Who speaks to you all through the Gospel today saying,
“Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she
loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little.”
If we want to receive blessedness, we must first abhor sin
and enter into a repentant life, and then believe that our sin is forgiven for
Christ’s sake. Finally, we must also demonstrate our faith and bring it to
light through works of love and mercy, as we see and hear in the sinner that is
St. Mary Magdalene.
This is why, when a saint day falls close to a Sunday, we
celebrate it, because not only are they an example for us, but they bring the
Christian life down to our level; the human level. So often, whenever anyone
starts out on a spiritual journey, it is always grand and spiritual and very
far away.
When we want to live the Christian life, we think in terms
of what we can do and what our neighbor isn’t doing. We think that as long as
we’re working on our righteousness, that our neighbor’s righteousness is never
enough. We think that as long as we feel spiritual on the inside, that is good
enough.
The example that St. Mary Magdalene leaves us is a picture
of what every prophet, priest, and believer has done through all of time. They
all fall down at the feet of God lamenting their uncleanness and weeping over
their debts. This is because, when they hear the Word of God, they are not just
hearing prophecy, they are also hearing their own pardons preached to them.
That is, they use their human attributes and talents in
order to thank and praise, serve and obey God. But even with those words, we
are still in the high and lofty, because those things can still be done on the
inside and be thought of as more grand than they are. No, we still need a
concrete place to perform these works.
Repent. We spend all our spiritual energy on trying to get
to Jesus, trying to pull His ear, trying to grab His hand, trying to find His
feet and we come up empty handed. Jesus even ascended to the right hand of God,
but we still think that He comes to us in the same way He did to the Apostles
and to St. Mary.
Do we want to know how to abhor sin and live a life of
repentance? We need look no further than St. Mary Magdalene, who though she had
been forgiven, healed, and exorcised; although she had already received the
full benefit from the hand of Jesus Himself, she was still disgusted by her
sins and continued to seek Jesus out.
She was so horrified that she did not care about the stares
and backstabbing comments she knew were going on in the conversations around
her as she stepped into the dining room. She went through this unbearable
embarrassment to get to the true Son of God, because He does not condemn, as
she well knows, but has mercy.
Who loves the Father the most except the Son? Whose debt was
the greater that was forgiven except the Son’s, though it was not His own? In a
strange and merciful twist of divine goodness and mercy, Jesus is the greatest of
sinners, the chief sinner, even though St.
Paul
Jesus receives the touch and caress of sinners and is not
made unclean by them. He accepts the care of “this sort of woman” and instead
of Jesus being corrupted by touch or influence, He gives out His power to
forgive and to save. Instead of a double-edged sword or a beam of white-hot
fire, judging and condemning, these sinners find a babe wrapped in swaddling
clothes.
In the incarnation of God, the Lord is reconciling the world
to Himself. In God becoming flesh, Jesus now presents and proves the mercy of
God; that He is close and not far, that He desires mercy, not sacrifice, and
that His loving-kindness endures forever, not just because He says so, but
because He acts just so, on the cross.
The suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ
of God, is the only proof that God loves us. Doesn’t St.
Mary tell us so? She is credited with being the first witness of the
resurrection, after all. See how she follows her Lord and notes each detail of
what He is saying and doing. She doesn’t stay at His feet and she doesn’t even
stay at the tomb, she follows Him.
Faith knows that the Son is loved by the Father. Faith also
knows that if we are not a part of the Son, that we will not be loved, but
condemned in our sin for eternity. Thus, our need for God to unite with us. Our
eternal need for the life of Christ to replace our life and in baptism this
miracle takes place.
Faith works the same way today. It does not point us to how
well we have overcome sin in our lives, but to how well Christ destroyed sin.
Faith doesn’t point us to how sorry we feel for our sins or even how repentant
we are, but to how perfectly Jesus has forgiven them. Thus, we follow where the
forgiveness leads us: yes, to the cross, yes to the empty tomb, but those are
no longer there. What we gather around today is the promise of God made to
bring those things to us.
We don’t have to find Jesus, or His hands, or His knees, or
His feet, because He finds us. Our sin finds us as well, we don’t have to look
too far for that, but Jesus makes a place in His Church, where His promise to
forgive sins is stronger than our guilt. He creates a very human institution,
fills it with earthly things, and declares these sacraments in this place
accomplish His work.
If our head is in the clouds of self-righteousness, waiting
for our own sanctification to drop down on us instead of our neighbor, we will
miss God’s work of salvation completely and be locked out of the banquet. This
is because God’s work, His great and most holy work, is being done at our feet,
to humans, on earth, in the Word and Sacraments.
Does St. Mary Magdalene
seek out and burst her way into wherever the Body of Jesus is? Dear Saints at St. Luke, so do you in the Divine Service.
No comments:
Post a Comment