H. Stephen Shoemaker
Myers Park Baptist Church
Charlotte, North Carolina
January 28, 2001
THE WAY OF THE KINGDOM, THE WAY OF COMPASSION
Texts: Leviticus 12:1-5
13:45-46
Luke 7:36-50
She was on a mission of wholeness -- to be herself made whole. He was on a mission of wholeness -- to make God's people whole. He was in the house of a Pharisee whose valiant but failed system of wholeness left people divided up inside.
As soon as she entered, the tears began to fall. She had wept the first time she heard him, his words coming like the first daybreak, words about the mercy of God flowing as free as the sun that shines and the rain that falls, freer. She felt healing happening.
So that day as she entered the room carrying the alabaster box of perfumed oil to anoint his feet, the tears just fell. Undeterred by her tears or the stares of the guests, she moved to where Jesus was reclining and knelt. Her tears spilled down her face and wet his feet. She let down her hair and dried his feet with her hair, then kissed them, then anointed them with her perfume.
Lest this scene be overheated with romanticism, we should remember that this woman is described as a "woman of the city," which probably means what it sounds like, and a "sinner." If a prostitute, her life in the sex trade had probably taken its toll physically, emotionally, spiritually. Here is no cheap Hollywood romance, Julia Roberts as the woman, Richard Gere as Jesus. One Scandinavian novelist has pictured Mary Magdalene with a cleft palate. The romance of the gospel is God coming to love, not our perfect skin or chiseled features, but our cleft palate.
I
At this point I must draw for you a map, what Marcus Borg calls "the purity map," of first-century Judaism. It shows the geography of salvation as designed by the Pharisees' program of "salvation through holiness." Amy Jill-Levine objects to Borg's picture because, she says, it paints Judaism in a negative light in order to show Jesus in a good light. I think she is right.
So don't think of the Pharisees' program of salvation as distinctly Jewish. Think of it as wearily, doggedly human. It is the attempt to save ourselves by dividing the world into holy and unholy, clean and unclean, righteous and sinner, good and evil, and keeping ourselves on the right side of the equation. It is compulsive religiosity: trying to save ourselves by our perfectionism and much doing. It is what Flannery O'Connor called the religion of the south: a "do-it-yourself religion."
So let me draw for you the purity map of Jesus' day and culture. It's like those sets of transparent plastic maps, one laid on top of the other. One map shows the geographical boundaries, the next topography, the next population density, etc.
Israel had its set of purity maps. On the surface were the geographical boundaries, kosher and non-kosher zones: kosher as in Judea, non-kosher as in Samaria and Sidon.
There was the map delineating circumstances of birth. If you were born a Levite or Israelite, you were pure. In the impurity zone were those of illegitimate birth and those born not anatomically whole: the maimed, the hunchback, the chronically ill, the leper, the eunuch (those not sexually intact or correct).
One map had to do with ritual behavior. Did you follow all 613 laws of Moses? All the rules of ritual purification, all codes of conduct? Did you make the requisite sacrifices in the temple? On this map there were the observant and the non-observant, the righteous and the sinners.
Of course if you were poor you couldn't afford to be observant; so there was a map having to do with wealth and poverty. If you prospered you were considered blessed; if you were destitute you were considered cursed by God.
The maps had to do with gender -- women may have been anatomically intact, but they were not anatomically correct. Their very femaleness rendered them impure during the most female of their days: childbirth and monthly flow. If they had a female baby they were unclean longer than if they delivered a male baby. They could not be priests or rabbis. There were parts of the temple closed to them.
Your profession could make you unclean: tax collectors, prostitutes, swine-herds. And there was the racial map; Jew clean, Gentile unclean; and Samaritan most unclean of all because they intermarried and relaxed the law of Moses -- and should have known better!
Such was the purity map of Jesus' day, and it governed every aspect of people's lives.
II
But Jesus, filled with the Spirit, came and challenged this map. God's map is not the same as your map, he said. Instead of the "politics of holiness" with its banner Leviticus 19:2, "Be holy as I the Lord Your God am holy," Jesus brought the "politics of compassion": Be compassionate as your Father [in heaven] is compassionate, "be merciful as God is merciful" (Luke 6:36).
We must be careful. Jesus did not banish holiness as a spiritual and moral goal. He redefined it. Holiness means wholeness, not perfection. It is holiness transformed by compassion. It begins by letting God be compassionate to you.
Holiness without compassion does not lead to wholeness but to splitness, to the divided self. Holiness without compassion makes us hateful -- which is self-hate turned outward.
Holiness without compassion baptizes our bigotries, circumcises our fears, and demonizes those who are different.
It creates scapegoats to preserve our illusion of purity. Social philosopher Renč Girard has with devastating insight described the "sacred violence" which lies near the heart of all societies and all religion. We must cast out or kill those whom we designate as impure in order to stay pure. He suggests that the cross of Christ was the unveiling of this sacred violence and its abolition. But we are slow to learn; so the politics of holiness has led to inquisition and crusade and holocaust and witch hunt and Klan rallies and public lynching and hate crimes and the religious and political persecution of gay and lesbian persons.
Jesus was for holiness but not the external kind, rather the kind that flowed from a healed heart. You can't make yourself holy by a regimen of dos and don'ts. You are holy. Live out of your essential holiness. Holiness is the journey toward who you are, not the journey toward who you aren't. It is the journey to the true self God made you to be.
So he brought a politics of compassion as the answer to a failed politics of holiness.
He crossed every barrier of the purity maps: touching lepers, including women prominently into his circle of disciples. He healed the wrong people on the wrong day of the week. He had table fellowship with the unclean: the poor, tax collectors, sinners. He was so compassionate toward Samaritans that he was accused of being a "madman and a Samaritan." "I'm not a madman," was his elusive answer. (John 8:48)
Here was a man who was a danger to the fabric of society and religion based on purity maps.
III
Today's story pictures the new way of the kingdom which Jesus preached and enacted. Jesus was eating at a Pharisee's house -- which should give the Pharisee in all of us some hope. A woman who was on the wrong side of the purity maps in almost every zone imaginable -- a woman, a sinner, a prostitute, probably sick in some way -- came into the room.
What gave her the courage to come? Had she observed him eating with tax collectors and sinners? Did she hear him say, "No one is good but God," when someone called him good? -- which gave her the glimmer of hope that she didn't have to be perfect to be whole.
She entered the Pharisee's house as welcome as Hillary Clinton in Rush Limbaugh's house, or Jane Fonda in Jerry Falwell's house, or a gymnasium for all kinds of kids in Myers Park.
She entered the room and anointed Jesus' feet. The Pharisee was scandalized that she would do such a thing and that Jesus would let her.
Jesus knew what he was thinking and told this story: A creditor had two debtors; one owed him $50,000, the other $5,000. When they could not pay him, he freely forgave them both. Which would love him more? Jesus asked the Pharisee. The Pharisee answered, I suppose the one who was forgiven the greater debt.
"Is this your final answer?" Jesus asked. "Yes," said the Pharisee. "Then you have answered correctly," Jesus said, but then drove the point home:
Do you see this woman? I entered your house. You gave me no water for my feet, but she washed my feet with her tears and dried them with her own hair. You gave me no kiss of greeting, but she has not ceased kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with perfume. Her sins, though many, are forgiven, for she has loved much. But he who is forgiven little loves little.
Then he turned from the Pharisee (whose lamb had probably just gotten stuck halfway down his throat) to the woman and said the words she'd already heard, words which had brought her there and brought her tears, words which let down her hair and kissed his feet and anointed them with perfume, words which were life to her.
"Your sins are forgiven" was what he said. Then this: "Your faith has made you whole." Not purity maps, faith. Then "Go in peace."
I hope you can hear Christ's words to her as Christ's words to you this day.
IV
And I hope you will now hear his words, "Go in peace," not only as personal blessing but also as a challenge to the church.
Where would she, could she go and find Shalom, in a culture defined by purity maps?
God needs places of Shalom, communities of hospitality where people can go and thrive and grow once they've heard the word of the gospel, communities that stand for a deeper welcome and profounder wholeness than can be experienced in the culture.
Hospitality, says Henri Nouwen, is the creation of a safe space where people can come and be who they are without fear. Only in such a space can we move toward wholeness and true holiness.
So in the civil rights crisis of the 60's we at Myers Park Baptist Church voted ourselves "open to all and closed to none." Let us continue to learn what this means. In God's name, in the Spirit of Christ: "Open to all, closed to none."
Open to gay and lesbian people? Let us then say so, as well as be so.
Can we be open to people who believe more than we do as well as less than we do? Let us be such a place.
Open to people of less means as well as more means, purging ourselves of the prejudice against the poor and the rich? Let us be so.
Open to people of simpler faith as well as to those of more complex and less assured faith? Yes.
Open to all who want to walk the way of Jesus toward the kingdom he brought: Southern Baptists and Unitarians, Protestants and Catholics, Christian Scientists and Charismatic and Jungians and Buddhists and New Age spiritualists all seeking to learn what it means to say "Jesus Christ is Lord."
Open to all, people more conservative and more liberal and to those who despair of both those labels. Open to people of differing color and worship styles.
And are we willing to be influenced by them as well as influencing them, for all have something to give as well as something to receive. We are all learners of God.
Are we willing to dissolve our own purity maps with their own brands of spiritual superiority and political correctness and trust in God to make us whole?
Your faith, your trust, not your purity systems, said Jesus, have made you whole.
"Go in peace," he said to the woman, hoping that she would find that place within called peace, and hoping that she would find a community of peace who would travel with her on her road to wholeness and say with open arms, Shalom, welcome.
Come, Spirit, come, make and remake us, shape and reshape us into such a people.
Copyright © 2001 H. Stephen Shoemaker
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