'Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved
much.'--LUKE vii. 47.
This story contains three figures, three persons, who may stand for
us as types or representatives of the divine love and of all its
operation in the world, of the way in which it is received or rejected,
and of the causes and consequences of its reception or rejection. There
is the unloving, cleanly, respectable, self-complacent Pharisee, with
all his contempt for 'this woman.' There is the woman, with gross sin
and mighty penitence, the great burst of love that is flowing out of
her heart sweeping away before it, as it were, all the guilt of her
transgressions. And, high over all, brooding over all, loving each,
knowing each, pitying each, willing to save and be the Friend and
Brother of each, is the embodied and manifested divine Love, the
knowledge of whom is love in our hearts, and is 'life eternal.' So that
now I have simply to ask you to look with me, for a little while, at
these three persons as representing for us the divine love that comes
forth amongst sinners, and the twofold form in which that love is
received. There is, first, Christ the love of God appearing amongst
men, the foundation of all our love to Him. Then there is the woman,
the penitent sinner, lovingly recognising the divine love. And then,
last, there is the Pharisee, the self-righteous man, ignorant of
himself, and empty of all love to God. These are the three figures to
which I ask your attention now.
I. We have Christ here standing as a manifestation of the divine
love coming forth amongst sinners. His person and His words, the
part He plays in this narrative, and the parable that He speaks in
the course of it, have to be noticed under this head.
First, then, you have this idea--that He, as bringing to us the love
of God, shows it to us, as not at all dependent upon our merits or
deserts: 'He frankly forgave them both' are the deep words in which
He would point us to the source and the ground of all the love of
God. Brethren, have you ever thought what a wonderful and blessed
truth there lies in the old words of one of the Jewish prophets, 'I
do not this for your sakes, O house of Israel, but for Mine holy
Name's sake'? The foundation of all God's love to us sinful men,
that saying tells us, lies not in us, nor in anything about us, not
in anything external to God Himself. He, and He alone, is the cause
and reason, the motive and the end, of His own love to our world.
And unless we have grasped that magnificent thought as the
foundation of all our acceptance in Him, I think we have not yet
learnt half of the fullness which, even in this world, may belong to
our conceptions of the love of God--a love that has no motive but
Himself; a love that is not evoked even (if I may so say) by regard
to His creatures' wants; a love, therefore, which is eternal, being
in that divine heart before there were creatures upon whom it could
rest; a love that is its own guarantee, its own cause--safe and
firm, therefore, with all the firmness and serenity of the divine
nature-incapable of being affected by our transgression, deeper than
all our sins, more ancient than our very existence, the very essence
and being of God Himself. 'He frankly forgave them both.' If you
seek the source of divine love, you must go high up into the
mountains of God, and learn that it, as all other of His (shall I
say) emotions, and feelings, and resolutions, and purposes, owns no
reason but Himself, no motive but Himself; lies wrapped in the
secret of His nature, who is all-sufficient for His own blessedness,
and all whose work and being is caused by, and satisfied, and
terminates in His own fullness. 'God is love': therefore beneath all
considerations of what we may want--deeper and more blessed than all
thoughts of a compassion that springs from the feeling of human
distress and the sight of man's misery--lies this thought of an
affection which does not need the presence of sorrow to evoke it,
which does not want the touch of our finger to flow out, but by its
very nature is everlasting, by its very nature is infinite, by its
very nature must be pouring out the flood of its own joyous fullness
for ever and ever!
Then, again, Christ standing here for us as the representative and
revelation of this divine love which He manifests to us, tells us,
too, that whilst it is not caused by us, but comes from the nature
of God, it is not turned away by our sins. 'This man, if he were a
prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is that
toucheth Him,' says the unloving and self-righteous heart, 'for she
is a sinner.' Ah! there is nothing more beautiful than the
difference between the thought about sinful creatures which is
natural to a holy being, and the thought about sinful creatures
which is natural to a self-righteous being. The one is all contempt;
the other, all pity. He knew what she was, and therefore He let her
come close to Him with the touch of her polluted hand, and pour out
the gains of her lawless life and the adornments of her former
corruption upon His most blessed and most holy head. His knowledge
of her as a sinner, what did it do to His love for her? It made that
love gentle and tender, as knowing that she could not bear the
revelation of the blaze of His purity. It smoothed His face and
softened His tones, and breathed through all His knowledge and
notice of her timid and yet confident approach. 'Daughter, I know
all about it--all thy wanderings and thy vile transgressions: I know
them all, and My love is mightier than all these. They may be as the
great sea, but my love is like the everlasting mountains, whose
roots go down beneath the ocean, and My love is like the everlasting
heaven, whose brightness covers it all over.' God's love is Christ's
love; Christ's love is God's love. And this is the lesson that we
gather--that that infinite and divine loving-kindness does not turn
away from thee, my brother and my friend, because thou art a sinner,
but remains hovering about thee, with wooing invitations and with
gentle touches, if it may draw thee to repentance, and open a
fountain of answering affection in thy seared and dry heart. The
love of God is deeper than all our sins. 'For His great love
wherewith He loved us, when we were dead in sins, He quickened us.'
Sin is but the cloud behind which the everlasting sun lies in all
its power and warmth, unaffected by the cloud; and the light will
yet strike, the light of His love will yet pierce through, with its
merciful shafts bringing healing in their beams, and dispersing all
the pitchy darkness of man's transgression. And as the mists gather
themselves up and roll away, dissipated by the heat of that sun in
the upper sky, and reveal the fair earth below--so the love of
Christ shines in, molting the mist and dissipating the fog, thinning
it off in its thickest places, and at last piercing its way right
through it, down to the heart of the man that has been lying beneath
the oppression of this thick darkness, and who thought that the fog
was the sky, and that there was no sun there above. God be thanked!
the everlasting love of God that comes from the depth of His own
being, and is there because of Himself, will never be quenched
because of man's sin.
And so, in the next place, Christ teaches us here that this divine
love, when it comes forth among sinners, necessarily manifests
itself first in the form of forgiveness. There was nothing to be
done with the debtors until the debt was wiped out; there was no
possibility of other gifts of the highest sort being granted to
them, until the great score was cancelled and done away with. When
the love of God comes down into a sinful world, it must come first
and foremost as pardoning mercy. There are no other terms upon which
there can be a union betwixt the loving-kindness of God, and the
emptiness and sinfulness of my heart, except only this--that first
of all there shall be the clearing away from my soul of the sins
which I have gathered there, and then there will be space for all
other divine gifts to work and to manifest themselves. Only do not
fancy that when we speak about forgiveness, we simply mean that a
man's position in regard to the penalties of sin is altered. That is
not all the depth of the scriptural notion of forgiveness. It
includes far more than the removal of outward penalties. The heart
of it all is, that the love of God rests upon the sinner, unturned
away even by his sins, passing over his sins, and removing his sins
for the sake of Christ. My friend, if you are talking in general
terms about a great divine loving-kindness that wraps you round--if
you have a great deal to say, apart from the Gospel, about the love
of God as being your hope and confidence--I want you to reflect on
this, that the first word which the love of God speaks to sinful men
is pardon; and unless that is your notion of God's love, unless you
look to that as the first thing of all, let me tell you, you may
have before you a very fair picture of a very beautiful, tender,
good-natured benevolence, but you have not nearly reached the height
of the vigour and yet the tenderness of the Scripture notion of the
love of God. It is not a love which says, 'Well, put sin on one
side, and give the man the blessings all the same,' not a love which
has nothing to say about that great fact of transgression, not a
love which gives it the go-by, and leaves it standing: but a love
which passes into the heart through the portal of pardon, a love
which grapples with the fact of sin first, and has nothing to say to
a man until it has said that message to him.
And but one word more on this part of my subject--here we see the
love of God thus coming from Himself; not turned away by man's sins;
being the cause of forgiveness; expressing itself in pardon; and
last of all, demanding service. 'Simon, thou gavest Me no water,
thou gavest Me no kiss, My head thou didst not anoint: I expected
all these things from thee--I desired them all from thee: My love
came that they might spring in thy heart; thou hast not given them;
My love is wounded, as it were disappointed, and it turns away from
thee!' Yes, after all that we have said about the freeness and
fullness, the unmerited, and uncaused, and unmotived nature of that
divine affection--after all that we have said about its being the
source of every blessing to man, asking nothing from him, but giving
everything to him; it still remains true, that God's love, when it
comes to men, comes that it may evoke an answering echo in the human
heart, and 'though it might be much bold to enjoin, yet for love's
sake rather beseeches' us to give unto Him who has given all unto
us. There, then, stands forth in the narrative, Christ as a
revelation of the divine love amongst sinners.
II. Now, in the second place, let us look for a moment at 'this
woman' as the representative of a class of character--the penitent
lovingly recognising the divine love.
The words which I have read as my text contain a statement as to the
woman's character: 'Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she
loved much.' Allow me just one word of explanation, in the shape of
exposition, on these words. Great blunders have been built upon
them. I dare say you have seen epitaphs--(I have)--written often on
gravestones with this misplaced idea on them--'Very sinful; but
there was a great deal of love in the person; and for the sake of
the love, God passed by the sin!' Now, when Christ says 'She loved
much,' He does not mean to say that her love was the cause of her
forgiveness--not at all. He means to say that her love was the proof
of her forgiveness, and that it was so because her love was a
consequence of her forgiveness. As, for instance, we might say, 'The
woman is in great distress, for she weeps'; but we do not mean
thereby that the weeping is the reason of the distress, but the
means of our knowing the sorrow. It is the proof because it is the
consequence. Or (to put it into the simplest shape) the love does
not go before the forgiveness, but the forgiveness goes before the
love; and because the love comes after the forgiveness, it is the
sign of the forgiveness. That this is the true interpretation, you
will see if you look back for a moment at the narrative which
precedes, where He says, 'He frankly forgave them both: tell me,
therefore, which of them will love him most?' Pardon is the
pre-requisite of love, and love is a consequence of the sense of
forgiveness.
This, then, is the first thing to observe: all true love to God is
preceded in the heart by these two things--a sense of sin, and an
assurance of pardon. Brethren, there is no love possible--real,
deep, genuine, worthy of being called love of God--which does not
start with the belief of my own transgression, and with the thankful
reception of forgiveness in Christ. You do nothing to get pardon for
yourselves; but unless you have the pardon you have no love to God.
I know that sounds a very hard thing--I know that many will say it
is very narrow and very bigoted, and will ask, 'Do you mean to tell
me that the man whose bosom glows with gratitude because of earthly
blessings, has no love--that all that natural religion which is in
people, apart from this sense of forgiveness in Christ, do you mean
to tell me that this is not all genuine?' Yes, most assuredly; and I
believe the Bible and man's conscience say the same thing. I do not
for one moment deny that there may be in the hearts of those who are
in the grossest ignorance of themselves as transgressors, certain
emotions of instinctive gratitude and natural religiousness, directed
to some higher power dimly thought of as the author of their blessings
and the source of much gladness: but has that kind of thing got any
living power in it? I demur to its right to be called love to God at
all, for this reason--because it seems to me that the object that is
loved is not God, but a fragment of God. He who but says, 'I owe to
Him breath and all things; in Him I live and move, and have my being,'
has left out one-half at least of the Scriptural conception of God.
Your God, my friend, is not the God of the Bible, unless He stands
before you clothed in infinite loving-kindness indeed; but clothed
also in strict and rigid justice. Is your God perfect and entire? If
you say that you love Him, and if you do so, is it as the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? Have you meditated on the depths of
the requirements of His law? Have you stood silent and stricken at
the thought of the blaze of His righteousness? Have you passed through
all the thick darkness and the clouds with which He surrounds His
throne, and forced your way at last into the inner light where He
dwells? Or is it a vague divinity that you worship and love? Which?
Ah, if a man study his Bible, and try to find out for himself, from
its veracious records, who and what manner of God the living God is,
there will be no love in his heart to that Being except only when he
has flung himself at His feet, and said, 'Father of eternal purity,
and God of all holiness and righteousness, forgive Thy child, a
sinful broken man--forgive Thy child, for the sake of Thy Son!' That,
and that alone, is the road by which we come to possess the love of
God, as a practical power, filling and sanctifying our souls; and
such is the God to whom alone our love ought to be rendered; and I
tell you (or rather the Bible tells you, and the Gospel and the
Cross of Christ tell you), there is no love without pardon, no
fellowship and sonship without the sense of sin and the
acknowledgment of foul transgression!
So much, then, for what precedes the love of Christ in the heart;
now a word as to what follows. 'Her sins, which are many, are
forgiven; for she loved much.' The sense of sin precedes
forgiveness: forgiveness precedes love; love precedes all acceptable
and faithful service. If you want to do, love. If you want to know,
love. This poor woman knew Christ a vast deal better than that
Pharisee there. He said, 'This man is not a prophet; He does not
understand the woman.' Ay, but the woman knew herself better than
the Pharisee knew himself, knew herself better than the Pharisee
knew her, knew Christ, above all, a vast deal better than he did.
Love is the gate of all knowledge.
This poor woman brings her box of ointment, a relic perhaps of past
evil life, and once meant for her own adornment, and pours it on His
head, lavishes offices of service which to the unloving heart seem
bold in the giver and cumbersome to the receiver. It is little she
can do, but she does it. Her full heart demands expression, and is
relieved by utterance in deeds. The deeds are spontaneous, welling
out at the bidding of an inward impulse, not drawn out by the force
of an external command. It matters not what practical purpose they
serve. The motive of them makes their glory. Love prompts them, love
justifies them, and His love interprets them, and His love accepts
them. The love which flows from the sense of forgiveness is the
source of all obedience as well as the means of all knowledge.
Brethren, we differ from each other in all respects but one, 'We
have all sinned and come short of the glory of God'; we all need the
love of Christ; it is offered to us all; but, believe me, the sole
handle by which you can lay hold of it, is the feeling of your own
sinfulness and need of pardon. I preach to you a love that you do
not need to buy, a mercy that you do not need to bribe, a grace that
is all independent of your character, and condition, and merits,
which issues from God for ever, and is lying at your doors if you
will take it. You are a sinful man; Christ died for you. He comes to
give you His forgiving mercy. Take it, be at rest. So shalt thou
love and know and do, and so shall He love and guide thee!
III. Now one word, and then I have done. A third character stands
here--the unloving and self-righteous man, all ignorant of the love
of Christ.
He is the antithesis of the woman and her character. You remember
the traditional peculiarities and characteristics of the class to
which he belonged. He is a fair specimen of the whole of them.
Respectable in life, rigid in morality, unquestionable in orthodoxy;
no sound of suspicion having ever come near his belief in all the
traditions of the elders; intelligent and learned, high up among the
ranks of Israel! What was it that made this man's morality a piece
of dead nothingness? What was it that made his orthodoxy just so
many dry words, from out of which all the life had gone? What was
it? This one thing: there was no love in it. As I said, Love is the
foundation of all obedience; without it, morality degenerates into
mere casuistry. Love is the foundation of all knowledge; without it,
religion degenerates into a chattering about Moses, and doctrines,
and theories; a thing that will neither kill nor make alive, that
never gave life to a single soul or blessing to a single heart, and
never put strength into any hand for the conflict and strife of
daily life. There is no more contemptible and impotent thing on the
face of the earth than morality divorced from love, and religious
thoughts divorced from a heart full of the love of God. Quick
corruption or long decay, and in either case death and putrefaction,
are the end of these. You and I need that lesson, my friends. It is
of no use for us to condemn Pharisees that have been dead and in
their graves for nineteen hundred years. The same thing besets us
all; we all of us try to get away from the centre, and dwell
contented on the surface. We are satisfied to take the flowers and
stick them into our little gardens, without any roots to them, when
of course they all die out! People may try to cultivate virtue
without religion, and to acquire correct notions of moral and
spiritual truth; and partially and temporarily they may succeed, but
the one will be a yoke of bondage, and the other a barren theory. I
repeat, love is the basis of all knowledge and of all right-doing.
If you have got that firm foundation laid in the soul, then the
knowledge and the practice will be builded in God's own good time;
and if not, the higher you build the temple, and the more aspiring
are its cloud-pointing pinnacles, the more certain will be its
toppling some day, and the more awful will be the ruin when it
comes. The Pharisee was contented with himself, and so there was no
sense of sin in him, therefore there was no penitent recognition of
Christ as forgiving and loving him, therefore there was no love to
Christ. Because there was no love, there was neither light nor heat
in his soul, his knowledge was barren notions, and his painful
doings were soul-destructive self-righteousness.
And so it all comes round to the one blessed message: My friend, God
hath loved us with an everlasting love. He has provided an eternal
redemption and pardon for us. If you would know Christ at all, you
must go to Him as a sinful man, or you are shut out from Him
altogether. If you _will_ go to Him as a sinful being, fling
yourself down there, not try to make yourself better, but say, 'I am
full of unrighteousness and transgression; let Thy love fall upon me
and heal me'; you will get the answer, and in your heart there shall
begin to live and grow up a root of love to Him, which shall at last
effloresce into all knowledge and unto all purity of obedience; for
he that hath had much forgiveness, loveth much; and 'he that loveth
knoweth God,' and 'dwelleth in God, and God in Him'!