Everett Henes: Love for Christ

Christians are not just those who believe in Jesus, but they truly love Jesus. This is why Christianity is not mere head knowledge as we understand it. Knowledge is necessary to the Christian faith, but it is not sufficient. It must be coupled with love for God. Why do we love God? There really is only one right answer. It might be worded differently, but it is best summed up in 1 John 4:19, “We love because he first loved us.” This is illustrated for us beautifully in Luke 7:36-50.

A Pharisee named Simon invited Jesus over for a formal dinner. All the typical formalities were followed for seating arrangements and food. Visitors even wandered in and out of the room. But the sorts of visitors expected would not have been who Luke highlights. Luke draws out attention to a woman by saying, “Behold! A woman of the city, who was a sinner…” There has been much speculation as to who this lady was as well as what made her a sinner. Luke is silent on both her identity and her sins, but her identity must have been well known to the town. She came to where Jesus lay and took an extremely expensive bottle of perfume and began to wash Jesus’ feet with her tears and dry them with her hair and then proceeded to anoint his feet with the perfume. Luke goes to a great deal to explain the process.

In the moments, Jesus senses Simon’s discomfort and he approaches it in a very matter of fact way, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” Simon is unaware of the fact that Jesus knows his very thoughts, so he simply responds, “Say it, Teacher.” Jesus tells a parable. Parables were told for different reasons, sometimes to reveal and other times to conceal. Here Jesus tells the parable as a rebuke. He invites Simon into the story with him in order to make a point. “A certain moneylender had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he cancelled the debt of both. Now which of them will love him more?” (Luke 7:41-42) The story is meant to be simple and to force an answer.

In his explanation, Jesus compares Simon with the sinful woman. Simon would not have allowed her to touch his feet and the only reason she was in his house was because of the nature of the public meal. Now Jesus is comparing them! This alone would have caused great offense to Simon. He was a Pharisee, and she a sinner with a town-wide reputation. Surely there has to be a difference between them, Simon would argue. But for Jesus, the comparison drives home the point.

Jesus puts the parable in monetary form, but that is to provide a parable. The truth of the matter is that the debt our sin gives us before God is not 50 or 500, it is an infinite debt. The truth is that it is a debt so grand that we could never pay it back. It is a debt that separates us from God eternally unless someone pays the debt in our behalf. It must be someone who does not owe anything himself. I cannot pay your debt before God, and you cannot pay my debt.

There is only one who was able to live a perfectly obedient life and to die a completely undeserved death. There was only one who was able to take the infinite wrath of God on behalf of his people. This is why it had to be God himself who would come down in the person of Jesus. The debt owed was too great for any person to pay and yet it was a debt that must be paid. This is the glorious truth of the Gospel, that our debts have been forgiven.

How much do you love Jesus? I am often put to shame by the sinful woman in this story. I am too often reserved in my love for my Savior. It isn’t that I am ashamed of Christ, it is just that I don’t often reflect on how much my forgiveness cost the Father. We must realize that the forgiveness of our sins wasn’t free, for our debt was put upon Jesus. Let us respond to such wondrous love with a love that testifies to how much we have been forgiven. For the one who has been forgiven much, loves much.

Everett Henes, pastor of Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church, may be reached at pastorhenes@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Sturgis Journal: Everett Henes: Love for Christ