Her sins, which are many, are forgiven. — Grammatically, the words admit of two interpretations, equally tenable. (1) Love may be represented as the ground of forgiveness, existing prior to it, and accepted as that which made forgiveness possible; or (2) it may be thought of as the natural consequence of the sense of being forgiven, and its manifestations as being therefore an evidence of a real and completed forgiveness. The whole drift of the previous parable is in favour of the latter explanation. The antecedent conditions of forgiveness, repentance, and faith — faith in Christ where He has been manifested to the soul as such; faith in Him as the Light that lighteth every man where He has not so been manifested — must be pre-supposed in her case as in others. And the faith was pre-eminently one that “worked by love,” from the first moment of its nascent life. In such cases we may, if need be, distinguish for the sake of accuracy of thought, and say that it is faith and not love that justifies, but it is an evil thing to distinguish in order to divide.
Note in detail (1) that the tense used is the perfect, “Her sins... have been forgiven her;” (2) that the many sins of her past life are not, as we should say. ignored, but are admitted, as far as the judgment of the Pharisee was concerned, and pressed home upon her own conscience; (3) the thought subtly implied in the concluding words, not that the sins of the Pharisee were few, but that he thought them few, and that therefore the scantiness of his love was a witness that he had but an equally scant consciousness of forgiveness.