triumphal entry into the city is described in Luke 19, we find Jesus weeping over the city. He cries out telling the people to pay attention, to open their eyes, because a hard time is coming. A time when their enemies will seem to succeed instead of the way of peace. 

When I read about Jesus weeping, when I think about what is to come, when I explore some of our world’s history of brokenness, I am left with questions. Questions like, can you truly be reconciled without forgiveness? Does forgiveness always lead to reconciliation? Is it about what we say publicly or how we feel in our hearts? What is the way of peace that Jesus is calling us to?

In Hebrew Scripture there was a very clear path laid out in Leviticus and Numbers about how one was to approach being reconciled with one’s neighbors. If a person wronged their neighbor, the first thing they had to do was go to that person and acknowledge their specific sin. Essentially they had to say what they had done wrong and how they are sorry that they did it. But then the were to work towards restoration, making it right again. They were to pay restitution of the value of whatever they harmed plus another 1/5 of the cost. Only after they had reached out to their neighbor could they go and make atonement before God in terms of sacrifice. Why was there such a process for restoration? Because people harm one another and we are not always great at an attitude of repentance. 

On some basic level there has to be forgiveness in order to be reconciled. We see this in the forgiveness that Jesus will offer time and again throughout this week, but forgiveness does not always lead to reconciliation. Sometimes the people that you are trying to offer forgiveness to will think that they have done nothing wrong and don’t need to be offered forgiveness. Sometimes the person you need to forgive has passed away. Sometimes we get forgiveness all messed up and we use apologies as daggers to further harm people instead of places of healing and grace. 

Other times there can be reconciliation without forgiveness. Have you ever had a friend, or perhaps your own family, who you just didn’t talk about something from the past because there is some unresolved hurt there. Yet, you just keep moving forward, as if nothing happened, because you value the relationship more than the hurt? 

But when forgiveness and reconciliation truly connect church, the result can be powerful. In today’s Gospel lesson Jesus is invited to the house of a Pharisee named Simon. Somehow, an unnamed woman from town found out where Jesus was going to be and she came to the table where he was eating and brought a jar of ointment with her. As Simon tried to eat with Jesus, probably wanting his undivided attention, here is a woman who everyone has deemed a sinner who entered into his house, uninvited, and is washing Jesus’s feet with her tears and drying them with her hair. 

Simon is not happy. But he knows better than to say anything out loud to Jesus, so instead  he just keeps his resentment in his heart, saying to himself.  “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him—that she is a sinner.” Only Jesus knows what he is thinking. But instead of just correcting Simon, instead, he told a story. A story very similar to the one we heard last week about debts and debtors, only this one has a slightly better ending with all the debts being canceled, but Jesus asking this very peculiar question - if debtors of two different sizes had their debts canceled, who would love the one forgiving their debt more? The answer - the one with the greater debt. 

Here is this woman before Jesus, who is crying because she has had her debt of sin forgiven. Yes, everyone identifies her as a sinner, but that is not how Jesus sees her. She is crying because she knows that she is forgiven and knows the weight of all that she had been carrying around. She shows love because of what she has been freed from. 

This woman was forgiven and free but she was also restored. She was made new. Friends, that is what the love of Jesus can do in our lives. Have you ever noticed how excited people can get when they dedicate their lives to Christ? When they first feel the weight of the burden of sin lifted from their lives? It can change them! And they are so excited to share it! Because they know, they know they have been made new. 

Somewhere between when we first accept Christ and as we live into our faith over the years, some folks can lose that excitement. That overwhelming feeling of grace. 

But we have an opportunity today to think about that experience all over again. As we ponder this scripture about the woman crying, we can realize that the way that we have always done things, may not be the only way. We’ve been thinking over the past few weeks about people we need to forgive in our lives or things that we need to be forgiven for. The world in which we lives seems to think that if someone has wronged us, what we need is retributive justice, justice in the form of punishment. But Jesus did not punish this woman for her sins, friends. Instead he offered restorative justice, by telling her to go and sin no more. By sending her back into society forgiven and freed. 

At first glance, it may be really hard for us to imagine this type of justice, rooted in forgiveness, in our lives and in our world. But friends, isn’t this the very type of forgiveness that Jesus offered us on the cross? 

In a moment we are going to have an opportunity to come and lay whatever we have been carrying at the foot of the cross. Maybe its a person that you are just really struggling with forgiving. Bring it to the cross. Maybe its a situation where you see no way out. Bring it to the foot of the cross. Maybe it is a sin that you just cannot shake. Bring it to the foot of the cross. Because here, friends, and especially this week, we remember the grace and forgiveness and new way and new life that wait for us here. Let us pray…