Following Christ really isn't about being religious. At least not if we think of religion as something we do, hoping that it will encourage God to put something in the plus column of our cosmic checking account! In Jesus' day, this was difficult for some people to understand, much less agree with - especially the Pharisees, who were among the most religiously zealous and observant forms of Judaism.

In the traditional Christian view, Pharisees are miscast as enemies of God - those "others" that we smugly grow up feeling superior to - those we were taught not to be like. However, in Jesus' time the Pharisees were the champions of tradition; they were the guardians of the law of God, the Torah that gave Jews a picture of what life lived with God was supposed to look like. The Pharisees were the ones in a disbelieving world who cared about following God and did their best to do so in every detail of their lives. Jesus would have called them righteous. And I think we need to be careful in our criticism of the Pharisees, especially until we're sure we understand what is happening in their encounter with Jesus in the Gospels.

Today's story told by Luke helps us understand this a bit more, the story of Jesus' dinner party in the home of a prominent Pharisee. Our story begins with an unnamed woman slipping into the house of Simon the Pharisee, un-welcomed and uninvited. She was a woman in a man's world, and the religious keepers of morality knew her only as a notorious sinner. As we have come to expect from Jesus, he will upset the applecart of religiosity, turning his attention away from Simon his host, and away from a room full of important people. What will grab Jesus' attention is this woman from the margins, who has come seeking forgiveness and mercy. Jesus will offer her the hospitality that is born in the very life of God's own being. And in the process Jesus will use this as an occasion to teach the Pharisees, and us, about not confusing God with zealousness.

The woman in today's Gospel story begins with her own unsettling actions. She slips into Simon's house weeping, and doing the ritual washing of a traveler's feet not with a pitcher of water but her own tears, and then drying Jesus' feet with her hair, and anointing them with ointment she had brought along for this purpose. Luke describes the outrage she provoked: "Now when the Pharisee who had invited Jesus saw it, he said to himself, ‘If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him-that she is a sinner.' And Luke says that Jesus spoke up and said to him, ‘Simon, I have something to say to you.' ‘Teacher,' he replied, ‘Speak.' Jesus launches into the story-within-the-story, a parable of a creditor who was owed money by two debtors, and chose to forgive the debt of both, itself an extravagant act, although one owed ten times more than the other. Which of these debtors, Jesus asked Simon, will love the creditor more - to which Simon responds, I suppose the one who has been forgiven the greater debt.