Text: We know that a person is reckoned as righteous, not by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ.

Prayer: Open our ears, loving Saviour, to hear your Word.
Grant us grace to respond to you with joyful love.
(Put on head scarf.)

Hello, I'm Joanna. I'm one of the disciples who followed Jesus and provided a bit of financial backing for his ministry. This time travel is really exciting - here I am, whisked out of first century Judea and landed into the far future. It's been wonderful to find disciples of Jesus in this totally different world, and I'm so happy to come along this morning and tell you what it was like, actually BEING there with him.

I'm going to tell you a story - one of my favourites. It's all about the time Simon the Pharisee invited Jesus to dinner. Of course, we women weren't invited, we just joined the people who came in and stood around the dining room walls to listen quietly to the conversation. I hear you don't do that? Not even for a very wise visitor?

Mind you, we knew right from the start that this dinner wasn't going to go smoothly. Sure, Simon wanted to talk to Jesus, But the poor man was so terribly respectable that he seemed to be uncertain about whether or not he should have actually invited this person into his home.
He was probably worried that Jesus might be ceremonially unclean. Some pharisees are DREADFULLY picky about being "clean". They firmly believe that God won't accept them if they don't keep a whole lot of laws and regulations, especially about "purity".

Well, pure or not, this pharisee was dreadfully rude. When Jesus arrived, Simon didn't greet him with the usual kiss or the little anointing on the head. There wasn't even a deacon with a bowl of water and a towel, so Jesus had to go in to dinner with dusty feet. I thought that was pretty poor.

Anyway, in comes this woman. If I hadn't already heard about her Reputation I would have been able to work it out from the look on Simon's face. He wasn't happy to see her. But I'd seen her having a long and emotional conversation with Jesus the day before, so I wasn't surprised when she went straight to his feet.
Oh, I should explain. This was a well-off household, so the dining room was arranged Roman style. The guests reclined on couches with their feet pointing away from the table, and they propped themselves up on the left elbow at the table and ate with the right hand. Anyway, this woman came up behind Jesus, carrying a jar of ointment. When she saw him she was so moved that she started to cry.
Her tears were dripping onto his feet, and he turned round and gave her a little smile. Simon was not impressed. He was even less impressed at what she did next. I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. She knelt down, then she actually untied her hair, right there in that respectable family home, and tried to dry Jesus' feet with it. Then, as if that wasn't bad enough, she opened the jar of ointment and started kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment.
Susanna was so embarrassed she got a fit of the giggles and had to go outside. The dinner guests were embarrassed and angry, too, and I thought Simon was going to explode. Jesus could see what was going through his mind: if this man was the prophet that he was rumoured to be, he'd know what she was, and kick her out. But Jesus didn't.
Instead he said, "Simon, I have something to say to you." Simon forced himself to respond politely, and Jesus put up this hypothetical situation for his consideration. Let's suppose, he said, that there was a creditor who had two debtors. One owed 500 days' pay, and the other owed 50 days' pay, right? Neither of them had any money, so the creditor just cancelled both debts. (Now THERE was a REALLY hypothetical situation! Nobody would ever be THAT economically irrational.)
Then says Jesus, "Which of them will love him more?" Well, Simon trotted out the obvious answer, the one who was forgiven the greater debt. And Jesus said, You're right! Then he turned round to the woman and said, "You see this woman, Simon?" Simon looked down his nose at her. He was obviously still wishing like mad that Jesus would do the decent thing and shoo her away.

But he didn't. Instead he started comparing Simon's bad manners with the woman's extravagant actions. "I entered your house," he said, "You gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair.
You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment".
Then he went on to tell Simon that the woman had been forgiven for many sins, and that was why she was demonstrating such great love. People who have only been forgiven a little, he said, only love a little. Then he turned round to the woman to reassure her - your sins ARE forgiven.

The men reclining at the table started asking each other who did this guy think he was, forgiving sins, just like that? I wasn't listening. I was looking at the woman. Whenever I smell that particular kind of ointment, I remember her face.
It was thin, red eyed, wet with tears, and her hair was hanging down all damp on the ends. And it was the most beautiful face in the world. She was smiling. It was a smile like - like a sunrise after a very dark night.

Then very gently Jesus said, "Your faith has saved you. Go in peace."

That was some years ago, now. Mary Magdalene and I were talking about it one night, in front of the fire. She's got a wise head on her shoulders, Mary. The more we thought about it the more we realised how revolutionary Jesus really is.
Forgiveness of sins and being righteous has always been THE most important part of the spiritual life of really devout people, like Simon. That's why they're so fussy about being pure and clean. Mary thought maybe that was why Simon was rude to Jesus, not making him properly welcome.
He'd probably heard that this man was always hanging around with sick people and women, and didn't want to touch him, for fear of being contaminated. Jesus simply didn't care whether he was clean or not.
Mary figured that if you really believed that Israel's disobedience to God was the reason why we suffer under the Roman occupation, then having a law-breaker like Jesus as your guest would be uncomfortable for Simon. And as for that woman - well, technically she was committing adultery - a capital crime - right there in Simon's dining room! I couldn't help feeling sorry for him, poor man.
Mary agreed with that, but then commented that she felt sorry for him for a more important reason. She pushed another stick into the fire and said that it was sad that he was working so hard trying to earn God's approval when Jesus would have just given it to him.
We'd burnt half the firewood by the time we decided that Simon's problem was a common one. We would all like to see ourselves as people who are capable of being good and earning God's love. It's not easy to admit to God or to ourselves that all our efforts to make ourselves good are a complete waste of time.
Then we decided that trying to earn God's favour by keeping the law was worse than that - you can't love God and look after your neighbour if you spend all your time measuring your own goodness. We felt that was the worst kind of self-centredness. Do you people think that's what sin is? I wish I had more time to discuss it with you.

Then we tried to work out what it is that Jesus does for people that relieves us of our burdens and lets us have peace.

"Let's start with our own experience," Mary said, "what did he do for you, Joanna?" I poked at the fire for a while, and then I said, "Well, for a long time my sickness was controlling my life - I couldn't do this or that because of the pain. All I could think about was me and my sickness and my need to be looked after.
I don't know how Chuza put up with me. I was like a fish tangled up in a net. When I met Jesus, wow! He didn't relate to my disease - he related to ME. He behaved as if I was somebody who mattered, somebody who had something special to GIVE.
You know the feeling, Mary, to Jesus, you're not just a sex object and domestic slave, you're somebody to be treated with respect and compassion. Basically, he cut away the net that had me all tangled up. He freed me from my selfishness and made me God-centred instead."

Mary gazed into the coals for a while. "It was different for me," she said. "I was a complete mess in every way. When you've got demons, you're so out of control you can't even be selfish. I was seeing and hearing things that weren't real and the demons told me the most terrible lies about people, usually the few who tried to be kind to me. The fear was just awful."
She paused, and I could see her remembering. "Then along came Jesus," she said. "The demons made me afraid of him, but he just took me gently by the shoulders and looked into my eyes. I looked back, and in his eyes I saw reality, for the first time.
They tell me the evil spirits screamed as Jesus ordered them out. I don't know about that, but I do know that since then I've been a whole person. The Holy Spirit lives in me now. I can love God and care about other people, and the more I live with Jesus the more saved and whole I become."
The embers of our fire were fading as she added, "John says that when he met Jesus it was like being born again. Andrew says he was a slave in his own little Egypt and Jesus led him out to the Promised Land, and when he got there he realised he'd come home for the first time."

By the time the fire had burned down to one tiny glow we had concluded that what Jesus does is basically the same for everyone. You get attracted to him by his genuine care and respect for you, and you start to believe in him, to really trust him. Then he gives you a right relationship with God.
Better: he includes you in his own relationship with God. That's a relationship of love and worship. After that you're so busy loving God and sharing that love with other people that you feel less and less desire to be selfish. Is this how you 20th century Christians understand it? WE thought it was a good way of describing the life Jesus lives in us.
But I still had problems.
"Mary," I asked, "If all we need to do to become righteous is to let Jesus love us and trust him to give us this great relationship with God, and save us from selfishness, then we don't need to work hard at obeying the law, do we? But if we don't have the Law, how do we tell what's right and what's wrong? What happens about the law, now we have Jesus?"

Mary yawned and stretched.
"Joanna," she said with a little smile, "The Holy Spirit hasn't talked to me about that, but I have heard that Paul of Tarsus has had some ideas. Let's go talk to him, next time he's in Judea?"

So we did, but that's another story.

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