03.14. PARABLE OF THE TWO DEBTORS

PARABLE OF THE TWO DEBTORS

Luke 7:36-50 The reader of the Gospels cannot fail to remark that the narratives of physical cures are greatly in excess of the narratives of spiritual restorations. Even in cases where spiritual good was received, this comes in sometimes as a mere appendage to the physical healing. Neither can it be thought that the faith required for the cure of the bodily disease itself guarantees the permanent health of the spirit; for there is convincing evidence that not every one who was physically restored was also emancipated from spiritual disorder. In fact, the reader longs for fuller information regarding our Lord’s method of dealing with those whose soundness of body enabled them to dispense with appeal to His miraculous power, but who were yet broken in fortune, defeated in life, enthralled by evil habit. This little story presents us with such a case; and it gives us a glimpse of the background of the life of Christ. It was only by accident this woman’s case came to the front. There may have been many who, like her, received light and healing of soul from a few minutes’ quiet talk with Christ, and who returned to their occupations unnoticed but renewed. Before she came to Simon’s house, this woman had heard Jesus, and had found in Him salvation; but nothing is told us of that part of her history. In asking Jesus to dine with him, the Pharisee probably acted, as most men on all occasions act, from mixed motives. Others were invited, and gladly, no doubt, availed themselves of the opportunity of meeting Jesus and for themselves determining whether His claim to be a prophet was or was not valid. That the Pharisee felt himself in the position of a superior person who might sit in judgment on this man from Nazareth, is apparent from the circumstance that though he asked Him to his house, he gave Him a barely civil reception, pointing Him to His place without even the formal courtesies which, though small in themselves, greatly facilitate freedom and friendliness of intercourse. A Pharisee, above all men, might have been expected to be punctilious in these matters. But very often those whose manners are formed upon irreproachable models fail grievously in the genial consideration of others which springs from sweetness of nature. The coldness of the reception given to Jesus by the self-satisfied Pharisee was unexpectedly set in a very strong light by the strikingly opposite conduct of the woman who came into the room where the company was dining. The common Eastern fashion is to sit cross-legged on the floor at meals. But the Jews of our Lord’s time had adopted the more luxurious Greek style of reclining on couches round a raised table. Jesus was thus reclining on His left side, with His head towards the table and His feet extended on the couch towards the wall of the room. The intrusion of an uninvited guest during meals would of itself excite no remark. In fact, provision was often made for such intruders by setting cushions round the wall of the room for the accommodation of persons who might wish to talk with the guests either on business or other matters. But that a woman of notoriously bad character, and who could not fail to be known in the little town to all but strangers, should thus enter the dining-room of a Pharisee, was probably an unheard-of presumption. But her whole nature was for the time absorbed in devotion to Jesus, and she could not wait for a quieter time or more convenient place, but passed unheeding through the abuse and repulses of the servants of the house. For her there was but one presence there. She saw no one else; she thought of no one else. Her impulsive temperament, which had possibly led her astray at first, now stands her in good stead, and rebukes our cold and tardy expressions of gratitude, our cautious and timorous professions of love to Christ.

She enters the room with the intention of anointing the feet of Jesus. But ere she can offer Him this adoration, the fulness of her heart, stirred by His presence, overflows, and in a tumult of penitence, joy, and love she sinks at His feet and bursts into tears. In her confusion, seeking for something to wipe the feet her tears have wet, she uses the hair that is hanging disheveled about her, and her face being thus drawn down and hidden, she covers His feet with kisses. Then remembering her errand, she pours the ointment over them. That our Lord did not interrupt her is more remarkable than that none of the onlookers did. To any ordinary teacher or benefactor there would have been extreme awkwardness in receiving so extravagant a demonstration of affection and in such circumstances. She kissed His feet. Homage can find no lowlier tribute to pay. Adoration can no farther go. And we cannot but rejoice that for the credit of our common humanity such a tribute was paid to our Lord. There were at least some on earth who recognized that He deserved all they could give. This woman’s worship is an exhilarating spectacle. She creates an atmosphere it does one good to breathe, an atmosphere of high and true sentiment, in which things are rightly estimated, and in which conventionality disappears. Would only that her kissing of the feet of incarnate goodness and love were the representative expression of the feeling of all men towards Christ! But to the Pharisee the admission of this woman to such liberties was proof that Jesus was no prophet. He himself would have allowed no such unseemly familiarities at the hands of a degraded person; and indeed he might be very easy on that score, for it is not the sanctimoniousness of the Pharisee that elicits such tributes of devotion. Judging Jesus by himself and his class, he did not doubt that He too would have spurned this woman’s attentions had He known her character. It was obvious to the Pharisee that Jesus could not know her character, and he therefore concluded He had none of the spiritual insight supposed to characterize the prophet. Jesus penetrates his thought, and makes him sensible that whether or not He had understood the woman’s state. He at any rate accurately gauged him. In a conversational, easy way He shows, by the Parable of the Two Debtors, that love is proportioned to indebtedness; and then, applying the Parable, He defends the woman’s conduct, and leaves Simon to draw edifying conclusions from his own. The Parable is so put that it is obvious to the entire company that great love means great forgiveness, while meager love means small or doubtful forgiveness. Our Lord then contrasts Simon’s conduct with the woman’s; his supercilious violation of the commonest courtesies with her gratuitous attentions; his haughty suspicion with her undoubting and devoted reverence; his self-serving and contemptuous hospitality, his languid and cool civility, which was unequal to the task of filling even the common forms of politeness, with the woman’s uncontrollable love that broke through all rules and proprieties of life, and forced new channels for its own vast volume. The facts are obvious to the whole company; the woman’s love is unmistakable, Simon’s coldness is equally apparent.

What deduction, then, is to be drawn from these facts regarding the spiritual condition of either party? Simon himself has announced the rule for making such a deduction. Great love, he has just said, is the result of great forgiveness. The larger debtor loved his creditor because he forgave him much. This woman, then, has been greatly forgiven; her love is the evidence, the proof of it, according to Simon’s own showing. Love, you have told us, varies with indebtedness; this woman’s great love means that she is greatly indebted, has been greatly forgiven. The vehemence, or as no doubt you would say, the indecency of this woman’s affection, is proof that her many sins are forgiven; that is to say, that she is pure. But — our Lord adds with a significant warning — to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little; a hint which might raise in the mind of Simon the question, Am I forgiven at all? If love be the index by which we can read the amount of forgiveness, and if I have barely love enough to show decent respect, what am I to conclude regarding my own debt? Our Lord’s immediate object in this Parable was to defend the woman and justify His own allowance of her presence and expressions of affection. This defense and justification are accomplished when it is shown that the very familiarities which the Pharisee thought Jesus should have rebuked are the proof that the woman is forgiven, cleansed, and pure. Simon had inwardly condemned both the woman and Jesus; the woman for being a sinner, Jesus for admitting her familiarities. By the Parable, Jesus gives him to understand that her love is its own justification. In this reasoning there is involved — first, that love to Christ is love to God, and is therefore the measure of purity; and secondly, that love to Christ is the result of forgiveness.

1. First, Christ points to the woman’s demonstrations of love to Him as proof that her sins are forgiven. He is the creditor who has forgiven much, and is therefore loved much. In other words, He puts Himself, and allows the woman to put Him, in the place of God; accepting her love for Himself as if it were love to God, and therefore proof that she is forgiven and pure. He does not appeal to the fact that her heart was filled with love, irrespective of the object of the love; He does not argue that because she was now possessed by a pure and unselfish affection, she was in a radically sound state of spirit. His argument is, that she has been forgiven a debt, and therefore loves her creditor. It is Christ Himself she loves, and He therefore is the creditor who has forgiven her; but her debt was sin, transgression against God, and it is therefore God who is her true creditor. Christ thus identifies Himself with God, and in the simplest manner accepts love to Himself as if it were love to God, and as decisive evidence regarding the woman’s relation to the Highest. On another occasion the Pharisees observed what was implied in Christ’s forgiving sin, and took exception to His doing so on the valid ground that none can forgive sins but God only. And it maybe supposed that on reflection this woman saw what was implied in her connection with Christ. It may be that as yet she had no definite ideas regarding the relation in which Christ stood to God. We do not know how He had got round her heart and quickened within her a craving for purity, and encouraged her to strive after it. But plainly He had enabled her to believe herself forgiven, and had filled her heart with new desires, and to her He was the embodiment of the Divine. All she sought was in Him. And Christ does not warn her, as if this passionate devotion to Him might arrest a love which should go beyond His person. He allows her to worship Him, to rivet her affections and her hopes upon Him; He encourages her to think of Him as the forgiver of her sin, as the one to whom it was right to give undivided and unstinted love, as her Lord and her God.

Christ is, in human personality, “the power not ourselves that makes for righteousness.” He is God manifest in the flesh. In Him we have all that lifts us to what is best and highest in human nature. In Him we find God; all that is sufficient to give us confidence, guidance, peace; to fill our affections and quicken them, to educate conscience and cleanse it, to lift us out of ourselves and give us eternal satisfaction. And Christ links us to Himself by love, and through our love imparts all the blessing He gives. To create an enthusiasm for Himself, a true attachment to His own person, is His chief object. This woman may have had many foolish ideas about God and man, she may have retained much that was faulty, but in that passion of devotion to Himself our Lord saw the beginning of all good in her. Affection for Him deadens every evil passion; it maintains the soul in an atmosphere of purity; it assimilates the whole nature to the Divine, and fills the heart with love to men. Love to Christ is, therefore, the measure and the pledge of purity.

2. Secondly, love to Christ is the result of forgiveness, and varies with the amount of debt forgiven. But this statement requires certain modifications. We must not force out of the parable any numerically exact ratio between pardon and love. Jesus does not mean that the one debtor of the Parable was precisely ten times as grateful as the other, although his canceled debt was ten times as great. Manifestly the character of the debtors must be taken into account, and their way of looking at the debt. If they were men of a precisely similar sensitiveness of conscience and quickness of feeling, then their gratitude would be in proportion to their debt. But where do we find two such men? Is it not notorious that while one man is broken-hearted under the shame of bankruptcy, another, less nicely educated to mercantile honor, jauntily sets about repairing his shattered fortunes, and gaily trims his sails to catch the changing wind? And between these extremes are there not all possible gradations of feeling and of conduct? So is it with our debt to God. He who has inherited a sensitive conscience, and has been trained to shrink from the smallest stain, will on that very account be deeply humbled even by sins which others make light of, and will highly value the mercy that forgives them. A coarser nature, habituated to vice, and saturated with depraved ideas, may accept forgiveness with surprisingly little sense of the goodness of God. It is not, in short, the amount of sin, but the sense of it, which is the measure of gratitude to Him who forgives it. To suppose that by sinning deeply you secure that one day you will love much, is a fallacy. You may have more sin to be conscious of; but your consciousness of it, instead of being greater, will be less. You will seek in vain for the old shame, for the early remonstrances of conscience, for the same humiliation on account of many sins that you once had on account of few. Your many sins will stand as facts in your history; but your heart, long used to their company, will refuse to loathe them as once it did. To be very wicked is no safe receipt for becoming very good. But the fact to which our Lord points in the parable is the commonly recognized one, that abstinence from crime, and from vices which society condemns, and which stain the outward life, frequently produces a self-satisfied and superficial character. The Pharisee is essentially shallow. He accustoms himself to judge by what appears; and when he is conscious that he satisfies the requirements of men like himself, who see no deeper than the conduct, he thinks little of his essential character, and spends no pains on ascertaining in what his virtue is rooted. The obvious difference between himself and the flagrant transgressor of the law betrays him into self-complacency, pride, and ignorance of the spiritual life and of God. Such a person remains unhumbled, and has no thirst for forgiveness, not being sensible of defilement. He criticises Christ, observes and considers but does not fully understand Him. He investigates His relation to other men; but no instinct of his own prompts him to cast himself upon His friendship as the very Person he needs. In contrast to this cold and self-satisfied character, our Lord sets the humbled penitent, the person who is broken-hearted on account of the defilement and accumulating misery and hopelessness of his sin. His transgression may have been of a kind that makes a dark blot on the life. Originally of a warm and passionate nature, he may have burst the ordinary trammels which society lays upon men, and may have brought into his life a great deal of wretchedness. He may be so entangled that deliverance seems hopeless; character and strength of will alike gone, he may go from day to day not knowing where to look for any help, and sometimes disposed to abandon all thought of restoration, and give himself frankly and finally to ruin. Such a person, when he is lifted out of his solitary despair by the loving recognition of Christ, when he feels the forgiving hand laid upon him and sees the gate of a new life standing open at his very feet, when he becomes conscious that through all his vileness and selfishness a Divine compassion has followed him, is wholly overcome with mingled shame and joy, and hails the Saviour as One who seems to have been provided precisely for his necessities. This is the advantage that the conscious sinner has over the self-righteous Pharisee. The sins of the one being branded by public sentiment, and bringing the sinner into collision with physical and social laws, are recognized by the sinner himself as deadly and humiliating evils. He cannot blind himself to the fact that forgiveness and cleansing, inward help and purity, are needed by himself. Sin, if it has not deepened his nature, has, at all events, convinced him of its own reality, and of the terrible influence it can exert in a human life. The Person who sets him free from this pervasive, intractable, and overmastering evil becomes all in all to him. But how was Simon, and how are we, to profit by the knowledge that love to Christ is the result of forgiveness? We are conscious that for the settlement and perfecting of the spirit there is nothing like love to Christ. We know that the existence in us of this affection would secure that our relations to everything else should be right. We have a sense of degradation so long as we are attracted by other persons and things, and yet feel only a slight attraction and an insecure attachment to Christ. We would fain love Him with the whole strength of our nature. But how are we to achieve this highest state of feeling? It is useless to demand love, as if such a demand could be directly enforced. This is the old dead law over again: “Thou shalt love.” This, we find, we cannot fulfil. We cannot love just because we are commanded to love; no, nor because it would be to our advantage to love, nor even because we wish to do so. Love must be spontaneous: it is created in presence of what fits our nature, so that often we cannot tell why we love such and such a person, not understanding our own nature sufficiently to see the suitableness. Love to Christ is the spontaneous product of our sense of His suitableness to our nature and condition, and of our indebtedness to him. A sense of indebtedness does in some cases produce hatred rather than love. But we cannot seek or accept forgiveness until we are humbled and see something of the transcendent attractiveness of the Lord. The soil is thus prepared for the springing of love in response to the sunshine of His favor.

Besides forgiveness is not a solitary gift. It is the beginning of a new life, a center from which life and light radiate, a germ which exists not so much for itself as for what it produces. It brings assurance of a friendship that is of infinite value; it imparts a reliance upon God, as our God, teaching us to count upon Him, exhibiting to us His hitherto unthought-of goodness. It pervades the soul with new and exhilarating sensations, and fills it with new desires and purposes. Therefore the Gospel does not directly say “Love,” but “Believe.” Trust in Christ as willing to forgive. Bring to Him your empty, ruined, ungodly, unloving spirit, and have it healed, filled, renewed. Act upon what you at present know, that He makes provision in His own person and work for sinful men. Humbly appeal to Him with such penitence and with such earnestness as you have; and as you open your spirit more and more to His influence, and find increasingly how complete you are in Him, your love will grow. It may not be of the passionate type elicited in this woman by the visible presence of the Lord, but it will be sound enough to urge you to serve and to please Him. The character of the love we bear Him must be in some respects different from that which those felt who saw His loving expression of face, and heard their forgiveness pronounced by His own lips; but it cannot be impossible or unlikely that we should learn truly and deeply to love Him who alone brings into our life the fruitful and happy expectation of endless purity and love, who alone gives us assurance that this life is anything better than a short and uneasy dream. Can we fail to love Him whose love for us is, after all, almost the only fixed and sure thing we can count upon? Can we fail to love Him to whom we must be indebted for as great a forgiveness as was this woman?

She sat and wept beside His feet; the weight Of sin oppressed her heart; for all the blame, And the poor malice of the worldly shame, To her was past, extinct, and out of date;

Only the sin remained,— the leprous state;

She would be melted by the heat of love, By fires far fiercer than are blown to prove And purge the silver ore adulterate.

She sat and wept, and with her untressed hair Still wiped the feet she was so blest to touch; And He wiped off the soiling of despair From her sweet soul, because she loved so much.

I am a sinner, full of doubts and fears;

Make me a humble thing of love and tears.