September 20, 2015: Your Hair is Showing – Dave Terpstra

There are three main customary greetings that would be considered obvious to any middle eastern host, particularly one hosting a visiting rabbi: water for their feet, a kiss, offering of oil for their head. To not offer these things is to loudly/silently proclaim that your guest is a nuisance and you would rather not have them there, and to miss all of these cues in the midst of a crowd would be to shame them in front of everyone. It would only be done purposefully. Jesus’ host “forgets” all three. Jesus does not respond, instead, he seats himself at the position at the table of the rabbi with the most authority. A woman then enters who performs all three of the courtesies Jesus has just been denied. 

The woman’s actions prompt Jesus’ parable to Simon. He helps Simon recognize the deeper reality at play. He helps Simon begin to see and then he gets practical. To see the deeper reality is to see the person involved too, “Do you see this woman?” For Jesus, great love is not an action required to gain forgiveness and right standing with God and others. Great love, as something honest and not put on, is something that only proceeds out of love received. Hence, the past tense, “…her many sins have been forgiven.” We see great love here as a response to forgiveness, which calls into questions Simon’s stinginess and poses the same question to us. If you cannot love generously and lavishly, have you allowed yourself to receive it? It is offered to you too.

Lastly, as a significant aside, miracles. What are they? Really though? Was it more miraculous, inexplicable, that Jesus could heal Blind Bartimaeus or that simply bumping into Jesus could rewrite the logic and motivation of Zacchaeus’ heart? In one case he is simply manipulating matter without something working against him, in the other case he is remaking the human constitution that was actively fighting and would work for self-preservation. When the disciples are saved in the storm it prompts the question, “Who is this?” Here again we have a group of people seeing something to radically (rooted-ly) different from what they know, an authority that rises from such a deeper place, that they cannot help but express the same question, “Who is this?”