She Loved Much Is a Result and Not a Price She Paid

Nobody tells you what to do the day after.

There is a great deal of teaching about how to come back. There are books about repentance and there are men who are very good at the moment itself, and I am grateful for all of it because I needed it.

What nobody prepared me for was the Tuesday. Not the night in the hospital, not the prayer, not the first Sunday. The ordinary Tuesday about five weeks later where I woke up with everything forgiven and no idea what a man is supposed to do with that.

I had a strange restlessness in that period that I could not name for a long time. It was not guilt and it was not doubt. It was closer to owing something with no invoice, and no address to send anything to, and a growing suspicion that I ought to be doing something enormous and that whatever it was, I was probably not doing it.

There is a scene in Luke that gave me the answer, and the answer is not what a person expects, because the woman in it does something completely disproportionate and Jesus explains her behavior with arithmetic.

What she does, and where she is standing

She comes into a dinner she was not invited to, in the house of a religious man, and stands behind Jesus at his feet.

And stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment. (Luke 7:38, King James Version)

Every detail there is socially impossible. She is in a house she has no business in. She is touching a rabbi in public. She has let her hair down in a room full of men, which in that culture was scandalous.

And she is not asking for anything. That is the part I missed for years. She makes no request. There is no petition in the scene at all. She is doing something with no purpose except itself.

The host thinks this proves Jesus is not a prophet, because a prophet would know what she was. And Jesus, who does know, tells him a story.

You are looking at somebody doing something with no request attached to it. Luke 7:38 records the whole scene without one petition in it. It is the Holy Spirit, Romans 5:5 shedding the love of God abroad in our hearts, who supplies what a person cannot decide to feel.

The story is about two debts and one creditor

Here is what He says.

There was a certain creditor which had two debtors: the one owed five hundred pence, and the other fifty. And when they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both. Tell me therefore, which of them will love him most? (Luke 7:41-42)

When they had nothing to pay. Both of them. It is not that one could pay and one could not. Neither could, and the difference between the amounts turns out to be irrelevant to whether it gets canceled.

He frankly forgave them both. Frankly is an old word here and it means freely, outright, with nothing sought in return.

And then the question: which of them will love him most. Simon answers correctly, that it would be the one forgiven more, and Jesus tells him he has judged rightly.

So the love in the story is a consequence. It is the predicted output of a certain size of cancellation, and the creditor did not request it, arrange it or require it.

You are not being asked to produce a response, and the story makes the loving an output rather than a payment. Luke 7:42 has the creditor forgiving both freely and then asks which will love most. It is the same Spirit, Galatians 5:22 naming love first among His fruit, who produces what nobody can manufacture on schedule.

The direction of the sentence people get backwards

Then comes the line that gets quoted, and the order of it is everything.

Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little. (Luke 7:47)

For she loved much reads, in English, as though the loving bought the forgiveness. And the parable He has just told rules that out completely, because in the parable the forgiving comes first and the loving is the response.

The sense is evidential. Her loving is the visible proof that a large forgiveness has occurred, the way a limp is proof of an injury rather than the cause of one. He is telling Simon how to read what he is watching.

Which matters enormously for a person on that Tuesday. It means the extravagance in the scene was not a payment plan she devised. It was what happened to somebody who had received something too large to sit still under.

You are not paying for something, and the parable puts the forgiving first and the loving after. Luke 7:42 cancels both debts before the question about love is even asked, and it is the Spirit of God, Titus 3:5 named in the washing of regeneration, who did the canceling long before anybody reacted to it.

What Paul says drives him, in one word

If a person wants the practical version of what to do on the Tuesday, Paul gives it, and the word he uses is a pressure word.

For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead. (2 Corinthians 5:14)

Constraineth. It means hems in, presses, holds on a course. It is not a word about obligation and it is not a word about enthusiasm. It is a word about being carried in a direction by something with more weight than you.

That is the honest description of what to do next. Not a program. Not an enormous act. Being pressed along by something that happened to you, into ordinary things, most of which will look small from outside.

And John says the same thing in the simplest sentence in his letter:

We love him, because he first loved us. (1 John 4:19)

Because he first. The order again, stated once more, in five words, by an old man who had watched this play out in hundreds of people.

You are being carried by something rather than required to organize a response. 2 Corinthians 5:14 says the love of Christ constraineth us. It is His Spirit, Romans 8:14 saying as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God, who does the leading that a person cannot schedule.