Love flows from sins forgiven

Sermon for the Festival of St. Mary Magdalene

Song of Solomon 3:5-6, 8:6-7  +  Luke 7:36-50

We probably know Mary Magdalene best from her role on Easter Sunday, as one of the faithful women who had accompanied Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem, who had served Him and provided for His earthly needs, who had witnessed His death on the cross and His burial, and who had gone to attend to His supposedly dead body on Easter Sunday morning. When she saw the stone rolled away from the tomb, she ran straight back to tell the apostles, and after Peter and John saw the empty tomb for themselves, Mary stayed behind weeping. And then Jesus appeared to her alive and finally revealed Himself to her by saying her name, “Mary.”

She may or may not have been the penitent sinful woman in this evening’s Gospel from Luke 7. Her name first comes up in Luke’s Gospel right after this account, where we’re told that Jesus had driven seven demons out of Mary Magdalene, and being demon possessed strongly implies that she was previously living a life that was sinfully separated from God.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if she’s the woman from this Gospel account, because the saints’ days in the Lutheran liturgical calendar aren’t meant to focus on the saint, but on the Scripture lessons associated with their day. So let’s spend a few moments reviewing the account in Luke 7.

The three main characters here are Jesus, the woman, and Simon the Pharisee. As Jesus sits at the table at Simon’s dinner, a woman enters and approaches Jesus with great humility. She stands before Him crying, and her tears fall on Jesus’ feet. She wipes them with her hair. She kisses them. And she pours expensive perfume on them.

Remember what Isaiah wrote? How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who proclaims peace, who brings glad tidings of good things, who proclaims salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns!” That verse is applied to all ministers of the Gospel, but only because it was Jesus Himself who first proclaimed that good news, that “Gospel” of good things, of salvation, of the free forgiveness of sins through faith in Him, even to the sinner who has committed the filthiest sins and lived in open hostility to God his whole life.

To a person like that, like the sinful woman in the Gospel, whether it was Mary Magdalene or another woman, the feet of Jesus, the One who came from God to atone for her sins and to bring her a promise of free forgiveness, were truly beautiful, and her tears and her peculiar attention to Jesus’ feet flowed from a heart that knew just how badly she had offended her God, just how tightly she had formerly embraced the filthy devil, just how close she had been to eternal death, but now, just how wonderful her God was, who offered her forgiveness, life, and salvation through this Son of Man sitting at the table in front of her.

But to Simon, as a self-righteous Pharisee, who already thought he was better than most people, including Jesus, her behavior was disgusting, and so was Jesus’ acceptance of it. If this man were a prophet, he would know what kind of a woman this is, and he would send her away in the disgrace she deserves.

But Jesus took pity on Simon, too, and told him a very simple, very gentle parable to snap him out of his self-righteous condemnation of that woman who had shown such humility and love to Jesus. Two men owed money to a lender. One owed 500. The other owed 50. Neither could pay, so the lender forgave them both. Which one would be more grateful? Which one would love the lender more? Obviously, the one who owed more.

Then Jesus goes on to show how that little parable played out in real life. The woman who knew how terribly sinful she was, who knew she owed a huge debt to God, was promised the forgiveness of her enormous debt through Jesus, so she loved Him very much, like the woman portrayed in this evening’s first lesson from the Song of Solomon, who sought out the one whom her soul loved and wouldn’t let go of him once she found him, because “love is strong as death.” She showed that love by her tender, humble acts of kindness toward Jesus, with her tears and her hair and her kisses on Jesus’ feet and her pouring out of the perfume that she used to use on herself as she practiced her sinful adultery, but now pours it out on Jesus’ feet, as one who has abandoned her sinful life and has found forgiveness with Jesus and a new life devoted to Him.

Simon, on the other hand, didn’t even show Jesus the customary courtesies of a dinner host. No water for Jesus even to wash His own feet. No kiss of greeting. No oil to anoint the head. Simon didn’t just love Jesus “little.” He didn’t love Jesus at all. Because he didn’t view Jesus as His Savior from any sins. He didn’t look to Jesus for forgiveness for anything.

But the woman’s demonstration of love showed everyone the faith that God already saw in her heart, and so Jesus says to her, Your sins are forgiven…Your faith has saved you. Go in peace. Now, which came first, the pronouncement of forgiveness, the faith, or the acts of love? Well clearly the faith came first, which came from the word she had already heard about Jesus, which brought her to this dinner hall and which already made her a forgiven daughter of God. Then came the acts of love. And then came the pronouncement of forgiveness, affirming the righteousness that was hers by faith, and also giving her another firm and solid word of God on which to rest her faith and build her faith, so that the next time her conscience troubled her over her past sins, the next time Satan tried to remind her of what a wretch she was, the next time a Pharisee or another person should treat her with contempt because of the filthy life she had once lived, she could turn back to those words Jesus spoke to her again and again and be comforted again by the word of Christ. And if this was St. Mary Magdalene, she didn’t just go away after that day, but stayed close to Jesus for the rest of His earthly life, and then stayed close to His Church for the rest of her earthly life. As we all must.

Today’s festival is about the basics of Christianity: First, Repentance. Your debt of sin is far greater than you imagine it to be. Not one of us here needs to be forgiven only a little. So come to Jesus daily in repentance, not so that you can keep on living in your sin, but so that you can get rid of it, first before God, and then in your life going forward. Second, Faith. Trust in the faithful Lord Jesus, who is the propitiation, the atoning sacrifice for your sins, and not only for yours, but for the sins of the whole world. Third, Forgiveness. Whether it’s the promise of the Gospel you’ve heard hundreds of times before, promising forgiveness through Christ, or whether it’s your Baptism, or the Lord’s Supper, or private absolution from the pastor to you individually, cling to those promises and know that when God pronounces you forgiven, not even hell itself can override it. Finally, Love. Let demonstrations of love flow from your faith in Christ, so that everything you do is for love of Jesus, who loved you first and gave Himself for you. Let Mary’s example spur you on to love Jesus as she did, always remembering the depths from which Jesus pulled you up, so that you never despise His forgiveness as Simon did.

Repentance, faith, forgiveness, and love. These are the things we learn from the Gospel for St. Mary Magdalene’s day. May the Lord make us ever more like her. Amen.