Readings of the day: 1 Timothy 4:12-16; Psalm 111:7-8, 9, 10; Luke 7:36-50
Thursday of the 24th week in Ordinary Time
Meals can be great occasions to unite people. But have some of us not experienced how meals can be occasions, sadly, for the creation or deepening of divisions among friends and acquaintances, households and families? The conflict over a contentious political or moral issue at a meal for Thanksgiving, Christmas, or other holidays is even somewhat stereotyped.
Fr. Eugene LaVerdière, a priest and Biblical scholar of the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament, wrote a book in the mid-1990s entitled Dining in the Kingdom of God. This book comments on the many meal scenes of Luke’s Gospel. Fr. Laverdière considers the meal scene we hear in today’s Gospel to be the centrepiece of a lengthy section of Luke (chapters 6 to 8) that extends from Jesus’ naming of his twelve Apostles to his healings of Jairus’ daughter and the woman with a hemorrhage. In this section of Luke, Jesus emphasizes unity that transcends many social and religious distinctions: Gender, social and religious status, ritual cleanliness, sinners versus the less sinful (since nobody, except for Jesus and Mary, is sinless), and so forth.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus finds himself at dinner at the home of Simon the Pharisee. A woman enters Simon’s house, bathes Jesus’ “feet with her tears and [dries] them with her hair,” and anoints his feet with oil. Immediately, Simon questions this woman’s presence in his house: If Jesus were a true prophet, he would know “that she is a sinner.” This draws from Jesus the parable of the two debtors, with the essential point that the greater debt or sin a person has to be forgiven, the more love with which that person will respond to having been forgiven.
The meal scene in Luke’s Gospel today is lengthy and detailed. We might focus, rightly, on the extravagance of the probably expensive oil with which the woman anoints Jesus; the drama of her washing Jesus’ feet with her profuse tears and drying them with her hair, as a sign of the main point of Jesus’ parable that follows: The woman’s sin is great, and so is her love poured out for Jesus upon forgiving her.
But Eugene LaVerdière says that this meal scene, placed within a longer section of Luke on Jesus’ call of his Apostles and early Galilean ministry, centres, in a word, on unity. Jesus chooses twelve Apostles to recall the twelve tribes of the one nation of Israel in the Old Testament. Meals in Jesus’ time, LaVerdière says, were ideally a sign of unity across tribal and social or religious status boundaries; the unity of the nation of Israel.
Other commentators on today’s Gospel meal scene invite us to pay attention not only to the fact that a woman interrupts Jesus’ meal with Simon in this way and that the woman is a serious sinner, or that she takes the place of a servant or slave by washing and anointing Jesus’ feet. This is despite her obvious wealth, since she could afford expensive ointment.
On top of all this, the woman would have had to enter the dining room along its edge to anoint Jesus’ feet as she does. This is because, at meals like this in Israel at Jesus’ time, the meal guests would usually recline, with their heads toward the table at the centre of the room and their feet toward the outer walls. This woman—because she is a woman and a serious sinner, but also literally, physically—enters and anoints Jesus’ feet from the periphery of the room. When Simon the Pharisee attempts to ostracize her further, to push her farther to the (more figurative) periphery on account of her sin, Jesus corrects him with a parable. And then he restores the woman to unity, social and religious: “Your faith has saved you, go in peace.”
The well-being of the ancient nation of Israel depended on this kind of unity. The well-being of our social units, households, and families depends on the unity to which Jesus calls us today. And our salvation depends on this same unity.
No comments:
Post a Comment