Scott Hahn with David Scott
In this Sunday’s readings we are like the fallen king, David, and the woman who weeps at Jesus’ feet.
Like David, the Lord has rescued us from sin and death, anointed us with His Spirit in baptism and in confirmation. He has made us heirs of His promise to the children of Israel.
And like David, and like the woman in the Gospel, we fall into sin. Our crimes may not be as grave as David’s (see 2 Samuel 11:1-26) or as “many” as that woman’s (see Luke 7:47).
But we often squander the great gift of salvation we’ve been given. Often we fail to live up to the great calling of being sons and daughters of God.
The good news of today’s readings, the good news of Jesus Christ, is that we can return to God in the sacrament of confession. Each of us can repeat Paul’s wondrous words in this week’s Epistle: “The Son of God has loved me and given himself up for me.”
Our faith will save us, as Jesus tells the woman today. Our faith that no matter how many our sins, or how serious, if we come to him in true sorrow and repentance we will hear his words of forgiveness. Like David. Like the woman in the Gospel this Sunday.
We hear David’s heartfelt confession in the First Reading. The Psalmist, too, confesses his sins to God. And we hear our Lord’s tender words of mercy and pardon in the Gospel.
By His word of healing and his promise of peace, He makes it possible for us to join Him at the banquet table of the Eucharist.
We can’t be like the Pharisee in the Gospel. We should never disdain the sinner or doubt the Lord’s power to convert even the worst of sinners.
Instead, we should pledge today to better imitate that sinful woman. In gratitude for the debt we’ve been forgiven, let us promise to live by faith and for God alone. Like her, let us devote our lives to serving Him with great love.
St. Ambrose
from On Repentance, 2:8
“Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do.» (Mt 9:12) Show your wound to the physician, then, that he may heal it. Even if you do not show it, he knows of it but is waiting to hear your voice. Cleanse your wound with your tears. This is what the woman in the Gospel did so as to be freed from sin and its stench: she washed away her guilt when she washed the feet of Jesus with her tears.
O Jesus, may you set aside for me the task of washing those feet of yours that you dirtied while you were walking in me!… But where shall I find that living water with which to wash your feet? If I have no water, I have tears. Grant that, while I wash your feet with them, I may be purifying myself as well.
What must I do to hear you say to me; “His many sins are forgiven, because he has loved much”? I confess that my debt is great indeed, and that more has been forgiven me who have been called to the priesthood from the tumult and strife of the law courts and of public administration. Therefore I fear being thought ungrateful if I, to whom more has been forgiven, were to love the less.
I am unable to compare that woman with anyone else at all, she who was so rightly preferred to that Simon the Pharisee who was giving the feast to the Lord. Yet she gave a lesson to all those who desire to gain forgiveness by kissing Christ’s feet, washing them with her tears, wiping them with her hair, and anointing them with ointment…
And if we are unable to equal her, the Lord Jesus knows how to come to the aid of the weak. Wherever there is no one who can prepare a meal, or bring ointments, or carry a spring of living water (Jn 4:10)along with her, there he comes himself.
Pope Benedict XVI
Homily, Lower Basilica of St. Francis, Assisi, June 17, 2007
The Word of God just proclaimed enlightens us by holding up to our gaze three converted figures.
The first is David. The passage concerning him, taken from the Second Book of Samuel, presents to us one of the most dramatic conversations in the Old Testament.
A burning verdict lies at the heart of this dialogue, with which the Word of God, uttered by the Prophet Nathan, exposes a king who had reached the summit of his political fortune but had also fallen to the lowest level of his moral life.
To grasp the dramatic tension of this dialogue, it is necessary to bear in mind its historical and theological horizon. This horizon is outlined by the event of love with which God chooses Israel as his People, establishing a Covenant with them and taking care to assure them a land and freedom.
David is a link in this history of God’s continuing concern for his People. He was chosen in a difficult period and placed beside King Saul, then to become his successor. God’s design also concerns his descendants connected with the messianic project, which was to find its complete fulfilment in Christ, “Son of David”.
The figure of David is thus an image of both historical and religious importance. In even starker contrast with this is the abjection into which he falls. Blinded by his passion for Bathsheba, he wrenches her from her husband, one of his most faithful warriors, and then orders his assassination in cold blood. This is something that makes one shudder: how could a man chosen by God fall so low?
The human being is truly greatness and wretchedness: he is great because he bears in himself God’s image and is the object of his love; he is wretched because he can make evil use of the freedom which is his great privilege,ending by setting himself against his Creator.
God’s verdict on David, pronounced by Nathan, sheds light on the intimate fibres of the conscience where armies, power and public opinion count for nothing but where one is alone with God himself.
“You are that man” are the words that nailed David to his responsibilities. Deeply struck by them, the king developed sincere repentance and opened himself to the offer of mercy. This is the path of conversion. . . .
Another aspect of the journey of conversion emerges in the passage from the Letter to the Galatians. It is explained to us by another great convert, the Apostle Paul.
The discussion in which the primitive community found itself involved is the immediate context of his words: in this discussion, many Christians who came from Judaism tended to link salvation to fulfilling the requirements of the ancient Law, thereby making the newness of Christ and the universality of his message vain.
Paul stood as a witness and champion of grace. On the road to Damascus, Christ’s radiant face and strong voice had snatched him from his violent zeal as a persecutor and had kindled within him the new zeal of the Crucified One, who reconciles in his Cross those who are near and far (cf. Eph 2: 11-22).
Paul realized that in Christ the whole of the law is fulfilled and that those who adhere to Christ are united with him and fulfil the law. Bringing Christ, and with Christ the one God, to all peoples became his mission. Christ “is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing all of hostility” (Eph 2: 14).
At the same time, Paul’s very personal confession of love also expresses the common essence of Christian life: “The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2: 20b).
And how can one respond to this love except by embracing the Crucified Christ to the point of living his very life? “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2: 20a).
In speaking of being crucified with Christ, St Paul was not only referring to his new birth in Baptism, but to the whole of his life at the service of Christ. This connection with his apostolic life appears clearly in the final words of his defence of Christian freedom at the end of the Letter to the Galatians: “Henceforth let no man trouble me; for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus” (6: 17).This is the first time in the history of Christianity that the words “the marks of Jesus” [stigmata] appear. In the dispute on the right way of seeing and living the Gospel, it is not, in the end, the arguments that decide our thought: it is the reality of life that decides, communion lived and suffered with Jesus, not only in ideas or words but in the depths of our existence, also involving the body, the flesh.
The bruises that the Apostle received in the long history of his passion are the witness of the presence of the Cross of Jesus in St Paul’s body; they are his stigmata. Thus, one can say that it is not circumcision that saves: these stigmata are the consequence of his Baptism, the expression of his dying with Jesus, day after day, the sure sign of his being a new creature (cf. Gal 6: 15).
Moreover, by using the word “marks”, Paul is referring to the ancient practice of branding the slave with his owner’s mark. Thus, the servant was “marked” as the property of his owner and was under his protection. The sign of the Cross, stamped on Paul’s skin through long drawn-out suffering, was his boast. It legitimized him as a true servant of Jesus, protected by the Lord’s love. . . .
And so we come to the evangelical heart of today’s Word of God. Jesus himself, in the passage from Luke’s Gospel which has just been read, explains to us the dynamism of authentic conversion, pointing out to us as a model the sinful woman redeemed by love. It should be recognized that this woman had ventured much.
The manner in which she chose to come before Jesus, bathing his feet with tears and drying them with her hair, kissing them and sprinkling scented oil upon them, was done to shock those who viewed people in her condition with the merciless eye of the judge.
What is striking, on the other hand, is the tenderness with which Jesus treated this woman, exploited and judged by so many. In Jesus she found at last a pure eye, a heart capable of loving without exploiting. In the gaze and heart of Jesus she received the revelation of God-Love!
To avoid any misunderstanding, it should be noted that Jesus’ mercy was not expressed by putting moral law in parentheses. For Jesus, good is good and evil is evil. Mercy does not change the connotations of sin but consumes it in a fire of love.
This purifying and healing effect is achieved if within the person there is a corresponding love which implies recognition of God’s law, sincere repentance and the resolution to start a new life.
The sinful woman in the Gospel was pardoned greatly because she loved greatly. In Jesus, God comes to give love to us and to ask love of us. . .
