Accepting Jesus Wholeheartedly

I want you to imagine this morning that you have been invited to an important dinner at a very respected person's house. It's a person who you greatly admire. A man of great integrity, worthy of your respect. This person lives on the posh side of town, and he's very generously invited you to attend a wonderful feast with some of the most lavish foods you'll ever taste. The dinner party is in honour of a visiting celebrity.

And so you are glad to have been invited because there's been a lot of commotion about this guy. You're not quite sure yet what you think of him, but you're happy to have the opportunity to get to know him and to suss him out. At one point in the evening, while you're still in the middle of having your first glass of wine or freshly made juice, while some of the most amazing hors d'oeuvres are being passed around by the staff, you hear a disturbance at the door. And there is a woman pushing her way through the packed room towards this celebrity. Out of the corner of your eye, you see this respected host scrambling and trying to push his way towards her, to politely but as quietly as possible steer her back towards the back door.

The newly arrived woman wears a tight fitting, low cut blouse, a miniskirt that is way too short and bright red stiletto heels. Makeup smudged across her face and her perfume a sickly sweet mixture of cigarettes and flowers. Her eyes lock onto the visiting speaker, and she is cutting a straight angle towards him. She throws herself around his legs, she hugs and kisses those legs, and she sobs uncontrollably. But they're not sad tears.

There's an unmistakable look of relief and gratitude on her face, as if she has found something that she has lost previously. Everyone in the dining hall is frozen. What an amazing and awkward thing to happen. What an embarrassment for a man of honour and prestige to endure. But the strangest thing is happening.

Instead of pushing her away, this celebrity, this man of prestige reaches down to her, smiles, strokes her hair, and says, "Hi there. Thank you for welcoming me into this home." Your eyes dart back to the wealthy host who looks equally as perplexed as you are. What an outlandish thing to say. This isn't her home.

She's barely made it past the front door. In fact, she looks like she doesn't even have a home. It's obvious that this woman works the streets. How is she welcoming him into this home? And why is this well regarded guest of honour not embarrassed by this public spectacle?

Perhaps he is one of her customers. Perhaps they share a secret love affair. Now, if you can imagine some of the tension, some of the awkwardness of that scene, you can imagine a story that Luke records for us in his gospel account of a time when Jesus was invited to dine with a Pharisee and a woman of, let's say, ill repute made her way into his home. Let's have a look together at that in Luke 7:36. Luke 7:36: One of the Pharisees asked him who was Jesus to eat with him, and Jesus went into the Pharisee's house and reclined at the table.

And behold, a woman of the city who was a sinner, when she learned that he was reclining at table in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment. Now, when the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, if this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner. Jesus answering said to him, Simon, I have something to say to you. And he answered, Say it, teacher. A certain money lender had two debtors, and one owed five hundred denarii and the other fifty.

When they could not pay, he cancelled the debt of both. Now, which of them will love him more? Simon answered, the one I suppose for whom he cancelled the larger debt. Jesus said to him, You have judged rightly. Then turning toward the woman, he said to Simon, Do you see this woman?

I entered your house, you gave me no water for my feet. But she has wet my feet with her tears, and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in, she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much.

But he who is forgiven little loves little. And he said to her, Your sins are forgiven. Then those who were at table with him began to say among themselves, Who is this who even forgives sins? And he said to the woman, Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.

This is the word of the Lord. Three characters in the story: Jesus, the Pharisee named Simon, and the sinful woman. Firstly, let's have a look at Jesus, whose acceptance of both his host and the other guest is scandalous. You may know that homes in the time of Jesus would have especially large areas that were open to the public. These sort of semi-public areas usually used by the owner of the house, but often open to guests from outside.

These areas were rooms often that opened into a courtyard, where visitors could enter and leave as they saw fit. It is something entirely foreign, probably to us westerners, but people were much more relaxed about their privacy in those days than we are. Your house and what was going on inside of it could at times be someone else's business. The so-called sinful woman of Luke's account was probably loitering in the public area during dinner time. She's certainly not a special invited guest.

But somehow she squeezes through the crowd of onlookers, and with some decorum at least, doesn't interfere with the meal that's taking place. She places herself rather at the feet of Jesus where he is leaning away. His feet are pointing away from the meal. What is happening in the centre of the room? She finds herself in the shadows, perhaps of the lamp lit room, and she starts holding, stroking, and kissing Jesus' feet as they stretch behind him.

Now, the home is no ordinary home. It is the home of a Pharisee. And although it's not explicitly stated, the woman is quite likely a prostitute. The Greek that we find here says that she is literally known in the city as a sinner. That's how it's stated.

She is known in the city as a sinner. In other words, she's a public sinner. And to the morally upright Pharisees, men who worked very hard to live good clean lives, she is like an infectious disease. Like last week's look at Luke 5, the leper, Jesus accepts her and he demonstrates God's grace to her as he cleanses her of her sin. But this woman doesn't just unobtrusively admire Jesus, she treats him with a shocking degree of intimacy.

Scandalously, she lets down her hair to wipe the feet of Jesus. Commentators point out that women only let down their hair in the bedroom, in the privacy of their own home. You could say it's akin to her walking around in a brassiere. It's enough to make you blush. And after she pours perfume over his feet and kisses them, everyone thinks something is wrong in this picture.

She doesn't belong here. The actions she performs are inappropriate, and a morally upstanding man like this up and coming rabbi, Jesus, he doesn't stop her from doing these things. With his reputation at stake, Jesus says nothing. The whole circus becomes too much for Simon, the Pharisee. After seeing everything she's done, verse 39 says, When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.

Now, just before we get to this episode in Luke 7, in verse 34, if you have a look, Jesus pointed out some of the reasons that people were rejecting him. And notably, in verse 34, this is what Jesus says: The son of man has come eating and drinking. The gospel of Luke is full of these mealtime moments. Son of man has come eating and drinking, and you say, Look at him, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. Luke loves highlighting episodes in the ministry of Jesus involving just that: tax collectors and sinners.

Why? Perhaps this is my speculation. As a well-to-do doctor himself, who at one point came to put his trust in Christ, he also at one time looked down on tax collectors and sinners and prostitutes. And it seems obvious that Luke wants to use their experiences with Jesus to test his readers. And the question he wants to ask them is, Have you grasped God's grace yet? Has his grace sunk in deeply for you?

Or are you scandalized by God's grace? Are you scandalized by the grace of God? The story here is the epitome of how scandalous Jesus' acceptance of sinners was. So what's the purpose of this story? Well, it is to make you and me think very deeply about the grace of Jesus.

Jesus' acceptance of sinners is scandalous. The son of God, the son of man, ate with sinners and tax collectors. He let them kiss his feet, clasp his legs. He is the friend of the unrespectable, the friend of both the swindling tax collectors and the licentious, undisciplined prostitutes. He welcomes the anxious, the mentally ill. He gives himself to the poor and to the needy.

So firstly, and perhaps most obviously, it is important for us to admit to ourselves and to each other that Jesus' acceptance of some people, those we might deem unacceptable by our standards and by even the standards of scripture, well, we often feel scandalized by Jesus' willingness to accept them. But there are more sides to the story in Luke 7.

Not only do we see Jesus welcoming sinners, it's also a story of sinners trying to come to grips with welcoming Jesus. We see two sinners in the story, namely Simon the Pharisee and this so-called sinful woman. Firstly, let's have a look at Simon and his struggle of accepting Jesus. His acceptance of Jesus is a cautious one. It's noteworthy that in our passage, Luke mentions that this is a house of a Pharisee twice.

He repeats this idea. This is the house of a Pharisee. Now, today, a good host receiving a very special guest might shake their hand at the door, usher them towards the comfiest seat in the house, and then make sure they get a drink for their guests. In Jesus' time, a very special guest would be greeted by a kiss on the cheek. You would offer them clean water to wash the dust off their feet, and perhaps, although very rarely, an exceptionally special guest would be offered some scented oil to refresh their skin or their hair.

But Jesus points out that Simon, the well-to-do Pharisee, has done none of these things. Now, it's probably not the case that Jesus is actually having a go at Simon for not having done these things, because Jesus understands the social setting. This is simply a meal. This is an opportunity for him to be known by the people that are there. To have done these three things, the kissing, the bathing of the feet, and the anointing of oil, it would have been exceptional for Simon to have done this.

Jesus is not necessarily having a go at Simon for not doing it. But Jesus' aim is to formulate a contrast here between the way in which the woman has approached him and the way that Simon has. For Simon, this dinner party isn't really about approaching Jesus. Ironically, it was an invitation into his home to try and keep Jesus at arm's length. He is there.

Jesus is there so that the Pharisee can say, This is not the Messiah. With this sort of bias in his heart, Simon thought he found the evidence that he wanted, which was: If Jesus was a prophet, he would know that this woman is a sinful woman. The text shows us the logic to how Simon would answer these questions. It goes something like this: The premise is, If Jesus were a prophet, he would know the woman's character.

And if Jesus knew the woman's character, that she is a sinner, he would have nothing to do with her if he was a righteous prophet of God. The conclusion is, Since Jesus has accepted this woman, he cannot be a prophet, or at least he is not a righteous prophet. And since Jesus is not a prophet, nor is he righteous, I can reject him. I can deny his message. I can ignore his ministry.

John Nolan in his commentary points out that behind Simon's thought lies the unexpressed assumption that a prophet would maintain the same respectable distance as Simon himself would from a notorious sinner. The underlying scandal of Jesus' behaviour, however, is here once again that he is friend to tax collectors and sinners. Simon is in for a shock, however. Jesus does know what type of woman this is. He will go on to say to Simon in verse 47 that her sins are many.

He knows who she is. But the unsettling reality is that Jesus has also looked into the heart of Simon himself and understood what he was thinking. Amazingly, if you have a look at the flow of the passage, Jesus so clearly reads Simon's thoughts that he replies to Simon as though Simon had spoken them out loud. That is what type of prophet Jesus is. But that's not even the biggest shock.

The biggest shock comes when Jesus sees the heart of the woman, sees the heart of Simon, and he's more disappointed by what he's seen in Simon's heart than in the woman's. That is the shock. Now, over the years, perhaps you've been a Christian for a while, having listened to the gospel accounts, the story of Jesus, perhaps like me, you assume that the Pharisees are always the bad guys. And so it's easy to never put ourselves in the same category as them, because we don't like to think of ourselves as the bad guys either. But the truth is, the challenge of Luke as he writes this is that you might find yourself today with the heart of Simon.

Cautiously scrutinizing the meaning and the message of Jesus. Is he really the one? Does Jesus truly offer me what no one else can give? Do I truly believe that? What does Jesus offer me that I can't offer myself?

Is he the one I'm willing to declare as the Lord of my life, and do the things that he lives and stands for become the things that I live for? In your cautious approach to Jesus, I want to say to you, Be careful not of Jesus' motives. Don't be cautious about his motives. Be cautious of your own.

Be careful not of other people's motives in coming to Jesus. Be cautious of your own, because your eternal life and that caution could be hanging in the balance. If your eyes are firmly focused on all the Christians around you, on how they live, on how they behave, if you are obsessed with the church of God needing to reach a certain criteria to be good enough for you, to reach the holiness that you believe you have achieved, the church needs to look a little bit more like this or like this.

If you look at everyone else around you and never take a second look at the concerning bitterness of your own heart, the concerning hate, the anger, the jealousy that you harbour in your own spirit, be careful, because it may just be the case that Jesus knows what is going on in your heart and he is more disappointed at that than those people that you don't like are bringing to Jesus. The sobering example of the Pharisees in the gospel accounts is that they were people who thought of themselves as being close to God, and yet were very far from him. They aren't the bad guys that we can never be. They are the types of people we are often prone to be identical to.

So firstly, we make sure that we undergo a good examination regularly of our hearts. And then, when we do, be careful that as we've done it, after we've done it, we don't use that as a licence to now judge the heart of our neighbour. Jesus said, just before this story here, wisdom is known by her children. And Jesus is saying, just before this story, that true wisdom is found in continuously working on yourself, thinking about your heart, your motives, and what you believe about Jesus. And then when you focus on yourself and you work on yourself, you trust that God will work on them.

And then thirdly and finally, we come to that third character in the account, and we see the woman's acceptance of Jesus, which is unconstrained. It's not cautious at all. Jesus tells Simon a story of two people who owed a significant amount of money to him. In those days, one denarius equated to a day's wages for a labourer. So fifty denarii or five hundred denarii was a significant amount of money.

But the focus is not so much on the amount that was owed, rather the difference in size between the one amount and the other. One owed the creditor a lot of money, and the other one a lot more. Now, the creditor cancels both accounts. And Jesus asked the question, Who would love this gracious creditor more? Simon responds logically, The one who had the bigger debt cancelled.

But Simon's coldness, moving from what he just simply thought in his mind, is now actually seen in how he responds. It is exposed when he gives his response. He says to Jesus, I suppose the one with the larger debt. The Greek here makes it clear that this is a half-hearted formulation, showing how cautious, how wary Simon is. He knows that he's walking into a trap.

Jesus simply replies, You have judged correctly. When Jesus turns to the woman explaining how she has welcomed him into her life as though she was welcoming an exceptionally special guest into her home, she's met him with tears of gratitude. She has, accidentally, through those tears, wet his feet, and then with no regard to her physical appearance, even among the very well-to-do people in the Pharisee's home, she let down her hair and she begins to wipe those tears on his feet with her hair.

She has greeted Jesus with a kiss, not on the cheek as an equal, but on his feet as a slave. She anoints his feet with an incredibly valuable ointment, the type of which you would anoint a king with. But she dare not do that on his head as an equal, but on his feet. Jesus points all of this out to Simon in order to say, as Nolan puts it, Don't you recognise in this woman's behaviour the love of one who has been forgiven greatly? And that is where the penny drops.

This isn't simply an issue about how you might view Jesus. It's also an issue of how you view yourself. Simon has determined that he has very little need of Jesus, and he's looking for evidence to cast Jesus aside. And to this, Jesus says, The one who has little need of forgiveness, for them there is very little motivation for love. But the woman has a strong sense of her brokenness, and she knows she needs forgiveness.

Somewhere in the ministry of Jesus at that time, she's learned that forgiveness is available through him. She has come to believe that Jesus can offer her something that she could never earn herself. And Jesus concludes, This is why she is so totally uninhibited, unconstrained with her love for him. The point is, the more you are aware of your sin, the more you are aware of your need of forgiveness before a holy and righteous God, the greater the urgent, compelling, unrestricted love you'll have for Jesus. And I want to say to you, as people of the gospel, people who have come to believe this truth, your Christian maturity is also found along that same spectrum.

Between those who love Jesus little, thinking very little about his grace, to those who love Jesus greatly, thinking very often about his grace. Where you find yourself along that spectrum identifies your position on Christian maturity. Your Christian maturity is then displayed by your behaviour. And so I can easily make the application that our love for God's people, our love for the people in this church, that begins with a sense of God's grace. Not simply God's grace to them, God's grace to me.

I need to be melted and broken by God's grace. When I pastorally counsel someone who is depressed, who is being abusive in the church, someone sleeping with a boyfriend, someone who has issues with pride, I can only do so as a fellow sinner. I am broken. They are broken, and by God's grace, and by God's grace alone, He is repairing us. And so if I don't understand that truth deeply, then my good intentions for helping them will only ever be patronising.

Apart from a deep understanding of Christ's grace to me, anything I can ever offer them will only be as good as I am, try as hard as I am. If I don't understand God's grace, my life in the church will be bitter. If I don't understand God's grace to me, my life in the church will be angry and entitled and shallow. Only as we're struck over and over and over again by God's amazing grace to me will my life and words point to Jesus as a Saviour who has loved me above all else.

This story that Luke tells us here is captured beautifully in a single verse written by Paul in the book of Romans, and you'll probably know it well: Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. Where the awareness of sin increases, the awareness of grace increases all the more. Where the dumb decisions have increased, the gratitude of Christ's forgiveness increases all the more. Friend, if you find yourself wholeheartedly indulging in behaviour that you know is not according to Christ's will for your life, end it.

Stop it. Turn your back towards it. Because forgiveness and true life is only found in Jesus Christ. That woman spent her life savings probably on that alabaster box. There's nothing else worthy of spending the money on.

But alternatively, if you love God's grace for yourself and you are so convinced that God's grace has been extended to you, great. But if you hold out very little grace to everyone else, despite that knowledge, you must repent of that too. Because you have misunderstood grace completely. The one who loves little reveals that deep down they believe they have been forgiven very little. If we love little, we think we have been forgiven little.

But we know, don't we? The truth is we have been forgiven an eternal debt, an eternal debt. So let me ask you, How big should your love be? What lengths should you be willing to go in order to work towards restoration of relationships?

Jesus would say, Forgive your brother seventy times seven, meaning an infinite amount of times, because you have been forgiven an eternal debt. So how far will we go towards restoration in the body of Christ? How far are you willing to go in your family to restore relationships? How hard will you work to love the ones whom Christ has died for? Where sin increased, grace has increased even more.

So Jesus turns lastly to this woman and he dismisses her with the words, Your faith has saved you. Now go in peace. Today, we are dismissed with the same words. May our hearts, may our minds pursue the peace of Christ all our days as we drink deeply and regularly from the truth of the grace of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Let's pray.

Lord, we ask that You will peel back hearts that have become calloused to Your grace. Lord, that You will slice away the things in our lives where we have thought we can add to Your grace, that we can add a good veneer of Christian living. We have added thinking that we are treating others better than we are treated and we believe we should be seen and regarded better because of our actions. And Lord, help us to understand truly, deeply, how much we have been forgiven.

Holy Spirit, we depend on You to remind us of that again and again. And so we receive these words again this morning from Luke 7, from Your word, as that reminder. But next week, Lord, next month, next year, when we have forgotten again, Holy Spirit, let us not forget. Well, there are so many complicated issues in our lives. There are so many things that have hurt us.

There are so many things that we have caused hurt by. God, You are the one who knows each and every one of our hearts. You know those situations. And we ask, Lord, that with Your scalpel, with Your blade, You'll cut into the things that have been covered up, ignored, suppressed, hidden in the darkness, and we will ask You, Lord, to give us the eyes to see, just as we have sung, Open the eyes of our hearts. Help us to do what is right.

Help us to devote our lives to good works in light of the grace of Jesus Christ. In His name we pray. Amen.