I just love entertaining! So in my previous employment, as a PA, I particularly enjoyed a job which combined corporate hospitality with business. The business was large-scale contract catering and the highlight of the year was always Royal Ascot, when I organised and, together with my boss, co-hosted 60-plus clients in the Grandstand Balcony Restaurant. Our guests were selected according to the level of profit they made the company. And do you know the hardest part of the arrangements? Yes, you’ve guessed: the Table Plans.

I suppose we’ve all done it, haven’t we? We’re planning a big celebration, so we draw up an invitation list. We decide who’s on the “A” list, who’s on the “B” list, and so on. Then we draw up table plans, which often focus more on who we think we should keep apart than who we should seat together!

Jesus appeared to have no such concerns. He challenges our selection criteria and convicts us of being too choosy.  Luke tells us today that one of the Pharisees (that is, Simon) invited Jesus to eat with him. Jesus arrived and took his place at the table. Then enters the woman who must have been tracking him because she knew where to find him. She is introduced to us as a sinner, which immediately sets up a bias against her. (Some say she is a prostitute but that’s only speculation.) As the story unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that the other table guests consider her intrusion untimely and her company unsuitable.

Not so with Jesus. He recognised real love when he saw it: that is, love which is unashamed and spontaneous. This woman wasn’t just grateful for the forgiveness she received, but her action demonstrated love as well as gratitude. Even if Jesus hadn’t known or guessed her need of forgiveness as she knelt before him and touched him with such loving and gentle grace, the depth of her love and gratitude pours out from her as abundantly as the ointment with which she bathed his feet. She asked him for nothing. Unlike many others whom Jesus had encountered along the way, this woman didn’t demand signs, miracles, healing or food. She just loved him.

The fact that she’d followed Jesus implies she’d seen him in action and heard him teach. She had seen the effect he’d had on others and her searching had led her to that moment when, finding herself at his feet, she was convicted: she knew her life had to change. And she didn’t even have to speak to know that he was the person she believed him to be. But even more important than that: Jesus knew her as the person that she wanted to be. Her commitment to him in her approach and her action revealed to him her need and he recognised the struggle she must have had, to do what she did in front of those people who despised her.

Women of those days were expected to be modest, not to draw attention to themselves, whatever their profession. By publicly weeping and allowing her tears to water his feet, and by spending her hard-earned money on expensive ointment, she gave him all she had. With no embarrassment and with complete abandonment to him, she waited for his verdict. And he recognised in her the degree of sacrifice that for her was total, and he loved her for it.

It took love to recognise love. She said nothing and asked for nothing, but she did plenty – weeping, bathing, kissing, and anointing Jesus’ feet and wiping them with her hair. Her action fulfilled the hospitality that was neglected by Simon the Pharisee, who was the host. Any respectable host would have greeted his guest with a bowl of water and a towel, to bathe the traveller’s weary, dusty feet. In the absence of such customary practice, it was this intrusive woman who did him that service, at great cost, and her reward was to depart in peace, having been forgiven.

Simon’s neglect is a sin of omission. His negative reaction to the woman’s extravagance should come as no surprise, because the telling comment is made earlier, that while tax collectors in receiving John’s baptism acknowledge the justice of God, the Pharisees by refusing John’s baptism reject God’s purpose for themselves. The woman, conversely, accepted Jesus’ verdict on her life and so received divine pardon. It seems that Simon, on the other hand, simply found such grace offensive and took the woman’s presence at the dinner to be a scandalous intrusion. Yet it is her lavish behaviour which contrasts with Simon’s failure to provide even the basic elements of hospitality.

What intrigues me about this reading is the parable which Jesus tells, where we find forgiveness of sins likened with forgiveness of debts: an experience no doubt well known to Galilean farmers. Their whole lives as well as their futures were bound up with their fiscal obligations. Pardon of debts, then, has little to do with guilt but more to do with the restoration of life and the renewal of hope.

The woman’s life changed because Jesus gave her the wherewithal for that to happen: her life was restored and her hope was renewed. She was granted spiritual healing, the right to worship with others again and the peace of heart and mind that she needed to complete her restoration within the community. No longer was she an unwanted outsider, condemned by those who considered that they’d earned their status.

Whilst we don’t know for sure what sin this woman had committed, we can identify with her because in one way or another we know that we all fall short. We know that we, too, are in need of Jesus’ forgiveness and peace. We also know that we can’t earn these things, but we can abandon ourselves to God’s grace and mercy. We aren’t given the woman’s name. A name would tie her to a space and time, and suggest that only she could claim the role she fulfilled. Instead, we can insert our own name, and respond through loving service as she does, because she is all of us, and we are all in her.

When we acknowledge our shortcomings, our tears of penitence, like hers, may become the perfumed ointment which anoints God’s troubled world. For whatever we do for the least of God’s “little ones” we shall be doing for him, and Jesus will recognise us as one of his. When we come to receive Holy Communion here, as a foretaste of the Heavenly Banquet, I can’t imagine God using Table Plans. His invitation to eternal love and life crosses all boundaries and divides, for God shows no partiality.

Those who are forgiven much love much. When we seek God’s forgiveness and respond to His love, which is freely given, undeserving though we are, He calls us to share it with others, impartially, without counting the cost, which includes forgiving others as He forgives us.

I see us all on God’s “A” list, because He doesn’t pick and choose as we might. Perhaps the question for us today is, “In the light of today’s Gospel, who might we inadvertently be judging or excluding? As undeserving recipients of God’s great love, who within our context is He longing to reach?”

Jesus took risks. He spent time with the outcasts of his day. He went to their homes. He was accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. And all for the love of God, for the sake of His kingdom, doing what he was sent to do, bringing the gospel of salvation to all nations, through word and deed. This is the task handed on to us.

Although disconnected from the main story, at the end of today’s reading we were told that soon after, “Jesus went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him, as well as some women … and many others, who provided for them out of their resources.”  [Luke 8.1-3]

Perhaps the connection for us is our “Bright the Vision” celebrations next weekend when for four days we will be welcoming friends and visitors alike into St John’s, providing for them out of our God-given resources.

Many of you have already expended a lot of effort towards the exhibition and the events that are planned. There will be ample opportunity for many more of us to offer a spontaneous welcome and unconditional hospitality to everyone who (paraphrasing the words of the Psalmist), “through the abundance of God’s steadfast love, will enter this house.” [Psalm 5.7]

Let us pray that God will bless all those who come through these doors. And let us pray that He will bless our vision to build on our inheritance and to extend the work of His kingdom in this place. Amen.