⁴⁸ Then Jesus said to the woman, “Your sins are forgiven.”

⁵⁰ And Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

Luke 7:48,50

Dear God, I want to follow up on yesterday’s prayer and stay focused on this woman for a bit. Let’s assume she wasn’t paying attention to what Jesus was saying to Simon the Pharisee. She was just focused on her sorrow and shame as she anointed, washed, cried over, and kissed Jesus’s feet. If that’s true, in the midst of her shame, what she heard was, “Your sins are forgiven. Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

So how does that land for her in that moment? How does she hear that?

• Forgiven: Has she ever felt forgiven by you before? Could all of the sacrifices at the Temple make up for what she has done? I’m going to go back to Jenny from Forrest Gump. Forrest is not Jesus, but in the scene where he asks her to marry him he has forgiven anything she might have ever done. He holds nothing–absolutely nothing–against her. But what’s her response? “You don’t want to marry me.” She’s implying, “You don’t know everything you are forgiving or will have to forgive in the future if you marry me. I will be bad for you.” I wonder if this woman carried that kind of shame around. “God, you don’t want to forgive me. There’s too much that I have done, and there’s still a lot more for me to do.” But then she hears about Jesus. She believes he’s from you. Interestingly, at least in that moment, she was not looking for a king to conquer and to kill the Romans for here. I would guess that she just needs release from her shame and goes to Jesus for proximity to you. I don’t even know that she expected forgiveness from that interaction. But she got it.
• Faith: She believed Jesus was who he said he was. I have no idea how she got into Simon’s house. I don’t know if she barged in past the other guests. I don’t know if she was weeping as she walked in. Did she have her head down? Did she crawl? But somehow she had intelligence on where Jesus was in that moment and she believed in who he was enough to endure the scorn of others to get there. In fact, her faith in Jesus being the Messiah was unique in that home. Simon was there to question Jesus, not worship him. I don’t know if he came to faith later, but in that moment, the person with faith was the sinner. But she was also the most desperate and had the least to lose in that room. It is really too bad we need to hit bottom and come to the end of ourselves before we are willing to come to you in faith. It makes me think of Jairus. He was probably a lot like Simon, but then his daughter was dying. He was at the end of himself. All he had left was desperate faith. For this woman, she was the one who was wasted and spiritually dead.
• Go in peace: I wonder what her life looked like after that. Sure, Jesus had forgiven her, but that didn’t change the people who knew her and knew of her. What was her path to societal redemption like? Did Jesus’s followers now accept her willingly? Did she join the traveling party? I hope she was able to live into the new life that Jesus offered her in that moment. We don’t know that she did. But it makes me think about what our role as the church is in helping people like her. She needed Jesus’s followers to accept his forgiveness of her and apply it to her as well. She needed them to help her rise up. There are plenty of people in our community who need the same thing.

Father, first, forgive me. I’d like to say that I’m not as bad as she was, but is that true. Have I not grieved you and hurt myself and others through my sin? I need your forgiveness. Even in this moment. Please forgive me. Please help me to go in peace. Help me to live into the life you have for me to live. Help me to take that forgiveness and apply it to others. Help me to help others to rise up. Oh, Lord, thank you. I worship you as my God. I am here to serve you. “Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to thee.”

I pray this in Jesus and with your Holy Spirit,

Amen