Homily for the eleventh Sunday of the Year C 17 June 2007

There is a story that someone wrote in the preface to his book “I want to thank my wife, without whose help this book would have been written in half the time”. In similar vein, I want to thank Fr Sean for making the preparation for this homily much harder than I expected it to be, for we have been discussing this Gospel reading all the week and he has made me see how complex it is. The central action of this dramatic scene which Luke describes for us is the extravagant gesture of love and gratitude of the unnamed woman, the woman “who had a bad name in the town”, wiping the feet of Jesus with her unbraided hair, covering them with her kisses and anointing them with an alabaster jar of ointment. Now all four Gospels have a scene like this in them: I expect you are already thinking of Matthew, who tells us that shortly before the arrest of Jesus, he was at Bethany when a woman came up to him and anointed his head with what Matthew calls “very expensive ointment”, prompting Judas to complain “Why this waste?”, the money could have been given to the poor! Mark tells us the same story, with Jesus explaining “She has done a beautiful thing to me” and telling us that is like anointing his body for burial. John too tells the same story, placing it not in the house of Simon but in the house of Mary, Martha and Lazarus; and here it is Mary who anoints Jesus’ feet with her precious ointment and wipes them with her hair, and John tells us that “the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment”. Luke’s account of this scene is quite different- perhaps in fact, it is not a case of him remembering the scene differently from the others, but a completely different occasion altogether- we will let the biblical scholars worry about that! What we need to ask ourselves this morning is, what is Luke trying to tell us in the way he presents this story to us?

We know that this woman, whoever she may have been, is someone “who had a bad name in the town”. Many people have assumed that she was a prostitute, but the Gospel does not say that and we must beware of thinking that the only grave sins are sexual sins. I do not want to suggest that sexual sins are of no consequence, not at all, but there are many other ways of failing God, many other destructive and self-destructive things that we can do that put us at odds with God. The main thing is, that this woman recognises her sinfulness, that she makes a deliberate effort to put the past behind her, and to ask for Our Lord’s forgiveness. She receives in return the assurance of God’s loving forgiveness, and is once again enfolded in Our Lord’s embrace of unconditional, constant love, the only embrace that can truly satisfy, the only love that will never disappoint us or go sour, the only embrace that we can always rely on. On our recent parish pilgrimage, some of us went to Paray le Monial, to the Shrine of St Claude, and we recall what St Claude says of Jesus “You are the only friend, the only true friend”.

Now, commenting on this act of great love, this sign of such devotion, Jesus says in this passage “Her sins, her many sins, must have been forgiven her, or she would not have shown such great love.” And thus we come to the real point that Luke is determined to make here. The fact that this woman has received forgiveness has changed her whole attitude to life. She has received Our Lord’s boundless love, and her life is now a channel of that same love, she is pouring love out like the expensive ointment, in gratitude to her saviour. How appropriate it is that we read this Gospel only two days after celebrating the feast of the Sacred Heart, to which so many of us at St Saviour’s have such a strong devotion. On Friday we read at mass from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, where he says “The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given us”. That love we have received must not lie like so much stagnant water in our lives for kept to ourselves it will just go stale. We must let it instead bubble up in us like a fountain, and let it brim over into the lives of those around us. Our Lord is no longer walking the earth for us in our gratitude to approach him and throw ourselves upon him- but we know that we find Jesus in our fellow men and women, and we can show them the love we want to show him. We must try to become more like God in the way we treat people, in the way we love. I read the other day a wonderful phrase that sums this up in the writings of Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, the former Archbishop of Marseille. He is explaining how we must love our neighbour in exactly the same, unconditional, constant, affirming way that God loves each one of us, without thinking whether or not that neighbour is worthy of our love or not. He says “our love of others must borrow from the divine love its most characteristic traits, in the first place, that of gratuité- gratuitousness!

It is that gratuitous, undemanding love that we must, in our love for God, offer to God’s fellow creatures with whom we live. St Luke gives us a challenging example to follow, in this woman whose many sins have been forgiven and who now shows Our Lord such reckless, extravagant love in return. As Mark has Jesus say, “she has done a beautiful thing to me”. Tonight as we go to bed, shall we ask ourselves a question: “What beautiful thing have I done to Jesus today?” And as we turn over in our minds the day that lies ahead of us tomorrow, can we ask ourselves “What beautiful thing shall I do to Jesus tomorrow?” May we all attempt these acts of gratuitous love towards our fellow human beings, whether we like them or not, and may our dear parish, and this town, become like the home of Mary and Martha, “filled with the fragrance of the ointment”, the fragrance of love. Amen.