Companion pieces: Nobody Wants Nathan, on what it takes to see a debt you cannot see, and Blessed Is the Man, on the psalm David arrives at.
He is reclining when she comes in — leaning on one elbow, feet away from the table, his back to the door. She can reach him without pushing past anyone.
She has brought a flask of ointment, so she has not wandered in. She came to do this.
The tears are not part of the plan. They fall on his feet, and there is no towel. She lets her hair down in a room full of men and wipes them with it, and then she kisses his feet, and goes on kissing them. Not once as she arrives. From the moment she comes in until Jesus finally speaks, she is still doing it.
Nobody stops her. Nobody says anything at all. The host is watching, the guests are watching, and a woman every man in that room could name is on the floor at a guest's feet, weeping, with her hair loose.
It goes on long enough to become unbearable.
And the man whose house it is says nothing, and thinks something.
What he thinks is this: if this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.
It is a tidy sentence. It settles three things at once. It settles her — who, and what sort. It settles Jesus — not a prophet. And it settles Simon, though that is the part he does not notice, because to call someone that sort, you have to be standing above them.
He does not say any of it aloud. There is nobody at that table he needs to say it to.
Then Jesus says, Simon, I have something to say to you.
And Simon says, Say it, Teacher.
Not prophet. Teacher. He has just ruled the other word out, and reaches for the one he has left.
Simon never opened his mouth. Jesus answers him anyway.
He tells him a story.
A moneylender has two debtors. One owes five hundred denarii, the other fifty. A denarius is a day's wage, so the first owes about a year and a half of work and the second about eight weeks.
Neither can pay. That is the only thing the story tells us about their situation. Not that they would not pay, or had not got round to it. They could not. So the lender cancels both.
Which of them will love him more?
The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the larger debt.
The I suppose is the giveaway. It is an easy question and Simon is faintly bored by it. He gives the right answer in the tone of a man who cannot see why he is being asked.
You have judged rightly.
Simon takes that as praise. He does not realise he has just judged himself.
Then he turns towards the woman. And goes on speaking to Simon.
Do you see this woman?
Simon has been looking at her all evening. He has not seen her once. He saw a sinner come in, and once you have called someone that, you lose sight of the person.
Then the list.
I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair.
You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet.
You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment.
Not one of the three things Simon failed to do was extravagant. Water for dusty feet, a kiss at the door, a little oil on the head — ordinary courtesy, the sort you give a guest without thinking about it. He withheld all three from a man he had invited himself.
And every single thing the woman did was the thing he had not done. She washed the feet he left dirty. She gave the greeting he withheld. She brought the oil he did not bring. She did his job, from the floor, while he sat and worked out what sort of person she was.
Simon had been running a debt all evening. It took somebody reading it out to him, item by item, before he could see it.
Your sins are forgiven.
He says it to her. It is the first thing he has said to her all evening. He has been talking about her for some minutes, to a man who would not look at her, and now he turns the sentence round and gives it to the person it belongs to.
The others at the table start on a question of their own — who is this, who even forgives sins — and he does not answer them. He has one more thing to say and it is not to them.
Your faith has saved you; go in peace.
Faith.
She has not said a word. Not one. There is no confession in this story, no statement of belief, nothing she declares or promises or undertakes. Luke gives her no line at all. What she did was come into a house where she was not wanted, and kneel down where everyone could see her, and stay there.
That is what he calls faith.
Not a thing she worked out. Not a thing she said. A direction she went in, when everything she knew about herself was an argument for going the other way.
You would think that the longer a person walks with God, the less they sin. I would like to think that about myself.
Or perhaps what really happens is that we sort our sins into piles, and most of them go in the pile that does not count. It takes something out of the ordinary, something that will not fit the pile, before we think: oh no, I am a sinner.
That happened to me this week.
There is no point naming it, and I know what happens if I do. If I told you it was a small lie, you would think, well, that is not so bad, everybody does that. If I told you it was an affair, you would draw breath and wonder how I could have. It was neither.
But it was sin.
And there are only two things to do with it. I can look at how far I have fallen, or I can look at how deep he has reached to get me.
The first is the one I reach for. Guilt, a proper confession, and a few days walking about with my head down like a man who has let the side down. It feels like the respectful thing to do. It is not. It is the ledger again, with me still looking for something to pay with.
David had far more to answer for than I have, and no Gospel behind him to lean on, and he arrives here:
I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,” and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. Selah.
He does not clear the debt. He stops arguing about it.
The overcoming is in the coming. Over and over again.
She never said a word, and he called it faith. And the last thing he said to her was not try harder, or do not do that again. It was go in peace.
That is what is on offer. Not a clean record. A cancelled one — and peace, in a room where every person there knew exactly what she was.