Her Much Was the Point

The table is long and it is already full and there is always another chair, and that is the trouble.

Because Yvette has been to that table three times now and each time she has sat further down it, and last week she sat at the very end where the leaf joins and you have to reach for everything, and she left before the coffee.

Nobody has done anything to her. These are warm people. Somebody put a bowl in her hands the first night before she had taken her coat off. That is not the problem and she knows it is not the problem.

The problem is the arithmetic she does at that table, which starts about ten minutes in and which she cannot stop.

She listens to them. And they are honest people, and they will tell you about their hard years without pretending. There is a woman there who talks about a bad decade with her drinking. There is a man who lost a business and did some things he is not proud of on the way down. And Yvette sits there and she is glad for all of them, genuinely, and she does the sum, and every single time the sum comes out the same way: theirs are the sort of thing a person brings to a table like this, and mine is a different order of magnitude.

Not worse in kind. Bigger. That is how she thinks of it, and she is a precise woman and she means it precisely. There is an amount, and hers is more, and there is a level at which a thing stops being the kind of story you tell over a bowl of soup and becomes something you carry out of the room with you.

So she sits nearer the end each time, and one of these weeks she is going to stop coming.

If you have that sum running, hear this before anything else. Jesus told a story once, at a dinner table, in a room where exactly this arithmetic was happening out loud, and He did something with the numbers that nobody expected.

He puts the number in the story on purpose

The scene is a dinner in a Pharisee's house, and a woman with a reputation comes in and does something extravagant at Jesus' feet, and the host thinks a thought he does not say out loud, which is that a real prophet would know what sort of woman this is.

And Jesus, who knows what he is thinking, tells him a story about two debtors. One owed five hundred pence. One owed fifty. Neither could pay, and the creditor forgave them both.

Then He asks the host which of them will love the creditor more. And the host, who is not stupid, says: I suppose the one who was forgiven more.

And Jesus says he has judged rightly, and then He turns to the woman and says this.

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

Read what He did with the size. He did not minimize it. He did not say her account was smaller than the room assumed, and He did not tell the host to stop noticing. He said which are many, out loud, in front of everybody, and then He put the word forgiven immediately after it.

The size was not hidden. It was stated and then answered in the same breath.

You are the one in that story whose account is named as many and forgiven in the same sentence, and it is already both. I am not being kind to a woman at the end of a table. It is written in Luke 7:47, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a scene from a dinner party and puts it in front of somebody doing arithmetic over a bowl of soup.

The much is what makes the love

And here is the part that turns the whole thing over.

In the parable, the size of the debt is not a liability. It is the reason for the greater love. Jesus builds His argument on it: the one forgiven more loves more, and that is presented as a good, and the woman with the larger account is the one the whole room is being told to look at.

Yvette has been sitting at the end of the table believing her much makes her the one who does not belong. In the story, her much is exactly the thing that gives her the capacity everyone else in the room is being pointed toward.

You have been given a capacity by the size of what was forgiven, and it is already the point of the story rather than the objection to it. Scripture says her sins which are many are forgiven, for she loved much, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a woman see that the number she is ashamed of is the one Jesus used to make His case.

Nobody at that table needs the figure

One more thing, and it is practical, because part of what keeps her at the far end is a fear of a conversation.

She thinks that belonging at that table means eventually telling them. That there is a night coming where the talk goes round and it will be her turn, and either she lies or she says it, and she cannot do either.

She does not have to do either. There is no obligation in this house to hand anybody a figure. The woman in Luke 7 did not give a speech; she did not say a single recorded word in the entire scene. She came in, she wept, she poured out what she had, and Jesus did all the talking about her account, and He did it in a way that ended the room's arithmetic rather than feeding it.

You are not required to produce a number for anybody, and it is already fully known by the only one whose knowledge matters. It is written that her sins which are many are forgiven, and it is Jesus saying it and not her, and the Holy Spirit is the one who speaks for a person who cannot speak for herself.