When You Can’t Undo What You Did

Half past one in the morning.

At this hour it isn’t always tomorrow that keeps a person up. Sometimes it’s something years old. A thing said, a thing done, back on the ceiling as clear as the day it happened. The house is too quiet to drown it out.

A lot of people live by a rule they never say out loud. If you did the damage, you pay it back before you get any rest. The trouble is that some things can’t be paid back. A word said to a child. A marriage. A year somebody can’t get back.

Once, a woman walked into a dinner party carrying something like that.

It happened in a town in Galilee, the farming and fishing country in the north of what is now Israel, about two thousand years ago. A man named Simon invited Jesus to dinner.

Simon was a Pharisee. The Pharisees were a serious religious movement of the time, people who worked hard at keeping God’s law in ordinary life. Inviting a traveling teacher home was real hospitality. It was also a chance to get a closer look.

Guests at a dinner like that didn’t sit in chairs. They lay on low couches around the table, propped on one elbow, feet stretched out behind them.

A woman came in who hadn’t been invited. The story gives her no name and one description. She was a sinful woman from that town. It never says what she had done, and it isn’t ours to guess. It does make plain that the town knew.

She’d brought an alabaster jar of perfume, the kind of thing a person saves. She stood behind Jesus, down at his feet, and she was crying. Her tears fell on his feet. She wiped them with her hair. She kissed his feet and poured the perfume over them.

Nobody said anything. Simon thought it, though. If this man were really a prophet, he’d know what kind of woman was touching him.

It was an understandable thought. Simon took God seriously, and everything he’d been taught told him to keep his distance from this. He hadn’t thrown her out. He was just sure he knew who she was.

Jesus answered the thought as if Simon had said it out loud. He told him a short story about money.

Two men owed the same lender. One owed five hundred denarii, the other fifty. A denarius was about a day’s pay for a laborer, so one debt was a bad couple of months and the other was closer to two years of work. Then comes the line the evening turns on.

When they were unable to repay him, he forgave both of them.

Which one, Jesus asked, would love him more? Simon said he supposed it was the one forgiven more. Jesus told him he was right.

Then he turned toward the woman and walked Simon back through his own evening. There had been no water for his dusty feet when he came in, the ordinary courtesy for a guest. She had washed them with her tears. No kiss of welcome. She hadn’t stopped kissing his feet. No oil for his head. She had poured perfume on his feet. Her many sins had been forgiven, he said. Then he told her so, directly.

The other guests started murmuring to each other. Who is this who even forgives sins?

He didn’t answer them. He spoke to her one more time.

Your faith has saved you; go in peace.

Look at what was still standing when he said it.

The guests were still muttering. The story leaves Simon at the table with the point made and never says what he did with it. The town outside the door had the same memory it had that morning. Whatever she’d done was still done. If someone had been hurt by it, they were still hurt. Go in peace meant walking back out into all of it.

And look at what he didn’t credit. Not the perfume. Not the tears. Not the years she might spend making it right. He said her faith. She had trusted that she was allowed to come near.

In his little story, neither man paid a coin. They were forgiven when they were unable to repay. Not being able wasn’t what stood in the way. It was what the forgiving was for.

None of that erases what happened, and it doesn’t excuse anyone from repair where repair is possible. It changes the order. She didn’t earn her way back into peace. She was sent out in it, before she’d taken a step toward the door.