There are many passages in the gospels that leave me marveling at the ability of the Evangelists, and indeed of the Holy Spirit, to pack so much content and depth into so little space.  One such a passage is the story of the sinful woman in Luke 7:36-50.  It contains only three characters:  Jesus, Simon the Pharisee, and an unnamed woman.  Really, only the woman does anything.  She weeps and washes Jesus’ feet with her perfume and her tears. 

Jesus does nothing.  He sits there and allows her to do it.  Outwardly, Simon does nothing.  Inwardly, though, He is seething.  He had invited Jesus into his home because he believed He was a prophet.  However, no holy man of God would allow a woman like that to touch him! 

Simon knew—or thought he knew—what kind of a woman she was.  We don’t know specifics, though Simon did.  All we know about her is that she was a sinner, and her sin was such that a Pharisee—even a more thoughtful Pharisee like Simon, a Pharisee who was willing to give Jesus a chance—would never consent to having her touch him.

Jesus, though, looked at her and saw a different kind of woman altogether.  Simon was wrong about Him—He did know about her past sins, in much greater detail than Simon did.  However, Jesus didn’t focus on those things.

Instead, He focused on the tears she shed, the tears that showed her sorrow for her sin.  He focused on her humility, her willingness to kiss His feet, filthy with the mire of the streets, and wipe them with her hair.  He focused on her willingness to sacrifice for His sake by anointing His feet with perfume.  We don’t know how much her perfume was worth, but the perfume that Mary used to anoint Jesus for burial was worth 300 denarii, and it’s likely that the value in this case was similar.  He focused on her choice to come to a place where she knew she would not be welcome, a place where she would be sneered at and hated, in order to be near Him. 

In short, He focused on her faith, the faith that would save her from her sins.  To Jesus, that was the kind of woman she was—someone who trusted in Him to forgive her, someone whom He would gladly forgive.  Indeed, she received her salvation before she left the room. 

However, her spiritual transformation is probably not the only one in the story.  Scholars believe that when Luke identifies a minor character in his gospel by name, it’s because he talked to that person and is using them as a source.  If that’s the case here, Luke got the story not from the woman, but from Simon, a disciple of Jesus decades after the events in the story took place.

In that case, the story does not only reveal the woman’s repentance.  It reveals Simon’s too:  his remorse at judging her so harshly, his shame at not seeing what Jesus sees, and his willingness to humble himself and exalt Jesus by recounting these events to Luke.  Ultimately, then, this is not only the woman’s salvation narrative, but Simon’s too, as he realized what kind of a man he was and the depth of his need for Jesus.

What kind of people are we?  Are we humbled by Jesus in the midst of sins that lead the “good people” of the world to regard us with contempt?  Or, instead, are we humbled by Him in the midst of our religious pride, as He gently reminds us that we need His grace as desperately as the worst sinner out there?

“Forgiven sinner” is the only kind of people that we can dare to be.  There is no hope in being anything else.

There are many pointed questions in Scripture, but perhaps the most pointed of them all appears in Luke 6:46.  Here, Jesus exposes the great contradiction of (self-described) Christianity—the millions upon millions of people who call Jesus Lord but don’t do what He says to do.  It is as though they see Jesus as the spiritual equivalent of Queen Elizabeth II—a beloved ceremonial figure who makes speeches from time to time but doesn’t have any real power.

This clearly is not the way that the Son of Man wants to be perceived.  Indeed, in the next several verses, He warns that the difference between the obedient and the disobedient is stark.  The former will triumph despite disaster; the latter will be destroyed by it.  “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord’,” then, is another way of saying, “Why are you rejecting my word even though it is your only hope?”

There are many ways in which (again, self-described) believers do this.  Most conspicuously, they take the things that He and His apostles said not to do and do them.  They practice every form of wickedness and, like the corrupt temple-goers of Jeremiah 7:10, they show up at church on Sunday morning and cry out, “We are rescued!”, only to return to evildoing.  Sometimes, their bad behavior is endorsed by the hierarchy of their denomination (many of which have been doing a lot of Bible-rewriting over the past few decades); at others, it is the result of their own stubborn commitment to sin.

Of a similar stripe are those who take what Jesus said to do and do something else instead.  They say He’s Lord, but they act like their ideas are better than His.  This spirit is evident in every departure from the simple pattern of the first century. 

Yes, we know that congregations in the first century were autonomous, but we think that banding together in a denomination will help us serve Him more effectively.  Yes, early churches spent their modest financial resources on only a few things, but think of all the good we can do if we go beyond that!  Yes, early Christians worshiped in song without instrumental accompaniment, but instrumental music is so beautiful and uplifting!

There are lots of people who think they’re smarter than Jesus.  I’m still waiting to find somebody who actually is.  If we don’t think that we are, what excuse do we have for exceeding His Lordship?

If we wish to avoid these errors, we must do so by magnifying rather than minimizing Christ as Lord in our hearts.  We must seek to increase rather than diminish the sphere of His authority.  In addition to following all of His commandments, we must honor Him in our judgments. 

If we are of a mind to do so, we can justify watching any kind of filth on TV, and if confronted over our preferences, we can indignantly demand book, chapter, and verse showing that we’re wrong:  “I know this isn’t the cleanest, but watching it isn’t sin, is it?”  Wrong question.  If Jesus is Lord, we won’t seek to expand the boundaries of moral gray areas.  Instead, we will seek what glorifies Him.

The Lordship of Christ is no small thing.  It should transform us in every area of our lives.  However, we do not yield this service to Him out of fear, but out of love, out of a desire to acknowledge, if not repay, all that He has done for us.

Luke 6:20-49 is often described as the Sermon on the Plain, as opposed to the Sermon on the Mount.  There are many explanations for the similarities and differences in content between the two sermons, but I believe the simplest one is the best.  Like most preachers, Jesus was willing to preach the same sermon to different audiences, adapting his content to the need of the moment.

One of the most obvious differences between the Beatitudes as presented in Luke 6:20-21, rather than Matthew 5:3-10, is the physical focus of the former.  Matthew 5:3 speaks of the poor in spirit; Luke 6:20 speaks simply of the poor.  Matthew 5:6 is about those who hunger and thirst for righteousness; Luke 6:21 is about those who are hungry.  

So too, the woes of Luke 6:24-26 are concerned with the physical condition of the hearers.  It is those who are literally rich, well-fed, happy, and honored who should be concerned.

At first glance, this appears to be class warfare written into the pages of the New Testament.  Poor = good, rich = bad.  However, such a flat reading harmonizes poorly with other texts, such as 1 Timothy 6:17-19.  There, Paul is quite clear that in order to please God, the rich don’t have to become poor.  They merely have to become rich in good works.  The rich can be righteous, and the poor can be wicked.

Instead, we need to read Luke 6 not only in the context of the rest of the text of Luke, but in the context of its time and place.  Here, as in many places in the gospels, the Great Revolt and the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 is lurking just offstage.  We must consider Jesus’ words with that calamity in mind.

During that time, though the Romans certainly did destroy Jerusalem, their work was not limited to its immediate area.  Instead, they crushed the Jewish rebellion throughout Galilee and Judea.  Nor were the legions troubled by modern-day concerns like good optics and minimizing collateral damage.  From their perspective, collateral damage was a feature, not a bug.  The more horribly the Jewish people suffered, the less likely other subject peoples would be to defy the majesty of Rome.

As a result, the decade around the destruction of the Temple was a pretty terrible time to be a prosperous Jew.  If you had it, the Romans were going to take it away from you.  Jesus’ prophecy proved exactly correct.  The rich did become destitute.  The well-fed did become hungry.  The laughing did weep. 

Because everybody was going to end up with nothing, those who started with nothing had an important advantage.  In Jesus’ time, the literally poor, hungry, and grieving were most likely to listen to Him because they didn’t like the status quo.  Even today, people whose lives aren’t going well are more likely to listen to the gospel than people who are prospering.  Hard times predispose people to change.

As a result, even though they didn’t realize it, the poor who followed Jesus were making the best preparations possible for the painful years ahead.  On the other hand, the rich thought they had everything figured out but weren’t truly prepared.  Poverty is nobody’s idea of a good time, but even it can be blessed if it causes us to turn to the Lord.

Most Christians probably appreciate the significance of Habakkuk 2:4 (“The righteous one will live by his faith.”) to understanding the New Testament, but the significance of Deuteronomy 19:15 often escapes us.  It reads, “One witness cannot establish any iniquity or sin against a person, whatever that person has done.  A fact must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.”  In other words, before you accept something, you need to have multiple pieces of evidence that support it.

We see this principle at work in many, if not most, of the books of the New Testament.  In Matthew and Mark, the legal case against Jesus falls apart because the Sanhedrin can’t find witnesses to agree on a single crime that Jesus has committed.  In Acts, the tripartite structure of the first gospel sermon in Acts 2 is based on Deuteronomy 19:15.  In 2 Corinthians 13, Paul describes his multiple visits to the Corinthian church as multiple witnesses.  In 1 Timothy 5, we learn that we should not accept a charge against an elder except on the testimony of two or three witnesses.  And so on.  Indeed, the more we look for multiple witnesses at work in the Scriptures, the more we will find them.

However, in no book of the Bible is Deuteronomy 19:15 more important than in the gospel of John.  Some commentators have compared John to a cosmic trial, a proceeding meant to prove that Jesus is the Son of God.  Naturally, in such a trial, witnesses are very significant.  In John 8:13-18, the Pharisees insist that they can ignore Jesus’ words because He is only bearing witness about Himself.  Jesus retorts that even though His word alone is sufficient, the Father also bears witness to Him. 

Indeed, this confirmatory structure is repeated throughout the entire gospel.  Jesus will make a claim about Himself (“I am the light of the world”) and establish the truth of His claim with a relevant miracle (healing the man born blind).    Sometimes, the order is reversed, as in John 6, when Jesus first feeds the 5000, then announces that He is the bread of life.

The fullest elaboration of this idea, though, appears in John 5:31-47.  There, Jesus acknowledges that legally, His testimony by itself is insufficient.  However, there are three other witnesses who confirm Him:  John the Baptist, the Father, and the Scriptures.  Thus, the Jews’ failure to accept Him is inexcusable and reveals their rotten hearts.

Even though we are 2000 years removed from the religious disputes of Jesus’ ministry, this methodology remains extremely important for us.  Anybody can say that He is the Son of God.  Lunatics do all the time.  However, Jesus didn’t merely say.  He backed it up by working miracles that His enemies tried to discredit (“He casts out demons by the power of Beelzebul prince of demons!”) but could not deny.  John the Baptist, who could have been a competitor, acknowledged His deity.  Prophecies written hundreds of years before His coming describe His ministry and death in such specific terms that they confirm His divine origin as well as their own.  When we put it all together, we too can have confidence that Jesus truly was—and is—the Son of God.

Our reading for this week features three stories that appear in all three of the Synoptic Gospels:  the healing of the leprous man, the healing of the paralytic, and the call of Matthew/Levi.  However, an examination of the context of these stories reveals that Matthew handles them differently than Mark and Luke do. 

Mark places them back to back to back except for a brief summary of Jesus’ ministry in 1:45, Luke does the same, but Matthew includes a chapter’s worth of material (Matthew 8:5-34) between the healing of the leper and the healing of the paralytic.  In his narrative, the healing of the centurion’s servant, the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law, the cost of discipleship, the stilling of the storm, and the story of the demons and the swine all come between the two.

Normally, I regard Luke as the most chronological of the gospels, but here, I think it is Matthew rather than Mark and Luke who is organizing his material chronologically.  Mark has taken three stories that occur out of strict sequence and arranged them thematically, and Luke has done the same (this happens, I think, because the gospel of Mark is one of Luke’s sources).

In Mark’s account, everything from 1:39-2:22 is about the true nature of Jesus’ healing (though 2:15-22 is shared with the next Markan theme—the opposition of the Pharisees).  The first story, the story of the cleansing of the leper, reveals the limitations of Jesus’ power.  His subject is physically healed, but spiritually, he remains disobedient.  Rather than obeying Jesus’ command to be silent, he tells everyone about the miracle.

The next story in the sequence, the healing of the paralytic, uses physical healing as proof of spiritual healing.  Jesus tells the paralytic that his sins have been forgiven.  Then, so that all the incredulous onlookers can know that Jesus is telling the truth, He cures His paralysis too—an actual outward sign of an inward grace!

All of this prepares us for Jesus’ summons of Levi from the tax booth.  “Follow Me,” He says, and Levi does.  In Luke’s account, Jesus clarifies for us in 5:32 what just has happened.  He has called a sinner to repentance.

But how can we know this?  How can we know that the heart of the loathsome tax farmer has been changed?  How can we know that he has been spiritually healed and reconciled to God? 

Simple!  The previous story has proven the point.  Because the paralytic walked, we can be sure that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins—even the sins of a tax collector like Levi!  Even today, Jesus’ miracles of physical healing should reassure us that we have been spiritually healed, and that through His power, we can continue to be.

All this should also teach us a powerful lesson about the depth and the intricacy of the gospels.  Yes, Mark 1:39-2:22 does contain three stories about Jesus, and we can understand them and appreciate them separately as Jesus stories, but much more is going on in the gospels than merely that!  Once we begin to consider the arrangement of these narratives and the authors’ (and/or the Author’s) reasons for so doing, we can come to a more profound appreciation of their meaning and relevance to us.