Spiritual Sabbaticals
Luke 7:36-8:3
My wife is on a sabbatical this Summer. For the summer months, she gets to step away from her normal duties at University Presbyterian and read, think, participate in continuing education, and rest. The goal of this sabbatical is renewal and refreshment.[1]
The concept of a sabbatical comes from the Old Testament tradition of Jubilee.[2] Every seven years, a Jubilee year was to be announced and all outstanding debts were to be cancelled. People get a fresh start. Their slates are wiped clean. Anybody here need a sabbatical?
Can you imagine what would happen if we practiced a Jubilee year in our culture? What if President Bush announced that beginning July 1, 2007, the United States would enter into a Jubilee Year? All outstanding debts would be cancelled. Consumer debt between now and June 30th would skyrocket, but come July 1st, it would all be gone. The malls, car dealerships, and real estate offices would be packed between now and June 30th.
If we implemented a year of Jubilee, it seems to me that being up to your gills in debt would make perfect sense because come July 1st, it all would be gone. The more debt you have, the greater your personal euphoria…and debt forgiveness. What would you splurge on?
Jesus understood the Jubilee concept and used it in a conversation with Simon the Pharisee.
You see, a woman came to a party and she essentially threw herself at Jesus. We don’t know what her sins were, but Luke describes her as “a sinner.”[3] Some have speculated that she was a prostitute because she let her hair down in public. While this is probably the easiest conclusion to draw, it may also be unfair speculation because there were other very appropriate reasons for a woman to have her hair down in public.[4] At the dinner party Simon was hosting, she comes in and starts washing the feet of Jesus with expensive oil and then drying his feet with her hair. Simon looks on with disgust at this display. He’s disgusted with the woman for making such a public spectacle, because after all, public image is everything! And he’s also a bit disgusted with Jesus because if he truly were a prophet, he would have kept his distance from such a woman. [5] Maybe he’s disgusted at her freedom and spontaneity.
Jesus must sense his disgust because he then tells Simon a parable. Two people owe the bank money. One owes $5,000.00 and the other owes $50,000.00. The banker decides to write off the debt of both people. Jesus asks Simon, “Which one should be more grateful?” Simon replies, “I suppose the one who had the greater debt,” and Jesus says, “Right on, Einstein!” Simon has chosen logically and his response is the one most of us would make too.
Some of you may have seen on the WRAL news last week that a Pizza Hut in Raleigh was shut down because they found mice in the restaurant. An employee came in the morning and found live mice stuck to those sticky boards.[6] That’s Simon in our text today. Jesus has just turned the lights on and he’s been caught! The two debtors in the parable are none other than Simon and the woman who’s making a fool of herself by washing Jesus’ feet. Simon believes he’s not much of a sinner, so he doesn’t offer Jesus very much: no water for his feet, no kiss, no drops of oil. He keeps Jesus at a distance. The woman on the other hand knows the depth of her sin and she crashes the party and makes a spectacle of herself. Forgiven much, she loves more than good taste could ever allow.
Most of you are now expecting me to ask, “Now which person are you in the parable? Are you more like Simon who’s lived a pretty good life and has not committed any of the really BIG sins we preachers rail against all the time? Or are you more like the woman who’s really gone off the deep end yet you’re trying to make a fresh start?” You can find yourself in those characters if you want to but let me save you all some time – we’re all woman regarding our sin. Our sins are enormous. I don’t care if you’ve lived your whole life in a Sunday School room, we each are in great need of forgiveness.
The real cutting edge I’d like to talk about from this story is what does or does not happen when Luke moves on. Luke 8:1 says, “Soon afterwards he went on through the cities and villages…” We don’t know what happened to this woman or to Simon after this night.
Do you think the next morning, after word got out what this woman did, that Simon embraced her and said, “Welcome to the church! We admire what you did and my own faith has been strengthened because of your example.” Do you think that’s what happened? Or is it more likely that people whispered as she walked down the street? “Did you hear about the way that floozy threw herself at Jesus last night at Simon’s party? You know, I saw her talking with Violet’s husband the other day. Do you suppose they have a thing going on?”[7]
When Jesus offers forgiveness to us, there is an expectation and hope that we will extend forgiveness on a human level. We are, in a sense, to declare a season of spiritual jubilee to all we encounter. The call from this text is not to live irresponsibly and sin all we can because we’ll be forgiven. The forgiveness is already monumental. So we should seek God’s forgiveness but also forgive others. Since God has given us some spiritual breathing room, we should cut others that same slack.
Amen.
[1] The June 14, 1998 issue of Homiletics has an article entitled, “Much Love,” that uses the idea of sabbatical as an illustration and I am developing this idea in my sermon.
[2] See Leviticus 25 for the Old Testament basis for Jubilee.
[3] See Luke 7:37.
[4] See Charles H. Cosgrove, “A Woman’s Unbound Hair in the Greco-Roman World, With Special Reference to the Story of the ‘Sinful Woman’ in Luke 7:36-50,” Journal of Biblical Literature, Volume 124, Number 4, December 2005, p. 678. The typical women’s style throughout many centuries was to wear their hair long but to bind it in some way so that it did not hang down loosely. In antiquity, a woman’s unbound hair often had sexual connotations. But this act also had other meanings. For a woman to unbind her hair before a god in worship was a gesture of humility and reverence. They were to enter into worship in a pure and natural condition. We should also note that in Numbers 5:18-31, the unbinding of a woman’s hair was part of test as to whether she had been adulterous. The priest would undo a woman’s hair that was suspected, place a grain offering in her hands, and these acts appear to be an act of shaming the woman into making a confession.
[5] Frances Taylor Gench, “Between Text and Sermon: Luke 7:36-50,” Interpretation, Volume 46, July 1992, p. 287.
[7] Joel B. Green, Footnotes in The New Interpreter’s Study Bible, (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2003), p. 1867. The idea of this application comes from Joel Green’s footnotes.