blip : Beyond Lost Intellectual Ponderings :

Title: “Do you see this woman?”
Texts: Luke 7:36-8:3; Galatians 2:15-21; Psalm 5:1-8.
Date: June 17, 2007
An unknown woman—uninvited, unexpected, suspicious—enters where she doesn’t belong. Unnoticed, she stands in the shadows, behind Jesus, outside the circle of fellowship. She doesn’t even have the dignity of a name, of being named—she’s completely anonymous.

Well, that’s not exactly true. The host recognizes her: Simon, the Pharisee, says to himself: “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner.” (Lk. 7:39). Simon doesn’t need to know her name; he already knows all he needs to know: this woman is a sinner. Nothing else matters.

And she’s been among these people long enough to know that she doesn’t matter, that she is unworthy. And so she cowers in the shadows, where she thinks she belongs. She is the product of a society that has convinced her that she is not worthy, that she is dispensable, that she doesn’t belong at the party with all the significant people. Sure, she has a place in the world… but it’s not with these people; and I’m sure she’s needed for something… but not for anything going on here at Simon’s house. She may enter the room where the Pharisees dine, but she must stay outside the inner circle, along the wall, anonymous.

For some reason—and the text is silent on this point—but for some reason, the woman without a name emerges from the shadows. But there is nothing confident about the way she comes to the table—she’s bowed low, nearly crawling, her face turned toward the ground, she wouldn’t dare look anyone in the eye… that’s something equals would do. Not her—a sinner.

I wonder what first announced her presence to Simon and the rest. I bet it was the tears, the sobs—as Luke says, “she stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair” (7:38). She speaks with tears—abundant tears, so many that she drenches Jesus’ feet and needs to wipe them with her hair.

Apparently Simon couldn’t hear the love the woman spoke with her weeping. It was a language he did not know—completely unfamiliar to him. He would never go to such extreme measures to reach out, to make a connection—he didn’t need to; people came to him. He was a Pharisee. He would never appear desperate.

So, this woman speaks, and of course Simon can’t understand. Sure his ears turn his eyes to this weeping woman, but his eyes see what he has always seen when he passes this woman on the city streets. She’s that sinner.

(pause)

Have you ever felt the weight of people staring at you? All those eyes beating on your back, burning holes through the side of your head. It’s the sort of thing that happens when you travel to a different county and you walk down the street in your Western tennis shoes and everyone looks at you like you’re something strange, exotic, a foreigner. Or it happens when you get somewhere and you look around and realize that you are totally underdressed… or overdressed. Or there was this one time I was at a reception of some sort and this woman walked out of the bathroom with a strip of toilet paper tucked into her skirt. Finally she felt the pressure of all those stares and realized why people were looking at her.

That’s why the unnamed woman is crouched down, bent over, face in the dust, more like an animal than a human—she doesn’t want to see those eyes, the eyes of the people, that follow her everywhere she goes. We don’t know why Simon calls her a “sinner.” We don’t know what she did or does to make her crawl in the dust. There’s nothing in the text that tells us what she did; there’s nothing there to suggest that she is a prostitute (I think that way or reading the story says more about the overly-sexualized reader than the story itself).

But there’s one thing we can learn about sin from the story of this woman. Sin is that lying voice that tells us we are worthless, that we are nothing, that we are not God’s beloved creation, the apple of his eye. And sin is the way we internalize that voice and start destroying ourselves and those around us. Sin is the way we are convinced that we are not part of God’s beautiful creation, and we begin to conspire with that voice of sin, and disfigure God’s good creation.

Alex preached on this passage from Luke a few years ago, and he summed up this voice pretty well: the voice of sin says, “Yes, you are alone. In all this universe, you are ultimately alone. You will crawl into a hole and die, alone. You are, after all, really no more than an animal.” (A Word in Season, How Good It Is!, ed. Tom Lehman, p. 97).

And the terrible reality of this deceiving voice of sin is that we speak it—it speaks through us—in ways that we don’t recognize. We speak this voice by the way we live, by the way we are content to let anonymous people make our lives possible. As much as we might like to think of ourselves as good and nice people (which is true), there are a multitude of ways that we are content to let the people who make our lives possible remain anonymous, without a name, like the woman in our story.

They live on unmarked streets and work in the shadows of warehouses, crouched over machines—or in fields, bent over plants. And the sinister wonder of our world (some call it “globalization”) is that there are so many unnamed people who make our lives possible, of whom we will never see how they live and where they live… or meet their children. We don’t really need to care about them. We don’t need to know their name. This is one way we speak the voice of sin with our lives.

But Jesus doesn’t close the door on Simon the Pharisee. All is not lost. “Then Jesus turned toward the woman and said to Simon, ‘Do you see this woman?” (7:44). It’s an amazing image. Like everyone else in the room, Jesus also turns his eyes on this woman. But these are not the same eyes that the woman feels piercing her back as she walks around town. These are the eyes of love, of God’s love, a love that can see love, eyes that see and receive the gift that only this woman can offer.

And Jesus doesn’t just glance at her, give her a mere moment of his attention, then turn to Simon and ask him a question. At this moment, there is nothing more significant, no one more important, than this woman… without a name, whose cringing and lowly body shows the profound effects of a lifetime under the weight of sin.

The text says, “Jesus turned toward the woman and said to Simon.” Jesus’ eyes are fixed on her, steadfast, unswerving. And Jesus invites Simon to see this woman the way he sees her.

And I say that the door doesn’t close on Simon because the question is never answered. Simon doesn’t say, “Yeah, I see her, she’s the scum of the earth. We have a place for her; but it’s not here.” Nor does he say, “Gosh Jesus, I guess I’ve never seen her the way you do. Thanks.” We don’t hear his response. He is left on the threshold of a decision. Luke cuts the scene before we get an answer.

And I want to believe that there is hope for this Pharisee. Because if there is hope for him, then there is hope for me.

The question Jesus asks Simon is an open question, and it’s one that jumps off the page and into our lives: “Do you see this woman?”... And if we are ever surprised with the opportunity to catch a glimpse of her, cowering in the corner, with what kind of eyes will we look at her? And will we offer her a passing glance, and remain undisturbed. Or can we begin to see the way Jesus sees?

(pause)

I’m afraid there’s also a danger here. The danger comes in thinking that we have everything to give and nothing to receive. It’s the danger is thinking that people are out there waiting for our benevolence, our goodness, waiting to capture our attention. This is all very narcissistic. We’ve got God’s salvation, God’s kingdom, and we need to go hand it out—it’s the church as the welfare state. All these people are dependant on us for God’s love.

But that’s not exactly what’s going on when Jesus asks Simon if he sees this woman. Jesus invites Simon to see this woman, and see what she is saying with her tears, because this woman has the power to see what Simon can’t: that Jesus is Lord, that Jesus brings God’s promised kingdom. And in Luke’s Gospel, this is only something the excluded and marginalized can see. That’s the scandal of Luke. God comes for the oppressed.

In Jesus’ first public address, he opens up the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue and reads this:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:18-19).

And then later, just a couple chapters before the story of Simon and the unnamed woman, Jesus says this:

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh (5:20-21).

And that’s not all—it’s gets scary for us:

But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep (vv24-25).

In other words, it’s no mistake that the scorned woman is drawn to Jesus in ways that Simon is not, and cannot be. It’s because this woman is part of those blessed people, the people who can see and receive God’s kingdom: “Blessed are you who weep now.” That’s this woman.

Our eyes are weak; we can’t see; we suffer from cloudy vision—clouded by our comforts. We are like Simon, well established and a benefactor of the world. But it’s the lowly who receive the kingdom; those who know their need are in a position to see the wonder of what Jesus has to offer.

Jesus’ question, “Do you see this woman?” soon leads us into another: “Do you see what this woman sees?” And there’s no way of knowing until you ask, and receive only what she can give.

(pause)

There’s one last thing. I think the story of the unnamed and sinful woman turns one more time. There’s a sense in which you and I are that woman. By no means are we as excluded and made to feel unwanted, worthless, like she feels.

But we also live in a world of sin where we are made to feel like we are less than God’s good creation—and we go about internalizing that voice of sin: we tell ourselves that we don’t measure up, that we are inadequate, that we are not worthy.

I think the way it works in our world is the way we are told that we need to have a certain kind of job, or look a certain way, or buy the right product that makes us worthy in someone else’s eyes, or our own eyes. In a lot of ways that line is true: we are our worst critics.

Sin is the way we are told that we are not accepted by God unless… (fill in the blank). And then we go about messing up our lives trying to be something we are not, trying to make ourselves satisfied with whatever those lying voices tell us will make our lives meaningful.

Our Christian way of life isn’t safe from this temptation either. We can easily try to start thinking that doing that ever important thing (whatever it may be) is the way we convince God that we belong to him, that he should love us.

And all I can offer you and me is that good old fashioned message of grace. It’s the message Paul tells us about in our passage from Galatians. Jesus Christ is living testimony of God’s abundant love for us—the Christ who, as Paul says, “loved me and gave himself for me.”

The message of grace is that we are held in God’s eternal embrace of love through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ—we are already forgiven, we are already invited to the fellowship, we are already infinitely loved. It doesn’t matter what we think in our heads about ourselves or about God; God already loves us; nothing can separate us from the love of God—not even what those voices all around us and inside of us.

That’s what we see when the sinful woman approaches Jesus. Jesus accepts her, despite all the things she might think about herself, and all the things those lying voices of sin tell her, voices like Simon’s.

This is also the message of our Psalm—grace is not just a New Testament thing. Verse 7: “But I, through your steadfast love, will enter your house.” God’s love is steadfast, unswerving, constantly knocking down the walls of loneliness and worthlessness that we and others erect.

And we see that steadfast love in the story of the sinful woman. Completely alone in the room. A shadow woman. But she’s heard the good news about this man named Jesus: that he offers abundant love, overflowing love, a love that shatters the boundaries of sin—the way sin binds us up and makes us want to retreat from a world and from people who need us like spare parts to a car… replaceable, bought and sold on ebay.

That God already loves you and me, no matter what we may think of ourselves, frees us from the shadows, from withdrawal, from loneliness, just like the unnamed woman was freed. She emerges from the shadows at the feet of Jesus, weeping, not proud or confident, but moved by love, and sent out in peace. And that’s you and me.