And he said to the
woman, Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace. (Luke 7:50)
I was recently asked if this verse (which
is focused on the repentant woman) is problematic for Latter-day Saint theology
as, at first blush, one might conclude a formulation of faith alone theology. I
believe Robert Sungenis offered a great rebuttal to any appeal to this incident
in the ministry of Jesus to support Sola Fide soteriology:
The Repentant Woman
In Lk
7:50, Jesus says to the woman who humbly anointed him, “Your faith has saved
you, go in peace.” One predisposed to a faith alone theology would be tempted to seize on this
verse and use it to prove his theory. To be sure, faith is one of the main
ingredients to salvation, but neither the story surrounding this saying nor
anything we have seen thus far in Jesus’ teaching will allow it to support a faith alone theology.
The
setting in Lk 7:36-50 portrays Jesus dining at a Pharisee’s house. A woman
comes in and, crying, begins wiping Jesus’ feet with her hair and pouring
perfume on them. The Pharisee is indignant because the woman is a known sinner.
He thinks that Jesus should have known better than to associate with her. To
explain these impromptu actions, Jesus tells the Pharisee a parable about two
men who had their debts forgiven, one a large debt, the other small. At Jesus’
prompting, the Pharisee concludes that the one who was forgiven the larger
amount would love his master more. Jesus applies this to the sinful woman who
is now seeking forgiveness. Jesus further admonishes the Pharisee for not
having greeted him with the customary kiss and anointing. These were common
customs of greeting and affection for friends and guests in those times. Thus, Jesus
is pointing out that Simon did not show Jesus even the least amount of love.
The woman, on the other hand, showed her love by doing the very things Simon
ought to have done. Perhaps she noticed that Simon had not given the customary
greetings and may have felt it her responsibility to do so. Her greeting,
however, is filled with emotion, sorrow and love. It is after, not before, this
exercise of love by the woman that Jesus remarks about her forgiveness. He then
concludes, “Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—for she
loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little.”
Here
Jesus is tying in the forgiveness of the woman’s sins with the love she showed
to Jesus. It is not simply that she believes in Jesus. Faith, of course,
prompted her to come. It is what the Council of Trent calls “the beginning of
salvation.” The real focus, however, is on her humbling herself, coming to a
stranger’s house in front of many guests and washing Jesus’ feet and applying
perfume, all in an effort to show her love for him. At the least, the woman’s
faith is, as Paul says in Gl 5:6, a “faith working through love,” but it is
certainly not a faith alone. Jesus would not have specified her love to such a
degree if he did not mean to combine her love with her faith as the cause for
her forgiveness and salvation. Luke makes it clear that the woman is a known
sinner, and thus in sin when she comes to Jesus, by his statement, “who had
lived a sinful life” (vr. 37). That Luke says these sins are forgiven
only after she shows the three signs of love to Jesus (vr. 48) is confirmation that her love was an
integral cause of her forgiveness and justification. For faith alone to be the cause of her forgiveness, as the
Protestants claim, the story line would have concentrated on her faith as
opposed to her love, and Jesus would have forgiven her sins before the acts of love. If her faith alone had obtained
her forgiveness, Jesus would not have confused the issue by making it appear
that her love was the turning point in her spiritual cure. Moreover, if faith
had been the only criterion for her forgiveness, Jesus would have said thus
before elaborating on Simon’s lack of love and the woman’s contrasting love. She
comes to Jesus doing acts of love because she is seeking forgiveness, not doing
acts of love because she has already been forgiven. Jesus never met this woman
before, so he could not have forgiven her sins prior to this incident. Luke
does not record that the woman says anything to Jesus, that is, she does not verbally
ask for forgiveness. Her actions of love alone speak of her desire and need for
forgiveness.
If God
had forgiven the woman of her sins privately before she ever came to Jesus,
there would be cause to say that the love she showed to Jesus was a result of
that previous forgiveness. The perfect passive verb in the statement of vr. 47, “her many sins have been forgiven” may
imply such prior forgiveness. It is more likely, however, that the subsequent
statement in vr. 48, which uses the same perfect passive
tense (“your sins have been forgiven”), and which places the reference point
for the past action at the beginning of the time Jesus is speaking to her, acts
as a commentary on the verb tense of vr. 47 and implies that this was the first time the
woman was formally forgiven and the first time she became conscious of her
forgiveness. (verses 47 and 48, Greek: αφεωνται = have been forgiven) Since nothing
else in the context would indicate a forgiveness prior to her meeting of Jesus,
we must assume that the woman was not forgiven until after her show of love, as
Lk 7:48 suggests. In effect, this scene at the Pharisee’s house portrays a
woman who is repenting for the first time. She does not do so verbally, but by
her tears and sorrow which Jesus understands as an act of love. The repentance
and sorrow, as manifestations of her love, are the reasons Jesus forgives her.
Hence, the love of the woman is both the cause and the result of the forgiveness.
The parable shows that as the woman seeks forgiveness, love simultaneously
flows from her. It is the love of the woman which allows Jesus to know she is
truly repenting. The Pharisee, on the other hand, doesn’t seek forgiveness of
sin (because he does not recognize his own sin) and thus he does not express any
sorrow or love for Jesus. In fact, he even distrusts Jesus to the point that he
secretly accuses him of being a fraud, as vr. 39 indicates. Though love is an integral part of
the forgiveness, there still remains some question as to why Jesus tells her in
vr. 50, “Your faith has saved you, go in peace.” If love is the key to
the passage why didn’t Jesus say, “Your love has saved you”? There are several
reasons for this. First, as noted above, faith is the beginning of salvation.
Without faith it is impossible to please God. Verse 37 tells us that the woman “learned
that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house,” which prompted her to come.
Thus, she must have known something about Jesus and had some rudiments of faith
in Jesus and a knowledge of her own sinfulness. The text does not tell us if
for some time she had already stopped sinning prior to meeting Jesus. It simply
calls her “a sinner.” But she needed to act on her faith. Jesus was not simply
going to read her mind in her house and forgive her of sin. Thus the love that moved
her to act brought her faith to fruition, and it was on this basis that the
faith saved her.
Second,
Jesus is accomplishing two things regarding Simon the Pharisee. The first is to
show how little he loves. The key is that Simon does not recognize his own
sinfulness but looks down on the woman who is a known sinner, just as in Lk
18:9 of the Pharisee who looks down on the tax collector who is a known sinner.
Jesus, by his parable of the two men who owed money, desires to teach Simon
that his capacity to love, whether God or man, can be no greater than his sense
of his own sin. The second thing Jesus accomplishes is to show Simon and his
guests that none of them has any faith in Jesus. Simon first raises
doubts about Jesus in vr. 39 when he says, “If this man were a prophet
he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is — that she is a
sinner.” Thus, Simon not only despises the woman but, more importantly, he even
questions the character and veracity of Jesus. This lack of faith in Jesus is
also evident among the guests, as vr. 49 records: “Who is this man who even forgives
sins?”
Ingeniously,
without remarking directly on their lack of faith, Jesus does so indirectly by telling the repentant woman that her faith
has saved her. No doubt the guests heard Jesus say this and correctly understood
it as an indictment against them for their own lack of faith. Thus we should
not take the addition of “your faith has saved you” as a dogmatic statement to
promote a faith
alone theology.
Rather, we should understand the statement within the whole context of the passage,
a passage that speaks of the great faith and love of the woman, as opposed to
the lack of faith and love in Simon and his guests. (Robert A. Sungenis, Not
By Faith Alone: The Biblical Evidence for the Catholic Doctrine of
Justification [2d ed.; Catholic Apologetics International Publishing Inc.,
2009], 189-92)
On the related topic of Luke 18 and the
parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, see:
Does
the Parable of the Pharisee and Tax Collector (Luke 18:9-14) Support Sola Fide?
(cf. Full
Refutation of the Protestant Claim Romans 10:9-10 Teaches Sola Fide)
For additional articles (1) refuting sola fide; (2) refuting imputation and (3) supporting baptismal regeneration, see, for e.g.:
