Sermon – June 13, 2010: Who Forgives Sins?
Sermon for Sunday, June 13, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
Who Forgives Sins?
1 Kings 21: 1-21a; Galatians 2: 15-21; Luke 7: 36 – 8: 3
Behind every successful villainous man there’s a bad woman. That’s one of the
lessons of the story of Jezebel. King Ahab is peevish, selfish, and corrupted, but he
doesn’t have the courage of his lack of convictions. He wishes he could have his neighbor’s
vineyard, but the neighbor won’t sell, so Ahab is stymied. He sulks. If it occurs to him that
he could resort to murder to get his way, some part of him is unwilling to be that bold.
He turns out to be one of those weakling husbands who drive a wife crazy.
Jezebel, his wife, is disgusted by his moping around, and impatient with its cause. Once
again she’s going to have to show him the way to get things done. She arranges for
Naboth, the vineyard owner, to be charged with a crime, and has him convicted and
executed, and then seizes the property. After all, she feels, what’s the use of being an
absolute ruler if one can’t arrange to have what one wants? She’s a Lady Macbeth type,
but not so squeamish about blood on her hands.
Jezebel’s a foreign wife who has led Ahab into support of foreign religious practices
and the persecution of any Hebrew prophets who object–and they all object. Her
influence on her husband is always evil, and this matter of Naboth’s vineyard ends up being
the last straw. When she and Ahab finally are punished, it is the inevitable consequence of
heedless faithlessness.
This ties in with a dominant Old Testament motif. That theme is that kings who
support the sole worship of the God of the Covenant are a blessing to the land, and
everyone wins when they are on the throne; and conversely, that kings who permit the
worship of other gods bring calamity upon the nation. Jezebel is not only wicked in herself.
She is the worshiper of a false god, and an enemy of the true God, so she is completely at
odds with the way things are supposed to be. Her doing wrong is symptomatic of her
being wrong, and her unhappy end is not just poetic justice, but divine judgment.
Before speaking about our time’s religious anxieties about faithful leadership and
national blessing, there’s another important thing to point out. Jezebel doesn’t just seize the
property and say to its owner, “too bad.” She frames him, and liquidates him, and then,
when his rights to respect and his existence alike have been destroyed, she takes the land.
She uses the law to kill him, the way David later was to use a patriotic war to kill Uriah the
Hittite, so he could steal his wife. Rulers have power to arrange things, but they don’t dare
flaunt lawlessness. They want, when everything is said and done, to maintain the
appearance of proper results. Naboth was a bad man and forfeited everything, the fact that
the king got the vineyard is incidental. Uriah was unlucky in battle and David took
responsibility for his widow. That’s how it is supposed to look.
We didn’t read the David and Bathsheba story today but it parallels this story about
the vineyard, because in both cases this careful arranging, using political power, manages to
create the illusion that everything has balanced out-that a wrong has been redressed by a
right, and that is that. People are fooled–perhaps even the perpetrators fool themselves.
In both cases, however, a prophet shows up to reveal that God has not been fooled, and
that for the wrong to be made right, for the balance to be restored, somebody’s got to pay.
This notion that when something’s wrong, something’s got to give, is a basic
premise of the Bible. The Bible thinks it’s a universal human expectation–that eating of the
Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, having moral discernment, using judgment,
distinguishing right from wrong, marks us as something like God. This insight into what is
just, which is second-nature to us, is what makes us uneasy when things are too good to be
true, and what buoys our hope when things seem like they can’t possibly get worse. In our
hearts we expect that things should balance out, especially that wrong should be offset by
something which makes things right.
I mentioned religious anxiety about national leadership and God’s either blessing or
judging the nation. This Old Testament concept is adapted by people from both sides of
the political spectrum. What separates people of strong political conviction isn’t whether or
not they think the nation will be held accountable for the morality of its choices, but what
things they regard as so wrong as to invite judgment. What makes people conservative
seems to be feeling that God will punish America for sexual license and lack of personal
responsibility, and what makes people liberal seems to be feeling that God will punish
America for individual greed and institutional violence. Sometimes people say that the
religious language in so much American political pronouncement is a smokescreen, and it
certainly can be cynical. But I would argue that it’s fundamentally sincere, that Biblical religion
still has enough influence on our expectations that we see both our moral burden and God’s
corresponding hand upon us in national terms.
The framers of the Declaration of Independence felt, and took pains to show, that the
King’s rule over the colonies violated an insufferable number of customs and freedoms.
Things from their perspective were so out of balance that a violent separation and a new
beginning were necessary. If you read the Declaration past its familiar first lines you find it a
very long document detailing multiple instances of misconduct on the part of the Crown. It
makes a case for the radical choice imposed upon the Continental Congress, and shows,
yet again, that people believe that no wrong can persist without its being countered by
something which recognizes and neutralizes it. It also shows that not all political action is
undertaken for villainous motives, unlike the story we had about Jezebel–but that in all such
cases even people in power feel obligated to show that violence must be justified by
showing that it is required to offset worse circumstances.
Paul writes about justification in the portion of the letter to the Galatians which we
have for one of our lessons. In this letter Paul argues against other teachers who insist that
converts to Christianity from paganism must adopt some Jewish ritual practices in order to
get Christianity “right.” Paul’s approach, they have claimed, is misleading, and dangerous,
because it is lax. People are too free. This is a religious instinct which arises again and
again, and though it often is labeled “fundamentalism”, it’s probably better to think of it as
severity, because even religions which fundamentally repudiate earning salvation by good
behavior have their severe versions in which individual behavior becomes the key to
salvation.
This is related to the idea that some kind of balance is how things work. God’s great
kindness freely given is too good to be true–it confounds the expectation of fairness, so
people make sense of redemption by making it contingent on moral rectitude. Just like
Jezebel’s doom is a matter of just deserts, the pious person’s favor with God is a matter of
just deserts.
This is a popular notion, because we do have a sense of what’s fair, but it is not
Christianity. The gospels repeatedly deny that the righteous earn God’s approval and
sinners God’s hatred. This is made more clear by stories like today’s, in which Simon, who
is professionally good, let’s say, is contrasted with the fallen woman who shows up to
weep and cast herself on Jesus’ mercy. She is professionally bad.
The idea that things balance out, from Simon’s perspective, works like this: he thinks
he’s the right person to be in the presence of a great prophet, because he has done all that
God could expect. So he’s being rewarded. That’s fair. This woman who shows up is
bad and should continually be identified and treated as bad, because that’s fair–she does
wrong and is despised. Simon is puzzled because Jesus seems to accept the presence
and homage of this wrongdoer, instead of recoiling or pronouncing judgment, both of which
would seem like the right action-reaction thing to Simon. So Simon thinks to himself that if
Jesus really had the kind of antennae that holy men should have, he’d have this woman
figured out.
Well, Jesus does. It’s just that Jesus doesn’t see the balance thing the way Simon
does. Jesus also picks up on something else, and that is Simon’s feeling that Jesus should
judge this woman. Then Jesus offers a lesson in terms of balance to Simon. Simon didn’t
give Jesus water for his feet, but the woman provided her tears. Simon gave no kiss but
the woman kissed Jesus’ feet. Simon didn’t anoint Jesus’ head but the woman has
anointed Jesus’ feet. There are three deficits which can be charged to Simon which have
been made up by the woman.
Jesus says that to challenge the scorekeeping mentality. He also does it to support
his offering of forgiveness. Forgiveness is an alternative way to restore balance.
Someone with adequately great say-so–God, or God’s representative, for instance, can
offset wrong by generously declaring that it now will no longer be held against one. That’s
the key to Christianity, and for those who know themselves to be sinners, that’s the source
of profound love for God, and undying gratitude to God.
To read sermons from past years, hit the “View All” link beneath the “This Week’s Sermon”
button, and then hit the “Archives” link in the sentence at the top of the page presenting
recent sermons.