The Forgiveness of Sin the Remission of a Debt.
I. There are a peculiar tenderness and quiet pathos about this narrative which have commended it to many, even of those who have no taste for dogmatic religion. It is one of those incidents which, like the sickness and death of Lazarus, can be separated from the general Gospel narrative; little idylls, if the expression be allowable, of human sorrow, and the aspirations which arise out of it. We know nothing of this woman save that she lived a profligate life in the city: she had been a sinner; she is now a penitent; and that is all we know. There had been something which was a part of this woman, and which had kept her distant from God; and this was sin. It was not that she was on earth and God in heaven this was not the gulf between them; nor that He was a powerful despot and she a weak slave; but that He was holy and she unholy. And now her old waywardness and pollution, which had hung like a millstone about her neck, had dropped off. She had become sorry and ashamed of self, through companionship with a holy life, and through being admitted to share a love which was the love of God. The debt which she had not paid He could pay and was paying.
II. A question about a simple Greek conjunction, that which in the English version is rendered "for" "her sins, which are many, are forgiven; forshe loved much" has introduced doubt into the meaning of a passage which is otherwise quite free from difficulty. The whole drift of the story, and the parable introduced to interpret it, point to the true meaning. The love is the fruit of the discovery that reconciliation is possible. For it is impossible to separate forgiveness from reconciliation. If forgiveness were the remission of a penalty, it would be possible to be forgiven and yet to be unreconciled. For the exemption of a soul from penal suffering does not and cannot unite a soul with God. In the case before us, forgiveness was only valued by the woman, as it was the beginning of a new life. Till she had met Christ, sin seemed no sin to her; but it rested with unutterable bitterness upon Him. She had not grieved for herself, but He had grieved for her, and for every sinner who was living in exile from God. Surely He had borne the griefs and carried the sorrows of the world, and was bearing them; and as she awoke to feel this, she was abased with shame which showed itself in tears, but filled also with the surest sign of humility, the gratitude which brought Him of her costliest and best.
A. Ainger, Sermons in the Temple Church,p. 130.