“Two men owed money to a certain moneylender, one five hundred, the other fifty.  Since neither could pay, he canceled both their debts.  Now which one will love him more?”

“I suppose the one who had the bigger debt canceled” (Luke 7:41-43).

Here’s a link to the entire passage!

We all say we want compassion and need compassion, but the actual doing of compassion can get … complicated.

We want and need compassion because the world we have created is both messy and messed up.  It’s messy because, when we’re dealing with the issues that arise within any community of humans, the right way isn’t always clear or obvious.  We see things differently, value different things, and therefore disagree often about what is to be done.

But messed-up runs deeper than messy.  Our need and our desire for compassion are rooted in what a mess we have made of things.  We who want and need compassion are also on the hook for why so much compassion is so urgently needed: we too are the makers of the mess.

In this week’s passage, Simon the Pharisee’s dinner party is interrupted by a “sinful woman.”  Assuming this means she was a prostitute, I think we’d all agree that that’s a sinful practice.  But who’s the main sinner here, a desperate woman who feels she has no other choice?  Her, ahem, customers?  Small village life that doesn’t have, or doesn’t create, the resources for impoverished women, so that they won’t have to sell themselves?  A culture that tends to think in terms of people getting what they deserve?  An Empire that drains resources from its colonies, so that things can go well in Rome and who really cares what happens in Galilee?  Because, thanks to us all, our world is messed up, and that means it’s also complicated.

Unlike Simon, who seems to have the woman already neatly pigeon-holed, Jesus receives the gifts she offers: her tears, her washing of his feet, that precious perfume.  He asks Simon a question about love and debt to make a point about love and debt: love doesn’t employ bookkeepers.  (No knock on all who work in bookkeeping, accounting and financial services – we need you!) Yes, the woman “owes” a lot.  She doesn’t owe anything to Simon, but whatever she owes, she has no way of paying.  And she sees Jesus as probably the first, last and only person she’ll ever meet who’s not keeping a moral balance sheet on her.

She creates a scene that is awkward for everyone, except Jesus; he is neither embarrassed nor uncomfortable with who she is and what she does to him.  And he pronounces her forgiven, not because she has finally figured out how to pay her own way out of the mess of her life, but rather because she responds to his loving presence with her own.

Compassion knows no quid-pro-quos, no credits versus debits, no “reasonable exchange” of back-scratchings.  When it comes to God’s compassion, there’s no getting what you’ve earned; instead we receive what we need.  And as he moves on from this village, Jesus’s compassion leaves one villager, maybe more, with an unaccustomed, unfamiliar and wonderful peace, and perhaps a lot of other villagers still angrily toting up credits and debits, still keeping score.

We all need compassion.  We all want it.  But we cannot receive it on our terms, which means we cannot give it on our terms.  Compassion in our messy, messed-up world will be complicated, but that can’t dissuade us, because we are called to follow Jesus.

Where are you like Simon the Pharisee – and towards whom do you have a hard time being compassionate?  How could you pray for yourself, and for that person/those people?  What might some first steps of repentance on your part look like?