when she had meant an honour. She has nothing at hand to
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repair the fault, and so, with a touch she looses the hair, which it was shameful to let down in public, and, with the ingenuity and abasement of love, makes it a towel. Then, gaining confidence and carried farther than she had dared to intend, she lays her lips, sinful as they were, on His feet, as if asking pardon for the tears that would come, and only then applies the ointment, her only wealth. This woman that was "a sinner" and Judas are the only two recorded as having touched the Lord with their lips. Love may be bold even while penitent, and Jesus does not withdraw His foot from such a kiss.
Softer than silent, penitential tears.
Sweeter than nard upon His sacred feet,
Fell His dear pity on her shame and fears, Calming the heart that once so wildly beat.
Oh, tender Saviour, how Thy heart was moved
Because so very, very much she loved!
The Act of Forgiveness.
1. Forgiveness is an act of God — an act originative, antecedent, fertile. God must begin. This is the secret that burns through all the strong appeals of St. Paul and St. John as they reiterate their conviction that nothing of our own enters into the primary movement of our justification. No goodness at all of ours drew out a response from the co-operating favour of God. It was our badness, not our goodness, that drew it from Heaven. It was pity for our perishing that moved the Father to send His Son to save the world. " While we were yet weak, in due season Christ died for the ungodly." Not because we loved God, but because we could not love Him, did His love for us break out over us in His Son. God first loved us while still we loved sin rather than holiness, in order that, by loving us. He might restore to us the lost power of loving Him. The heat of His love alone it is that wakes up in our cold hearts the forgotten love for Him.
2. God makes forgiveness available by sending us His Son. Has He no forgiveness without the shedding of blood ? Yes
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indeed ; He is ever ready, He has never ceased to be ready, to forgive. But His ready forgiveness is shut up, of melancholy necessity, within Himself. It can discover no way by which to enter, no point of attachment by which to lay hold. The love of God wanders round this bitter, inhospitable world, and can find no haven that is not barred.
Therefore it is that He sends His Son, in whom His forgiveness can find a road into the repellent earth, into this repugnant humanity. God's expelled forgiveness, as all other doors are bolted, will open a way for itself ; as no man will admit it, it will itself become a man, that it may find admittance. God will forgive man in spite of man. God's forgiveness issues out of Heaven in the shape of a Man, wearing human flesh. Jesus Christ is the Forgiveness of the Father. The Father had already forgiven the world when He sent His Son to be born of the Virgin Mary, to be crucified under Pontius Pilate. The Son arrives, bringing with Him the pardon of the Father; and this pardon is effectual. For there is now in man one spot at least clean from defilement, on which the eyes of God's purity can afford to rest. There is now, amid the loveless herds of sinners, one Heart at any rate upon which the Father can risk the outpouring of His love; one Body, amid the hopeless and the faithless, and the diseased, which can admit the rushing power of the transfiguring Spirit.
Tf Just as a secret act of God's original energy underlies all our natural life — one act, prevenient, enduring, hidden — so a secret act of forgiveness, original, enduring, prevenient, underlies all our regenerate life. God spoke once, "Let us make man"; and lo, in the unending force of that fiat, we all are, we have our being. God spoke once in Christ, "Let us work out man's forgiveness " ; and in the everlasting power of that one word, so spoken and done, the new race of the forgiven finds itself existing, the Church of the redeemed rises, grows, gathers, swarming upward out of some hidden will, as clouds that make and build themselves out of the very vacancy of air under the strong eye of the risen sun.^
3. Jesus gladly takes up the task assigned to Him. With Divine authority He says, "Thy sins are forgiven thee." He
^ H. S. Holland, Creed and Character, 225.
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approaches the fallen with a boundless sympathy, and draws them to Himself by the spiritual law of attraction. He came from an infinite height into this world, that He might be near sinners, able to touch them, and ready to be touched. It was to take their nature upon Him in the very likeness of sinful flesh, that they might feel Him closer still, and that He might not be ashamed to call them brethren. It was to become sin for them, though He knew no sin; that He might bear it, first by pity, then by sacrifice, and at last by pardon. This is the great and Godlike plan, the very heart of the reason why " He lifted up His feet to the long desolations," and touched the soil of our sin-stricken earth. And now He is only carrying out His grand plan in one of its applications when He draws the sinner near Him, and suffers her to clasp His feet that she may feel she is in contact with God's infinite and saving mercy. It is a ray of the glorious Sun of Righteousness, whose going forth is from the end of the heaven, and His circuit unto the ends of it, which He has made to glance into this woman's soul and to stray across this Pharisee's threshold, that men may be made to see how the Son of God came to win back their hearts, and may learn that, while He hates the sin, He loves the sinner with yearning, quenchless compassion. If the sinner's heart is ever gained, thus it must be, when He who in His character is " undefiled, separate from sinners " comes so close to them in sympathy, and stretches out a hand to them, stainless in purity, but filled with pardons. The Pharisee, when he sees it, sets it down as folly. But wisdom is justified of her children, and God " hath abounded toward us in all wisdom and prudence," because He hath abounded " in the riches of his long- suffering."