11th Sunday in Ordinary Time 06-17-07

Scripture Readings
First 2 Sm 12:7-10,13
Second Gal 2:16,19-21
Gospel Lk 7:36-8:3, or Lk 7:36-50

Prepared by: Rev. Lawrence J. Donohoo, O.P.

1. Subject Matter
• Justification by faith is the basis for a relationship of love between Christ and the Christian.
• Paul teaches and Simon the Pharisee learns that the proud, relentless quest for self-
righteousness can be a greater obstacle to repentance than sin itself.
• Consciousness of one’s sinfulness is itself an effect of grace and can be an incentive for a
greater appreciation of the divine grace of forgiveness–an instance of “O happy fault.”
• Love covers a multitude of sins.

2. Exegetical Notes
• Context: “[T]his unit is a continuation of Paul’s speech to Peter, but it is apparent that the
speech now has a broader audience. . .Paul’s rebuke of Peter is transformed into a
theological statement of the gospel he preaches.” (Matera)
• Exegetes differ on whether the phrase “faith in the Son of God” is objective genitive or
subjective genitive, that is, whether it is Paul’s faith in Christ or Christ’s faith that is intended.
(Ambiguity in Scripture usually allows us to have it both ways.)
• St. Paul speaks of being “crucified with Christ” in the past tense, but now living a life that is
not his but Christ’s living in him in the present tense. The past tense can refer to his life
being included in Christ’s life–and death–on the cross, or to his own past conversion as a
baptism of fire. The past-present contrast suggests a death-resurrection sequence. Christ’s
actions are simply stated in the past (“who loved me and gave himself for me”), leaving it to
the reader to conclude to their present form as well (Paul’s present relationship with the
resurrected Christ as “resurrectional”).
• Luke’s account has resemblances with Mk 14:3-9, Mt 26: 6-13, and Jn. 12:1-8. “But Luke’s
story takes place in a completely different place in the narrative. The anointing in the other
Gospels takes place immediately before the passion account. Luke’s version is
inconceivable apart from its present context. . . .[I]n Matthew and Mark, Simon is identified
 as ‘the leper,’ whereas in Luke, he is designated as a Pharisee, a point critical to the story’s
meaning.” (Johnson)
• “Your faith has been your salvation”: “This is the first time in the ministry account that ‘faith’
and ‘saving’ have been explicitly joined.” (Johnson)

3. References to the Catechism of the Catholic Church

• 1521 Suffering, a consequence of original sin, acquires a new meaning; it becomes a
participation in the saving work of Jesus.
• 2266 Punishment has the primary aim of redressing the disorder introduced by the offense.
When it is willingly accepted by the guilty party, it assumes the value of expiation.
Punishment then. . .has a medicinal purpose: as far as possible, it must contribute to the
correction of the guilty party.
• 1987 The grace of the Holy Spirit has the power to justify us, that is, to cleanse us from our
sins and to communicate to us “the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ” and
through Baptism.
• 1988 Through the power of the Holy Spirit we take part in Christ’s Passion by dying to sin,
and in his Resurrection by being born to a new life; we are members of his Body which is
the Church, branches grafted onto the vine which is himself.
• 1989 The first work of the grace of the Holy Spirit is conversion, effecting justification in
accordance with Jesus’ proclamation at the beginning of the Gospel: “Repent, for the
kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Moved by grace, man turns toward God and away from sin,
thus accepting forgiveness and righteousness from on high. “Justification is not only the
remission of sins, but also the sanctification and renewal of the interior man.” [Trent]
• 1990 Justification detaches man from sin which contradicts the love of God, and purifies his
heart of sin. Justification follows upon God’s merciful initiative of offering forgiveness. It
reconciles man with God. It frees from the enslavement of sin, and it heals.
• 1991 Justification is at the same time the acceptance of God’s righteousness through faith
in Jesus Christ. Righteousness (or “justice”) here means the rectitude of divine love. With
justification, faith, hope, and charity are poured into our hearts, and obedience to the divine
will is granted us.
• 1992 Justification has been merited for us by the Passion of Christ who offered himself on
the cross as a living victim, holy and pleasing to God, and whose blood has become the
instrument of atonement for the sins of all men. Justification is conferred in Baptism, the
sacrament of faith. It conforms us to the righteousness of God, who makes us inwardly just
by the power of his mercy. Its purpose is the glory of God and of Christ, and the gift of
eternal life.
• 1994 Justification is the most excellent work of God’s love made manifest in Christ Jesus
and granted by the Holy Spirit.
• 1995 The Holy Spirit is the master of the interior life. By giving birth to the “inner man,”
justification entails the sanctification of his whole being.
• 1427 Jesus calls to conversion. This call is an essential part of the proclamation of the
kingdom: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the
gospel.”
• 1430 Jesus’ call to conversion and penance, like that of the prophets before him, does not
aim first at outward works, “sackcloth and ashes,” fasting and mortification, but at the
conversion of the heart, interior conversion.
• 1431 Interior repentance is a radical reorientation of our whole life, a return, a conversion to
God with all our heart, an end of sin, a turning away from evil, with repugnance toward the
evil actions we have committed. At the same time it entails the desire and resolution to
change one’s life, with hope in God’s mercy and trust in the help of his grace.
• 826 Charity is the soul of the holiness to which all are called: it “governs, shapes, and
perfects all the means of sanctification.”

4. Patristic Commentary and Other Authorities

• St. Augustine: “[T]he justification of the wicked is a greater work than the creation of heaven
and earth. . .[because] heaven and earth will pass away but the salvation and justification of
the elect. . .will not pass away.”
• St. Thomas Aquinas: “A person is said to live according to that in which he chiefly puts his
affection and in which delights him most. Thus when someone lives seeking only what is his
own, he lives only unto himself. But when he seeks the good of others, he is said to live for
them. For this reason, since the Apostle set aside his love of self through the cross of Christ,
he said that he was dead so far as love of self was concerned, declaring that ‘with Christ I
am nailed to the cross,’ that is, through the cross of Christ my own private love has been
taken away from me.”
• St. Thomas Aquinas: “A form of repudiation and of ingratitude would exist if I were to say
that the Law is necessary in order to be justified. If the Law is sufficient, that is, if the works
of the Law suffice to justify a person, Christ died to no purpose and in vain since he died in
order to make us just.”
• St. John Chrysostom: “How is this, O Paul? Why do you appropriate a general benefit and
make your own what was done for the whole world’s sake? For he does not say, ‘who loved
us,’ but rather, ‘who loved me.” Considering the desperate condition of human nature and
the inexpressibly tender solicitude of Christ in what he delivered us from and what he freely
gave us, and [Paul being] kindled by the yearning of affection towards him, he [chooses to
express himself in this way. . .Similarly, the prophets often appropriate to themselves he
who is God of all. Above all, this language teaches that each individual justly owes as a
great debt of gratitude to Christ, as if he had come for his sake alone, for he would not have
begrudged this condescension even for one person alone, so that the measure of his love to
each is as great as to the whole world.”
• St. Cyril of Alexandria: “That proud and foolish Pharisee therefore did not even think Jesus
had attained to the measure of a prophet, but Jesus made the woman's tears an opportunity
for clearly instructing him in the mystery. For he taught the Pharisee and all assembled
there that the Word being God ‘came into the world in our likeness, not to condemn the
world, but that the world might be saved by Him.’ He came that he might forgive the debtors
 much and little and show mercy upon small and great that there might be absolutely no one
who did not participate in his goodness.”

5. Examples from the Saints and Other Exemplars

• With respect to actions bespeaking the desire to forgive, St. Stephen’s public prayer for
those who killed him included Saul, who would one day write: “I still live my human life, but it
is a life of faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” St. Stephen did
as well.
• With respect to actions bespeaking the desire to be forgiven, St. Maria Goretti forgave her
assassin before dying in the hospital. After spending 26 years in prison, Alexander Serenelli
converted and upon his release he went immediately to Maria Goretti's house, knocked on
the door and asked Maria's mother to forgive him for his heinous crime. She not only
forgave him, but she invited him to attend Christmas Mass with her. And in 1950, Alexander
Serenelli sat next to Mrs. Goretti once again at the canonization of her daughter. (Fr. Tom
Powers)

6. Quotations from Pope Benedict XVI

• “A concept of ‘Gospel’ that fails to convey the reality of God’s anger has nothing to do with
the Gospel of the Bible. True forgiveness is something quite different from weak indulgence.
Forgiveness is demanding and requires both parties, the one who forgives and the one who
is forgiven, to do so with all their minds and hearts. . . .Only when the relationship between
truth and love is rightly comprehended can the cross be comprehensible in its true
theological depth. Forgiveness has to do with truth. That is why it requires the Son’s cross
and our conversion. Forgiveness is, in fact, the restoration of truth, the renewal of being,
and the vanquishing of the lies that lurk in every sin.”
• “Conversion in the Pauline sense is something much more radical than, say, the revision of
a few opinions and attitudes. It is a death-event. In other words, it is an exchange of the old
subject for another. The ‘I’ ceases to be an autonomous subject standing in itself. It is
snatched away from itself and fitted into a new subject. The ‘I’ is not simply submerged, but
it must really release its grip on itself in order then to receive itself anew in and together with
a greater ‘I.’ In the Letter to the Galatians, the fundamental intuition about the nature of
conversion [is] that it is the surrender of the old isolated subjectivity of the ‘I’ in order to find
oneself within the unity of a new subject, which bursts the limits of the ‘I.’”
• “Faith requires conversion and that conversion is an act of obedience toward a reality which
precedes me and which does not originate from me. . . .For Christians, this prior reality is
not an ‘it’ but a ‘he’ or, even better, a ‘you.’ It is Christ, the Word made flesh. He is the new
beginning of our thought. He is the new ‘I’ which bursts open the limits of subjectivity and
the boundaries divine subject from object, thus enabling me to say: ‘It is no longer I who
live.’”
• “Obedience to the Church is the concreteness of our obedience. The Church is that new
and greater subject in which past and present, subject and object come into contact. The
Church is our contemporaneity with Christ; there is no other. . . .Conversion, then, also calls
for going beyond self-reliance and for entrusting ourselves to the mystery, the sacrament in
 the community of the Church, in which God enters my life as agent and frees it from its
isolation. Along with faith, conversion entails losing oneself in love, which is a Resurrection
since it is a kind of dying.”
• “The inner self of Jesus, as it is portrayed throughout the whole of his life and finally in his
self-sacrifice on the cross, offers a measure and prototype of future humanity. It’s not for
nothing that we talk of following Christ, of entering upon his way. It is a matter of inner
identification with Christ–just as he identified himself with us. That is really what man is
moving toward. It is in the great stories of discipleship, which extend across the centuries,
that we first see unfolding what is hidden in the figure of Jesus. It is not the case, then, that
a schematic pattern is imposed, but that every potential development of true human
existence is contained therein. We see how Thérese of Lisieux or Saint Don Bosco, how
Edith Stein, the apostle Paul, or Thomas Aquinas, has learned from Jesus how to go about
being human. All these people have become truly like Jesus–and they are nonetheless
different and original.”
• “I am preceded by a perception of me, an idea and a love of me. They are present in the
ground of my being. What is important for all people, what makes their life significant, is the
knowledge that they are loved. The person in a difficult situation will hold only if he knows
Someone is waiting for me, Someone wants me, and needs me. God is there first and loves
me. And that is the trustworthy ground on which my life is standing and on which I myself
can construct it.”
• John Paul II: “Conversion requires convincing of sin; it includes the interior judgment of
conscience, and this, being a proof of the action of the Spirit of truth in man’s inmost being,
becomes at the same time the start of a new grant of grace and love: ‘Receive the Holy
Spirit.’ Thus in this ‘convincing concerning sin’ we discover a double gift: the gift of the truth
of conscience and the gift of the certainty of redemption. The Spirit of truth is the Consoler.”

7. Other Considerations
• Nathan teaches us that divine punishment and divine forgiveness are compatible. That
David is forgiven does not mean the punishment will be revoked.
• We are often brought to a knowledge of our sins by others (fraternal correction). The
humility that enables us to receive correction is often a precondition for conversion.
• Contrast David who is brought to a sense of his sinfulness through the prophet Nathan and
the penitent woman who brings herself to Jesus by a sense of her own sinfulness.
• Contrast David who receives forgiveness by responding in humility to the divine accusation
and the penitent woman who receives forgiveness by Jesus’ response to her gestures of
love.
• David learns that he cannot justify himself by taking (in)justice into his own hands; Paul has
already learned that he cannot justify himself through the law; the penitent woman learns
that she is justified through love.
• Because Christ loved Paul (and all others), he died for him. If justification is through the law,
then his expression of love was to no purpose. The argument implies that love can never be
purposeless.
• Jesus often heals by means of touching the afflicted person. In this case the penitent
woman, like the one afflicted with hemorrhaging, is healed by touching Jesus.
• All three readings concern the mystery of God’s loving intervention making possible the
conversion of the sinner.
• The penitent woman’s actions, even ambiguous in their historical context, should still be
read against a cultural background that was likelier than our own to express intentions in
terms of actions, e.g., rending one’s garments.
• Jesus and Luke provide a space for conversion to take place: Jesus, by defending the
woman’s act of working out her salvation through love, and by calling attention to the
sinfulness of all; Luke, by protecting her identity and leaving her unnamed. “To everyone
who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give a white stone, and on the
white stone is written a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it.” (Rev.
2:17) And the Saul whom Stephen prayed for is Paul, the author of Galatians.

Recommended Resources
Benedict XVI. Benedictus: Day by Day with Pope Benedict XVI. Edited by Peter John Cameron.
Yonkers: Magnificat, 2006.
Johnson, Luke Timothy. The Gospel of Luke. Sacra Pagina Series, ed. Daniel J. Harrington, vol.
3. Collegeville, MN: Glazier, 1991.
Matera, Frank J. Galatians. Sacra Pagina Series, ed. Daniel J. Harrington, vol. 9. Collegeville,
MN: Glazier, 1992.