She loved much
The woman with the alabaster jar
Simon the Pharisee had invited Jesus to dinner, correctly and coolly, offering none of the usual courtesies. And into that respectable gathering came a woman from the wrong part of town — known in the city as a sinner, almost certainly a prostitute. Uninvited, she made straight for Jesus, broke open a jar of costly perfume, and wept at his feet, wetting them with her tears and wiping them with her hair.
Simon was scandalized; a real prophet, he thought, would know what kind of woman this was and recoil. Jesus knew exactly what kind of woman she was, and did not recoil. Instead he told Simon a little parable about two debtors, one forgiven much and one forgiven little, and asked which would love the lender more. The answer was obvious.
Her many sins are forgiven, Jesus said, for she loved much. The lavish love pouring out at his feet was not the cause of her forgiveness but the overflow of it. She had been forgiven an enormous debt, and she knew it, and the knowing made her love extravagant. Simon, sure he owed little, loved little.
“Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little.”
— Jesus, of the woman who anointed him — Luke 7:47 (WEB)
To love God more, see more clearly how much you have been forgiven — extravagant love flows from a forgiven debt fully felt.
“As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.”
Tepid love almost never announces itself as a forgiveness problem; it just feels like duty, like the fire has gone out for no reason we can name. The interior work is to follow the coldness back to its source — the quiet, respectable arithmetic by which we shrink our debt to Simon's size — and to let the true sum be felt again, until the cancelled weight of it rekindles a love no discipline could light.
This week, instead of trying to drum up more love for God, sit with the size of your forgiveness — name specifically what you have been spared and that it is removed as far as the east is from the west. Let the gratitude become love.
Respectability is the great anesthetic of the soul; let it persuade you that your sins were modest and your debt small, and your love stays correct and cold. But the heart that grasps the full size of what was forgiven loves with an extravagance Simon never reached — a fire that gratitude keeps burning.
There is a direct line between how much you know yourself forgiven and how much you love. Cold, dutiful, joyless love is almost always the symptom of a small sense of forgiveness — of quietly believing, like Simon, that your debt was modest and your sins respectable. The extravagant lovers of God are the ones who have seen the true size of their debt and felt the whole of it cancelled.
The way to love God more, then, is not mainly to try to love him more. It is to see more clearly how much you have been forgiven. If your love for God has grown tepid, the question to ask is not just where your devotion went, but where your sense of the size of your forgiveness went. The woman at his feet had not forgotten what she had been spared.
- Has my love for God grown tepid?
- Do I quietly believe, like Simon, that my debt was modest?
- Where has my sense of how much I've been forgiven shrunk?
Lord, show me again the size of the debt you cancelled, removed as far as the east is from the west. Let me, like her, love much because I have been forgiven much. Amen.