What's your MRGB rating?

Sit with that question for a second before I explain it, and notice if some kind of number comes to mind anyway. MRGB. Minimum Required Good Behavior. Most of us carry a rating like that somewhere in the back of our minds, an invisible bar we're measuring ourselves against. Good enough day. Good enough week. Good enough person. We keep score, mostly against ourselves, and mostly in private.

I was reading Luke 7 recently, and three words stopped me cold.

Jesus is speaking about a woman that an entire room had already written off, and he says, *"her sins, which are many, are forgiven"* (Luke 7:47, ESV). I've read that many times. But this time, for whatever reason, I felt my shoulders actually drop. Something in my whole body relaxed. I live with a pretty steady sense of not living up to my own standards, let alone God's. Hearing Jesus name it that plainly, no minimizing, no softening, "which are many," and then hearing what comes right after, "are forgiven," does something to a person. I've thought more than once about recording myself saying it and playing it back once a day. I'm not entirely joking. (I’m editing this blog and I’m getting goosebumps.)

Let me tell you where it happens. Simon, a Pharisee, invites Jesus to dinner. I want to be careful here, because it's easy to hear "Pharisee" and picture a vaudeville villain twirling a handlebar mustache. That's not who these men were. Simon is a serious, respected man who has spent his life trying to live rightly before God. Hosting a visiting rabbi was an honorable thing to do, the kind of thing a good religious leader in his community was expected to do.

There was a custom back then that when a traveling teacher dined someone's home, the house was open to any who wanted to hear the rabbi teach. Neighbors could stand along the walls just to listen, even if they hadn't been invited to the meal. That's how someone gets into this story who was never on the guest list.

Luke tells us she was "a woman of the city, who was a sinner." That's all we're told. He doesn't name her sin. He doesn't name her. The idea that she was a prostitute came from a sermon by Gregory the Great, centuries after the fact, not from the text itself. I think Luke's silence is doing something on purpose. If we're never told her specific sin, she can be anyone. She can be you or me.

Here is what Luke tells us:
“And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was reclining at table in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head and kissed his feet and anointed them with the ointment.” — Luke 7:37–38 (ESV)

Her tears are literally falling onto his feet, not a few polite tears, but real weeping. Then she lets down her hair, which in that culture was scandalous on its own, something reserved for private moments, and uses it to wipe his feet. Only after all of that does she pour out the perfume.

Simon watches this whole scene and thinks to himself, silently, that if Jesus were really a prophet he'd know what kind of woman this is and wouldn't let her touch him. Nobody else at the table hears it. It's a private verdict, resting on an assumption Simon never says out loud: that clean people keep their distance from unclean people, or risk becoming unclean themselves.

Jesus answers that unspoken verdict with a story about money. A moneylender had two debtors, one who owed five hundred denarii, the other fifty. Neither of them could pay. He canceled both debts outright. Which one will love him more?

I think the detail that matters most in that story isn't the size of the debt. It's that neither man could pay. Simon isn't a man with no debt. He's a man who believes his debt is manageable on his own. But the parable says the person with less debt also could not pay. And the moneylender doesn't offer either of them a payment plan. He just cancels both, in full.

Then Jesus turns Simon around to actually look at her. "Do you see this woman?" All evening Simon has been looking at a category, that kind of woman, probably trying hard not to look at her at all. Jesus makes him look at a person. He points out, gently but plainly, everything Simon didn't do: no water for his feet, no kiss of greeting, no oil for his head. Simon did what was proper. He invited Jesus to dinner because that's what a respectable man does. It just wasn't love that put him there. It was duty.

He was acting out of duty. She was acting out of gratitude and love.

Then comes the line that started all of this for me. "Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much" (Luke 7:47, ESV).

Get the order right, because it's the whole point. Her love doesn't earn this forgiveness. It doesn't purchase it. Her love is the evidence of a forgiveness already given and received, the same way the canceled debt came before any gratitude in the story Jesus just told. Then he says to her directly, "your sins are forgiven." The tense of that phrase in the original language points to something already accomplished, not a transaction happening in the moment. Jesus isn't in the process of forgiving her right then. He's announcing what has already been true.

If you are a long-time, practicing Christian, here is what you might need to hear today. The person in real danger in this story isn't the woman. It's Simon, the one who doesn't think he needs anything. In another time and place, Jesus said, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick," (Luke 5:31, ESV). The sick person who knows they're sick is in a much better place than the sick person who's sure they're fine. And if I'm honest, most of us don't come to this story in the posture of that weeping woman. We come more like Simon, trying to do what's right, trying to live well.

But here's where the gospel comes all the way back around to Simon and to us, if we will hear it. If something in you got uncomfortable while reading this, you’re recognizing sin and that’s a good thing. You need to know that the quiet self-righteousness you may have stumbled upon also falls under "which are many." There is no MRGB. There never was. Not for her, not for Simon, not for you.

We don't confess our sins to open some valve of God's love. That valve is already open, already flowing. We confess to keep our own thinking straight, to stay lined up with what's already true.

Your sins, which are many, are forgiven.

Go in peace.

---

*Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.*