4th Sunday after Pentecost, June 12 2016
1 Kings 21.1-21a; Psalm 1 (CH4 1); Galatians 2.15-21; Luke 7.36-8.3
St Andrew’s Scots Memorial Church, Jerusalem
At Tabeetha School in Jaffa, the pupils are busy preparing for exams next week. Or perhaps, as some of their teachers fear, they are just eating ice-cream on the beach.
In the Book of Kings, the exam results are already in, and there are only two grades: you are either a good king or a bad king, and mostly you are the latter.
Ahab, king of Israel, is a bad king. His report card is not encouraging. “Ahab son of Omri did evil in the sight of the Lord more than all who were before him,” says the Book of Kings. “Ahab did more to provoke the anger of the Lord, the God of Israel, than had all the kings of Israel who were before him.”
Ahab is an evil-doer and an idolater. In the Book of Kings, these two things often go together.
He takes a foreign wife, Jezebel, daughter of King Ethbaal of Sidon, and he also take Ethbaal’s god. He goes and serves Baal, and worships him. He erects an altar for Baal in the house of Baal, which he builds in Samaria. He also makes a sacred pole.
Our reading from 1 Kings this morning shows Ahab and Jezebel up to their usual tricks.
Ahab desires the vineyard of Naboth, which is conveniently located close to his palace in Jezreel, so that he can turn it into a vegetable garden. Naboth refuses to sell or trade: the vineyard is his ancestral inheritance. So Jezebel hatches a plot to put Naboth out of the way. She has him falsely accused and stoned to death; and Ahab takes possession of the vineyard.
This is the sort of thing God likes to discourage, so God sends the prophet Elijah to tell Ahab that he will bring disaster upon him: “In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth, dogs will also lick up your blood.”
This was already a long reading, but if Heather had gone on a few verses more, we should hear that when Ahab heard the words that God had given Elijah to speak, “he tore his clothes and put sackcloth over his bare flesh; he fasted, lay in the sackcloth, and went about dejectedly.”
And God relents a little in his judgement.
But Ahab’s repentance is only skin-deep, or should I say sackcloth-deep. He is still a bad king. Indeed, says the Book of Kings in parentheses, “there was no one like Ahab, who sold himself to do what was evil in the sight of the Lord, urged on by his wife Jezebel.”
Ahab is still the worst of bad kings and he comes to a sticky end, struck down by an Aramean archer at the battle of Ramoth-Gilead.
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This is a Bible story in which God features as a character, a play where God is one of the cast, and God is never that. To get to the one true God behind this character-God, we need to recognize that repentance and forgiveness are two sides of the one coin.
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Our gospel reading, with its story within a story, focuses on forgiveness. Simon the Pharisee gives Jesus a title of respect and honour – he calls him teacher – but he doesn’t overdo his welcome. By contrast, we may think that the woman of ill-repute, who bathes the feet of Jesus with her tears and dries them with her hair and anoints them with alabaster ointment, has gone a little over the top.
So Jesus tells Simon one of the shortest and most self-evident parables in the gospels, so self-evident I won’t insult your intelligences by explaining it to you.
Repentance and forgiveness are two sides of the one coin. To know ourselves forgiven is to repent, to change. To change is to be changed.
This works at an ordinary human level, when the one who forgives us is our husband or, as is more often the case, our wife. But it works above all when the one who forgives us is the one who creates us, the one who makes us in his own image and rues how much we mar that image.
Simon thinks that Jesus doesn’t know who the woman is – that she is a sinner – but Jesus knows full well. Jesus has a rare human ability to see people, not just to look at us but really to see us, to look beyond the superficial and see us as we really are.
Simon looks at the woman and sees a sinner. Jesus looks at the woman and sees a sinner who has been forgiven: her over-the-top behaviour is all the evidence he needs. She does not fall into the common trap of taking forgiveness for granted but shows every sign of grasping its overwhelming worth.
The American scholar Klyne Snodgrass says we should not downplay the significance of her response. In John’s gospel, on the night before he dies, Jesus washes the feet of his followers and dries them with a towel. Today, in Luke’s gospel, he is on the receiving end of such an act of humility. The woman who anoints his feet and dries them with her hair models the humility that Jesus commends to us all. She, rather than Ahab or Jezebel, should be our role model.
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I was down in Tabeetha School on Friday to lead a secondary school assembly.
In Alice in Wonderland, the White Rabbit asks the King of Hearts where he should begin, and the king says gravely, “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end, then stop.” And since last autumn, that’s what I’ve been doing.
We’ve had a series of assemblies on the Lord’s Prayer. I began in the autumn with “our Father who art in heaven” and concluded this spring with “deliver us from evil”.
But I had still one more assembly in hand, so on Friday, I took a leaf from a book by the English scholar Tom Wright and did the reverse of what the king recommends. I began at the end, went back till I came to the beginning, and then stopped; and I did this with intent.
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Tom Wright does this in the concluding chapter of his book Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good, and he does it with intent too.
Praying the Lord’s Prayer backwards, he argues, is oddly enough the more natural way to do it. Because we start with us, our own needs and desires and concerns, and work our way up to God.
We start with the most basic of prayers: Help!
Help! Do not bring us to the time of trial. Save us from a dangerous world.
Help! Lead us not into temptation. Save us from ourselves.
Then we pray for forgiveness and for food.
And only then do we stop being self-centred and begin to be centred in God. Your kingdom come – not mine. Your will be done – not mine. Your name be honoured and respected – not mine.
Once we have climbed the ladder – and it’s a ladder we are always climbing as we go through life, a ladder that stretches all the way to heaven – we can of course change direction, reverse our steps, beginning where we ought to begin.
We can begin with God and from God, because it is from God we take our beginning and to God we owe the whole of our life, from end to beginning, from beginning to end.
Whichever direction we move in, we should not pass the line that asks for forgiveness without noticing how it ends. Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Forgive us what we owe, as we forgive what was owed to us.
This is, remarkably, says Tom Wright, the one moral commitment on our part that Jesus includes in the prayer that comes from him and bears his name. It’s not there as a condition but because it’s constitutive of forgiveness. It’s not saying, “God will forgive us, if and only if we first forgive one another.” It’s the other way round: to be forgiven by God in spite of our faults, to be loved by God in spite of our often loveless behaviour, is life-transforming. It changes us for good.
“The kingdom comes with limitless grace in the midst of an evil world,” say Klyne Snodgrass, “but grace that does not bring forth a response is grace unknown.” Too often we can think that grace can be received without effect and without response. That, says Snodgrass, is impossible.
As we said in our call to prayer, God loves us and shows us that love by sending his Son into the world so that we might live through him.
It may take us a long time or a short time to get that point, but when we do, we are home free. The love of a God who forgives us in spite of all our faults transforms us. It allows us to repent and to go out in faith to transform an evil world so much in need of transformation.
May it be so.
Sources
Klyne R Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008)
NT Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel is News and What Makes it Good (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 2015)