Gratitude

Charlotte Collins Reed

Christ Church Episcopal

June 12, 2016

6 Proper C

When I was a child, my mother insisted that the thank you notes for all of our Christmas presents be written by New Year’s Day. The notes needed to be thoughtful, specific, and at least three sentences. To an 8 year old, that felt like being required to write a book! If someone brought us a casserole, the dish had to be returned filled with cookies or some other treat so we wouldn’t appear ungrateful. An invitation to dinner needed to be reciprocated to both show gratitude and prevent the host from thinking that we did not enjoy ourselves….even if we didn’t. My mother was from the Deep South where the rules around gratitude were clear and utterly inflexible. The theory was that if one expressed gratitude, whether or not it was heartfelt, one would learn to be a grateful person.

While gestures of appreciation seemed to my mother’s children like a mere act of reciprocity, I think there was more at stake. Each year we received a birthday and Christmas gift from our Aunt Rhoda. Actually, she was my mother’s great aunt, so she was our great-great aunt. Aunt Rhoda was a widow and lived in Hastings, Florida, and we thought she was probably very old. Maybe even 60. We only met Aunt Rhoda once when I was about 11 years old. But we always felt like we had a relationship with her because each year she would send us gifts, we would write thank you notes, and often she would respond with a note herself. Somehow, that act of gratitude, forced though it might have been, forged a relationship between a child and a delightful older woman.

The rules around gratitude are a little messier in today’s gospel reading. When Simon invites Jesus to dinner, he has no idea what he is in for. The dinner has just begun when a woman, known to be a sinner, arrives and begins an embarrassing display of public affection for Jesus, anointing his feet with oil and wiping them clean with her tears and her hair. Simon is mortified, as most of us would be if this happened to a guest in our home. But Jesus is unfazed by the woman’s actions. Jesus tells Simon a parable that connects gratitude with forgiveness. The parable leads us to believe that the woman is showing her gratitude to Jesus for the abundance of forgiveness she has received.

When Jesus tells the parable about the debtor who was forgiven 50 denarii and the debtor who was forgiven 500 denarii and asks Simon which person will love the creditor more, Simon answers that the person with the greater debt will love the creditor more, and Jesus tells him that he has answered correctly. That seems quite logical. And that is where we should become very suspicious that something else is going on. Gospel logic tells us that the first are last, and the last are first; the rich are poor and the poor are rich. So, when Jesus goes logical on us in a recognizable way, something else is up. Jesus then points out the lengths to which the woman has gone to offer Jesus hospitality and the lack of effort Simon had put into hospitality. Simon, who is presumably the one with the lesser debt to be forgiven, and hence logically the one with lesser love, is being called on the carpet for lack of hospitality. Simon does not come out of this conversation looking good, whether he is the greater sinner or the lesser sinner, and I imagine he comes out of the conversation very confused. The woman, a known sinner, has been forgiven and told that her faith has saved her. Simon is no doubt a man of deep faith. What does she have that he doesn’t? And what is faith?

If faith is right belief, then Simon clearly has faith. The Pharisees had a lively and active faith. He, like all Pharisees, knew his scriptures, worshiped in the synagogue, and worked to keep all of the laws. The woman did none of that. If faith is right behavior, then Simon, like all Pharisees worked hard to model righteous behavior. Simon is not like King Ahab in the reading from Kings, who flagrantly disregards the law of God. Simon is a good man. Jesus’ parable seems to make that clear. Whatever the woman’s sin was, since she was a known sinner, that sin must have involved behavior of some sort. So faith does not seem to mean consistently righteous behavior.

What the woman did have that Simon did not have was a deep and genuine relationship with Jesus. Her relationship with Jesus freed her from her sin. Her response was a deep and overwhelming gratitude. The result of her gratitude was behavior toward Jesus that modeled the absolutely outrageous love of God. When Jesus tells the woman that her faith has saved her, he is not telling her that she did something that earned her salvation, or that because she believes correctly she has been saved. Jesus is not even telling her that, because she has been forgiven, her faith has saved her. According to the parable, Simon has also been forgiven. What has saved the woman is her relationship with Jesus that shows itself in demonstrating God’s extravagant love.

As my brother, sister and I learned from writing thank you notes to our Aunt Rhoda, gratitude fosters and builds relationships. That is certainly true of the woman’s gratitude to Jesus. And relationships heal, as the woman also experienced. And healing produces more gratitude. Real gratitude produces behavior that imitates God’s abundant love for us. Jesus calls us to be people of deep gratitude who can love the world with God’s abundant, outrageous love for us. That’s what gratitude does.

Amen.