The Rev. Canon Mariclair Partee
The dramatic events from today’s Gospel reading have provided material for innumerable artists- a dinner party at the lavish home of a Pharisee, a member of the Jewish upper class, Jesus, and a woman driven by devotion to wash his feet with her tears, anoint them with perfume, and wipe them clean with her hair, all while the host stands over her in judgment. That’s pretty exciting stuff and the paintings that have resulted are equally dynamic. My favorite is “Feast at the House of Simon the Pharisee,” painted by Peter Paul Rubens in 1618, now part of the collection of The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. I have not seen it in person, but even in reproduction its monumental size and rich colors make quite an impact. The painting is about 9 feet long by 6 feet tall, and is a tight focus on the dinner table at Simon’s house, the people slightly larger than life size. No fewer than fifteen figures crowd the scene, including multiple servants and a snarling dog, searching for crumbs under the corner of the table. The white tablecloth divides the painting into top and bottom halves. Above the horizontal expanse of the cloth one sees the servants at work in the background, passing baskets of food and dishes and bread. Below the line of servants’ faces one finds the various dinner guests, their faces painted to show their reactions to the actions of this unclean woman, in the lower middle of the scene. At Jesus’ left, Simon, the host, covers his face partially with a dinner napkin, presumably appalled at how wrong his party has gone. Next to him a tight group of five men argue, some looking repulsed at this rabbi who allows his feet to be touched by such a woman as this, others simply bewildered. The final two dinner guests, both heavily bearded, are casting their gaze into the lower half of the painting, rapt with judgment or bewilderment it is not clear, watching the woman as she washes the feet of her Lord.
In typical Rubens’ style, she is a large, full-bodied woman, dressed in sumptuous fabrics of plum and silver and peach, in the Renaissance style, and her hair is, for 1st century Palestine, improbably golden blonde. Of all the figures, only she and Jesus are shown in their entirety, not blocked by furniture or other people. Jesus is wearing a blue robe, draped with a red cloak, and he is silhouetted against a dark architectural background. In the midst of the confusion of bodies in this massive painting, Jesus and the woman seem alone in the right half, their skin radiating light. The woman caresses Jesus’ feet, an ointment bottle in the foreground, and seems lost in the actions of physical worship, her eyes half closed, her face transcendent. Jesus looks not at her, but at the group around the table, and gestures to the example she is setting in her willingness to cross lines of social boundary to express her devotion to her Lord. In the background a single servant casts her eyes toward Jesus, as if some new world has been opened for her at that moment.
In my mind, this painting shows the exact instance of Jesus’ telling of the parable we have just heard, the parable of the weight of debts and the relative lightness of those debts forgiven. As understanding dawns on the men at the table of the meaning of his words, the tight group pulls away to argue among themselves about the law and the scriptural basis for forgiveness of debts, the host, Simon, is aghast at his own oversights in hospitality, his failure to provide his guest with the comforts due a stranger and his own sharp judgment when he was so lacking, and the two bearded men at the far end of the table are questioning, perhaps, the social order they have grown old in, and are looking at the woman at Jesus’ feet with wonder and awe.
My eye continues to be drawn back to the servant girl, the fringe figure whose eyes provide a counterpoint to the action of Jesus and the woman, and in her gaze I found my own understanding of the parable Jesus told that day. This parable of forgiven debts and equivalent love seems, at first hearing counter to other parables Jesus has told. In the parable of the vineyard, he chastened the workers who worked a full day and were paid the regular wage for their displeasure that those who came later worked less, were paid the same. Be happy when you have been given what you are due, he seemed to say, and do not worry yourself with the fairness of other’s charity. Does this not then call into question the premise that one who has a greater debt will be more pleased with that debt’s forgiveness than one whose debt was less? Shouldn’t we all be equally pleased that our debts were forgiven at all, love equally, and not cast our thoughts to the debts of others?
But this is not the point- these parables are not an even comparison. The debts forgiven- 500 denarii in one case, 50 in the other- were both crushingly large amounts. We are not told anything about the debtors themselves, but we must assume they were men of little wealth to have borrowed in the first place, and regardless, these sums are large- a single denarius was valued the same as 10 donkeys, and was well over a day’s wage. So for the creditor to have pardoned a debt of 50 denarii was munificent, and saved this man and his family years of saving and scrimping and going without, and for this the debtor was understandably pleased. However, for the man who owed 500 denarii, this was a sum that probably could not have been paid back in his lifetime, and would have weighed upon his family and subsequent generations of his family, perhaps caused one or two of them to be sold into slavery, and so when that debt was forgiven, the entire family was given its freedom.
The correlation of these Biblical sums to modern day equivalence can be misleading, though, in our day when credit is still readily available and relatively cheap, and so I think it makes more sense to think of this parable in terms of the forgiveness rather than the debts. We all have burdens that we carry with us, each day. We know that some are lighter than others, though we only truly know the weight of our own, and perhaps we know from personal experience that some are downright crushing and we aren’t sure we’ll be able to make another day under their weight. Regardless of the weight that we carry, in God we find a set of arms that can hold all we can load upon them, we find forgiveness that goes to our very souls, sees every ugly, embarrassing, shameful bit of us that might exist, and loves us anyway, loves us even more for being so imperfectly human. And so, rather than calculating the modern day value of a denarius, it is more helpful to imagine the burden that you carry suddenly lifted, your shoulders suddenly rising on their own from the lightness, feeling the loving embrace of God wrapped around us and supporting us. This is what we have in Jesus, this is what we were promised on the cross and are promised each time we approach this altar- that we are loved, and worth loving, no matter how great our debts. And in that love there is release, and freedom, and that newfound worth is enough to make a woman, cast out of society for whatever mistakes, fall down at her Savior’s feet, and bathe him with her tears and her kisses, and dry the dust of the road from those feet with her hair.
That forgiveness is enough to tear a hole in the fabric of a society neatly defined by law and power, and rearrange it into a new world where forgiveness is a promise, where there are no strangers but only family, all to be reflected, in a flash of understanding, in the eyes of a servant girl suddenly set free.
