Forgiven Much, Loving Much

Most of us know exactly which debtor we’d rather be. Fifty denarii sounds manageable. Five hundred sounds like a life that went badly wrong. So we quietly file ourselves under fifty, and then we wonder why our love for God feels so thin, why the Mass can leave us unmoved, why confession feels like an errand. Today’s Gospel gives the diagnosis in one line: he who is forgiven little, loves little. Simon the Pharisee’s trouble was that he had no idea what he owed.

Saint Paul had no such illusion. In the first reading, he calls himself the least of the apostles, a man unfit for the title, because he had hunted the Church down. And then, in the same breath, “by the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Corinthians 15:10). The woman with the alabaster flask couldn’t have quoted a line of theology, but she knew what Paul knew. Today the Church celebrates Saint Robert Bellarmine, a cardinal who ate the food of the poor and gave away the hangings on his walls, a man with every reason to think highly of himself who plainly didn’t. What did all three of them see that Simon missed?

The Readings

First Reading: 1 Corinthians 15:1-11

Now I would remind you, brethren, in what terms I preached to you the gospel, which you received, in which you stand, by which you are saved, if you hold it fast—unless you believed in vain.

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God which is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.

Gospel: Luke 7:36-50

One of the Pharisees asked him to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee’s house, and sat at table. And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was sitting 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. Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw it, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.” And Jesus answering said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” And he answered, “What is it, Teacher?”

“A certain creditor had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he forgave them both. Now which of them will love him more?” Simon answered, “The one, I suppose, to whom he forgave more.” And he said to him, “You have judged rightly.” Then turning toward the woman he said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house, you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.” And he said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” Then those who were at table with him began to say among themselves, “Who is this, who even forgives sins?” And he said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

Scriptural Analysis

Paul opens chapter 15 by reminding the Corinthians of something they already know. He preached a gospel, they received it, they stand in it, and they are being saved by it, on one condition: that they hold it fast (1 Corinthians 15:1-2). George Montague points out that the verb is present tense, “you are being saved.” Salvation is a process in which their ongoing fidelity is decisive; there is no “once saved, always saved” here (see 1 Corinthians 10:12).^[1]

The verb he uses for handing it on, paradidōmi (pah-rah-DID-oh-mee), passed into Latin as tradere, and from there we get our word “tradition.” Raymond Collins notes that “deliver” and “receive” were the technical vocabulary of the rabbinic schools for passing on what a student got from his master, and Paul is handling the gospel the same way.^[2] Since he is writing around A.D. 56, this is the oldest written summary of the Christian creed we have, and the Catechism points to it for exactly that reason: the resurrection is a real event, historically attested, and Paul is passing on a living tradition he learned after Damascus.^[3]

Look at how tightly the creed is built. Collins lays it out as two balanced halves. Christ died, and Christ was raised. Each half carries a qualifying phrase, “for our sins” and “on the third day,” and each half is stamped “according to the scriptures.” Then each half gets a second fact that pins it to the ground: he was buried, which proves the death was real, and he appeared, which proves the resurrection was real. Collins calls these the “reality factor” of the creed.^[4] Montague adds that “was raised” is in the perfect tense: he has been raised, and stays raised. The death happened once. The resurrection is a standing condition, the permanent presence of the risen Christ with his Church.^[5]

“According to the scriptures” points first to the Suffering Servant, pierced for our sins, who justifies the many (Isaiah 53:5, 11). The “third day” probably echoes Hosea, “on the third day he will raise us up” (Hosea 6:2), but Montague gathers a whole cluster of third days behind it: the first appearance of life on earth (Genesis 1:11-13), the Lord’s glory on Sinai (Exodus 19:11, 16), and Jonah released from the fish (Jonah 2:1, 11), which Jesus himself called a sign of his rising (Matthew 12:40). In Scripture, the third day is when God begins something new.^[6]

Then the witnesses. Cephas, the Twelve, more than 500 at once, James, all the apostles. Montague calls the list “not exhaustive but official.” The women at the tomb, who the Gospels say saw him first, are missing, most likely because in the Jewish courts of Paul’s day a woman’s testimony didn’t count, and Paul is building a case that skeptics can’t dismiss. The line about the 500 is the sharpest point: most of them are still alive, and as Montague puts it, their witness “is still readily available for anyone who wishes to check it out.”^[7] Even the Jewish leaders who disputed the apostles’ story admitted the tomb was empty; they claimed the body was stolen (Matthew 28:11-15).^[8] The Catechism draws the same conclusion: the faith of the first Christians rested on the witness of concrete men, known to the community and mostly still living among them.^[9]

“Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.” The Greek is ektrōma (EK-troh-mah), which literally means an aborted or stillborn child, and may have started as an insult Paul’s enemies threw at him.^[10] Montague’s reading is the one that stays with me: as a Pharisee persecuting the Church, Paul was like a stillborn infant, and he “was brought to life and sight when Christ appeared to him on the road to Damascus.”^[11] That’s why he can say he is the least of the apostles: he persecuted the Church, and he meant it. But he refuses to let the sentence end there. “By the grace of God I am what I am.” Collins counts three mentions of grace in that one verse. Grace is the source of Paul’s call, the power of his preaching, and the reason his preaching worked.^[12] Paul knows the size of his debt and the size of the gift, and the two are proportioned to each other.

Keep that in mind as we walk into Simon’s house.

Luke has just told us that the sinners who heard John “justified God” while the Pharisees “rejected the purpose of God for themselves” (Luke 7:29-30), and that Jesus was being mocked as “a friend of tax collectors and sinners” (Luke 7:34). Now he shows us both at one table. A Pharisee invites Jesus to a formal dinner, the kind where guests reclined on couches with their feet stretched out behind them, which is how a woman could stand “behind him at his feet.” Pablo Gadenz notes that Luke says “Pharisee” four times in four verses, always attached to his invitation or his house, as if to keep reminding us what a host is supposed to be doing.^[13]

She is “a woman of the city, a sinner,” and Luke never names her. Joseph Fitzmyer observes that the Western Church, since Gregory the Great, folded her together with Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene, but the New Testament gives no basis for that.^[14] Luke doesn’t tell us her sin either. Fitzmyer passes along an interesting suggestion: in Aramaic the word for “sinner,” ḥayyābtā’ (hai-YAHB-tah), literally means “debtor,” which may be why a story about a sinner carries a parable about debts.^[15]

What she does is a sequence, and Gadenz notes that Luke’s verb tenses mean she kept on doing it. Tears, hair, kisses, ointment. Because she is weeping, the gestures read as grief, supplication, and gratitude, whatever Simon thought of her hair being down.^[16] Saint Gregory the Great reads each one as a deliberate reversal. The eyes that once looked for earthly things now wear themselves out weeping. The hair that once framed her face now wipes his feet. The mouth that once spoke proud words now kisses the footsteps of her Redeemer. “She converts the number of her faults into the same number of virtues.”^[17]

Simon sees it all and reaches a conclusion. “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is.” He says it to himself, and Jesus answers it anyway. Gadenz catches the irony: Jesus proves he is a prophet precisely by reading the thoughts of the man who just decided he wasn’t one.^[18] Then the parable. Two debtors, 500 denarii and 50, a denarius being a day’s wage. Neither can pay. The creditor forgives both, and Luke Timothy Johnson points out that the verb charizomai (khah-REE-zoh-my) means to do something graciously, as a gift; canceling a debt because the man can’t pay is unheard-of behavior for a moneylender.^[19] Gadenz ties the same verb to the jubilee text Jesus read at Nazareth, “to proclaim liberty” (Luke 4:18), which in the Old Testament meant the release of debts. The parable is a jubilee in miniature.^[20] Simon answers correctly, “the one to whom he forgave more,” and Gregory the Great observes that the Pharisee is convicted on his own grounds; he ties the knot he’s about to be bound with.^[21]

Jesus then turns toward the woman while still speaking to Simon, and lists three ordinary courtesies a host owed a guest: water for the feet, a kiss of greeting, oil for the head. Simon skipped all three. The woman supplied all three from inside herself. Gadenz notices that “feet” appears seven times in the Greek of this passage and hears Isaiah behind it: “How beautiful are the feet of him who brings good tidings, who publishes peace” (Isaiah 52:7). The one whose feet she is kissing is about to announce peace to her.^[22]

“Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much.” That “for” has been argued over since the Fathers. Does her love cause the forgiveness, or show it? Every serious commentator I’ve read comes down the same way, and the parable is the reason. The creditor forgave first; the love followed. Fitzmyer explains that the Greek hoti (HOH-tee) here gives the evidence for the forgiveness rather than its cause, and he traces that reading back to Cyprian and Ambrose. Johnson puts it plainly: Jesus argues in reverse, from the love the woman shows to the forgiveness she must already have received, and the closing line clinches it, “he who is forgiven little, loves little.”^[23] The perfect tense of “are forgiven” agrees: her sins have been forgiven by God, and Jesus declares a state that already exists.^[24] So grace comes first, always; no one loves God into forgiving them. But what grace produces in the sinner is real. Gregory the Great says the more the heart is burned up by charity, the more the rust of sin is consumed, and the Catechism teaches that a conversion proceeding from fervent charity can purify a sinner so completely that no punishment remains.^[25] The woman’s tears are the fruit of a repentance that has already happened, and Simon, who never thought he needed to repent, has been forgiven little and loves accordingly.^[26]

Then the guests murmur, “Who is this, who even forgives sins?” It’s the right question. Only God forgives sins, and Jesus, the Son of God, exercises that divine power in his own name.^[27] And Jesus sends her off with “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” This is the first time in Luke’s Gospel that faith and salvation are joined in one sentence, and it will become a pattern (Luke 8:48; 17:19; 18:42).^[28] Gadenz points out that the chapter opened with a centurion of great faith, into whose house Jesus never entered, and closes with a Pharisee, into whose house he did. Saint Augustine preached on that contrast: the teacher of humility sat down in the proud Pharisee’s house, but there was nowhere in Simon’s heart for the Son of Man to lay his head, while the centurion, whose house he never entered, gave him his whole heart.^[29]

Put the two readings side by side, and they say the same thing from opposite ends. Paul was the 500-denarii debtor and knew it, and so his love ran to “harder than any of them.” The woman was the 500-denarii debtor and knew it, and so her love ran to tears and perfume. Simon assumed he was the 50-denarii man, and so he couldn’t be bothered with water for a guest’s feet. Fitzmyer says the little forgiveness shown to Simon traces to “his fundamental attitude.”^[30] The measure of your love for God tracks the measure of what you know you’ve been forgiven.

Daily Application

Here’s the uncomfortable part. Most practicing Catholics are far more likely to be Simon than the woman. We’re at the table with Jesus every Sunday, and we’ve quietly settled on a low estimate of our own debt: no murders, no scandals, a few venial things we don’t examine too closely. The result is exactly what Jesus predicted. Love that’s thin. Prayer that’s dutiful. A confession every year or two, because there’s not much to say.

The reading asks for a specific interior movement, and it’s the one Simon refused: an honest accounting of what you actually owe. That’s harder than it sounds, because pride resists it. Gregory the Great pictured two sick people at that table: the woman kept her senses in her fever, and the Pharisee lost his; he couldn’t feel his own sickness. If your sins seem small, the likeliest explanation is that you’ve stopped looking at them in the light of who God is. The woman wept because she had seen Jesus, and next to him her life came into focus. So put yourself in front of him and let him do that. Sit in front of the tabernacle for 15 minutes and ask him to show you the real number. Then take that number to confession. Go to his feet, the way she did, and stop worrying about who else is in the room. And notice what the priest says to you when it’s over. “Go in peace.” Those are Jesus’s last words to the woman in the Pharisee’s house, and the Church put them at the end of the sacrament on purpose.^[31]

Saint Teresa of Avila turned this Gospel into a way of receiving Communion. When she received the Lord, she strove to believe he had truly entered her poor house, and she “considered she was at his feet and wept with the Magdalene, no more nor less than if she were seeing him with her bodily eyes in the house of the Pharisee.” Then the line that should follow every one of us to the rail: “His Majesty is not accustomed to paying poorly for his lodging if the hospitality is good.”^[32] Which host are you at Mass?

Saint Robert Bellarmine is a good companion for this. He was the most learned man in Rome, a cardinal, a theologian to the pope, and he kept eating the food of the poor and gave away the tapestries on his walls to people who were cold. That’s how a man lives when he knows what he’s been given. He’s also the patron of catechists, which ties him to Paul. Bellarmine wrote two catechisms, and Paul’s whole opening is about receiving a tradition and handing it on intact. If you teach the faith in any capacity, to a parish class or to your own kids at the dinner table, you’re in the business of paradidōmi, and what you hand on is the same four-part creed Paul handed on: he died for our sins, he was buried, he was raised, he appeared. Hand it on the way the woman received it, as something you know you didn’t earn.

Christ is waiting at that table for the one who knows what she owes. Go find out what you owe, and then love him accordingly.

---

Notes

1. George T. Montague, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 263. ↩
2. Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 534; Montague, First Corinthians, 263. ↩
3. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 639. ↩
4. Collins, First Corinthians, 529–531. ↩
5. Montague, First Corinthians, 264. ↩
6. Montague, First Corinthians, 263–265. ↩
7. Montague, First Corinthians, 265. ↩
8. Montague, First Corinthians, 267. ↩
9. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 642. ↩
10. Collins, First Corinthians, 537. ↩
11. Montague, First Corinthians, 265–266. ↩
12. Collins, First Corinthians, 532, 538. ↩
13. Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 149–150; Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 127. ↩
14. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), 688–689. ↩
15. Fitzmyer, Luke I–IX, 689. ↩
16. Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 150. ↩
17. Gregory the Great, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, on Luke 7:36–50. ↩
18. Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 150; Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 127. ↩
19. Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 127; Fitzmyer, Luke I–IX, 690. ↩
20. Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 151. ↩
21. Gregory the Great, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, on Luke 7:36–50. ↩
22. Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 151. ↩
23. Fitzmyer, Luke I–IX, 686–687, 692; Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 127–128; Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 151–152. ↩
24. Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 128; Fitzmyer, Luke I–IX, 692. ↩
25. Gregory the Great, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, on Luke 7:36–50; Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1472. ↩
26. Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 152. ↩
27. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1441. ↩
28. Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 128. ↩
29. Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 153, quoting Augustine, Sermon 62.1. ↩
30. Fitzmyer, Luke I–IX, 692. ↩
31. Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 153. ↩
32. Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection 34.7–8, quoted in Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 152. ↩

Books Cited

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• George T. Montague, SM, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2011)
• Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Liturgical Press)
• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
• Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2018)
• Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Liturgical Press)
• Joseph A. Fitzmyer, SJ, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Doubleday, 1981)
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, 4-volume set (Baronius Press)