June 17, 2007 Des Moines
Luke 7:36-8:3
Faith and the Optical Illusion
A group of primary school students
once were asked:
“Did you ever do anything good in your lives?”
They all looked at their questioner with their enormous
eyes, and said almost spontaneously and in chorus: “No!”
It was only
after some time that one small boy remembered:
“Oh yea! I helped an old lady
cross the street.”
And a girl
said: “I had one piece of candy and I
broke it in half to give a piece to my friend.
I think that was good.”
Again they
were asked, “Did your parents ever do anything good?” And again, with the same enormous eyes, and
in the same spontaneous chorus as before, they all again said, “No, never.”
After some
minutes they remembered:
– “My breakfast is always ready in the
morning.”
– “My mother tells me a story every
evening.”
– “My father brings me to bed.”
– “Sometimes my mother sews for the
poor…”[1]
For reasons strangely hard to
identify, that’s not an uncommon dialogue – not so much the parent part, but
the response part. For some reason we
seem disposed to ignore the good. Oh, I
know we all crave to open the papers and read about good news; we crave the
experience of turning on the television to hear Matt Lauer talking about good
things instead of terrorism, hurricanes, war and crime. But you may have noticed even in my
description of the craving a cloudy ambiguity.
I mean, what would you consider good news? Forget about the cynics who say that nobody
would read about good news if it were printed.
What would you classify as good?
I have to confess myself that it is
something finally realized or recognized only after effort. A friend of mine uses the illustration of a
clean white page with only a small black spot in the middle of the sheet. When asked what is seen, the observer
inevitably answers, “A black spot.” If
you think about it awhile, the inevitable question becomes, “what about all the
white?”
For the last many years the
Reconciliation Offering promotional materials have used a graphic that, when you
look at it one way, is a picture of a chalice.
If you refocus your eyes, however, you can see that the dark space that
once was a chalice is now simply the space between the outlines of two faces
nose to nose. It’s an optical
illusion. Jesus, in the story from
Luke’s gospel, contends that we live out of a life-size optical illusion. It has to do with our perspective; that the
bad we see may simply be the small space between the good that covers the page.
Jesus is at dinner with a Pharisee
named Simon. If that seems odd, it is
only natural. Based on everything else
we read, they aren’t supposed to like each other. But reading the story objectively, there don’t
seem to be any sinister overtones in the story.
It could be that Simon was an admirer or sympathizer, and that that
could have prompted the invitation. We
know from other stories that not all of the Pharisees considered themselves to
be enemies of Jesus. But given the
host’s negligence of common courtesies, this doesn’t seem very likely either. A more likely possibility is that Simon was a
“collector of celebrities;” a person who liked to be in vogue by associating
with people in the spotlight – a kind of autograph hound that preferred his
signatories “in the flesh.”
There also seems to be a little
“sizing up” going on as well. It could
well be possible that Jesus was invited over for a closer look; a chance for
Simon to get to know him better; to get a better handle on who he was. If that’s at all true, it is
commendable. It is a direct approach
that is so often missing. Our tendency
is to try to do that long distance, or second hand.
One of the most common mistakes in Bible
study, for instance, is to read book after book about the Bible, without ever
reading the Bible, itself; doing research through secondary sources, without
ever opening primary ones. In making
judgments, we so often reach our conclusions by listening in on other people’s
conversations and hearing their conclusions without ever engaging the matter
directly. If the Pharisee is curious
about Jesus, I appreciate his direct way of learning for himself – making up
his own mind.
If the story sounds familiar to you,
it may be that it bears a great deal of resemblance to ones in other gospels in
which the disciples get so upset over the waste of the expensive “oil of pure
nard” poured over Jesus’ head. Some
scholars argue that it is simply an interesting coincidence of similar things
happening. Others claim that the stories
are the same, simply and differently told by the different tellers.
If they are the same, they are put
to different uses. In this story the
disciples are not even present; the offense is taken by a Pharisee. Furthermore, in this story, the scandal is different. For the other gospel writers, the problem was
the value of the ointment that was wasted – it was a stewardship problem. Here, the problem has nothing to do with the
ointment but rather with its bearer – the prostitute who applies it. Here, it is a moral problem.
Or, as it turns out, perhaps a
vision problem. No one but Jesus seemed
to see who was whom.
There was obvious discomfort as the
woman came into the room. In his
reflections on the story, Joseph Donders wonders if she did not see some of her
clients around the table. And the bottle
of ointment that she poured on Jesus:
could it have been a gift from one of them?
And Simon, looking on as the woman
made a fool of herself, lowering her hair, crying on his feet, pouring the oil,
like those children with whom we began, couldn’t find anything good in the
episode to report.
In the award-winning play, A Raisin in the Sun – currently enjoying
a revival run on Broadway – a black family lives in the depths of poverty,
crowded into a dim apartment. The mother
does domestic work, her son is a chauffeur, and her daughter is in school
wanting to be a doctor. The father has
just died and the family is watching the mail for the proceeds from a life
insurance policy. The mother wants to
make a down payment on a house with the money and use part of it to send the
daughter to medical school. The son
wants to invest the money in a liquor store – his scheme of getting rich and
escaping the ghetto.
When the money finally arrives, the
mother entrusts it to the son to take to the bank until her plans for the house
and medical school can be arranged.
Instead, the son gives the money to an acquaintance to invest in the
liquor store. The acquaintance skips
town with the money.
The daughter, whose dreams of
medical school have been destroyed, looks at her brother and says to her
mother, “That’s not a man. That is
nothing but a toothless rat. …He’s no
brother of mine.”
The mother says: You feeling like you better than he is
today? Yes? …You done wrote his epitaph too – like the
rest of the world? Well, who give you
the privilege?”
The daughter replies: “Be on my side for once! You saw what he did. Wasn’t it you who taught me to despise any
man who would do that?”
The mother answers: “Yes, I taught you that. Me and your daddy. But I thought I taught you something else
too. I thought I taught you to love
him.”
“Love him?” the daughter fairly
screams. “There’s nothing left to love.”
To which the mother replies: “There is always something left to love. And if you ain’t learned that, you ain’t
learned nothing.”
“Simon, the religious leader,
thought: ‘Look at her sins.’
‘No,’ Jesus told Simon, ‘look at her
goodness. You did not greet me—
She did.
You did not wash my feet—
She did.
You did not kiss me—
She did.
You did not respect me—
She does!’
And turning to the woman, with the
gospel itself, said ‘Don’t listen to him.
Forget about the evil in you; think of the good. I do.’”[2]
If Jesus were to look at you, the
words would be the same. He’s seen
through the illusion, you see. We too
often are taught – most often by ourselves – not to take ourselves too
seriously when it comes to who we can be in the Spirit. It is only we who are convinced at times that
we are too bad for good; only we for whom the illusion seems real.
“Love me?” we sometimes scream. “There’s nothing left to love.”
To which the mother from the play
replies: “There is always something left
to love. And if you ain’t learned that,
you ain’t learned nothing.”
The good news of the story is that
with faith comes the vision to see through the illusion. Turning to us as he did to the woman, he
says, “forget about the evil in you; think of the good. I do.
Your sins are forgiven. Go in
peace.
We shall.