How dare you speak of grace?

A while back I spent a good chunk of a week at a denominational pastors' retreat in the Alberta foothills just north of Calgary. One of the things we did during our worship times each day was spend some time “dwelling in the Word.” The specific text we focused on each session was Luke 7:36-50, the story where Jesus is anointed by a “sinful woman” at the home of Simon the Pharisee. It’s a scandalous story—a woman of ill repute showing up a bunch of religious elites, crashing their party with her sensuous, inappropriate display of penitence, love, and devotion. Even more scandalously, Jesus praises her as an example to emulate, claims to forgive her sin, and sends her away in peace. One can only imagine what must have been going on in the minds of the esteemed, religious host and his respectable dinner guests!

During one session, we were invited to creatively re-imagine and re-present the text to others.  How might this story have played out today? Who would the characters have been?  Where did we see ourselves in the story?  Now I am, it must be said, an incorrigible rationalist and about as creative as mud…  And I enjoy role-playing about as much as a root canal… But it was good and necessary for me to (painfully, awkwardly) enter into this story.  Personally.  It’s one thing to affirm that this woman recognized her need for mercy, grace, and forgiveness and that I should do the same.  It’s quite another to imagine myself exhibiting that kind of vulnerability, social disinhibition, and desperate need.

(Conversely, it’s not at all hard to imagine myself as a religious “expert” hosting a bunch of guests to [respectably] discuss matters of theology.  Why, oh why, are the people Jesus praises in the gospels so rarely smarty-pants types who have spent a lot of time studying, analyzing, and parsing the ways of God?)