Bible Commentaries

Luke 7:13

I. It were vain to inquire why human nature requires sympathy; we can only appeal to experience, and we find it to be so. And let the compassionate see in the conduct of their Lord, and in the perfect example of compassion which He sets before us, how they ought always to act in their compassion for a friend. Though full of the deepest feeling, how calm the blessed Jesus stands before the bier of the young man, the only son of a widowed mother. What we require in a friend is not the mere verbal expression of sympathy, or what the cold world, in complimentary language, calls condolence; but with the sympathy we look also for the advice and suggestions of which we are conscious, our minds being paralysed the while with grief, that we stand so greatly in need.

II. Grief is not sin. The sin consists only in the excess of grief; and grief is excessive when it incapacitates us for the duties of our station, or leads us to distrust of our God. This in truth is the struggle of human nature, during the threescore years and ten of its trial—to bring the human will into subjection to the Divine. The question is not as to the amount of pain and grief which it may cost us to obey; but whether, notwithstanding the pain and grief, we are ready to submit, and from our trust in God's goodness, through faith to acquiesce with thankfulness in the dispensations of Providence, however painful they may prove to be. When God takes away the friend of our bosom, or the child of our affection, He does not call upon us to rejoice; but He simply requires us to be resigned—that is, submissively to yield what God requires of us under the conviction suggested by faith, that it is best that so it should be. There is no sin in praying, "Father, let this cup pass from me," for so prayed our sinless Lord; but there would be sin in failing to say, "Father, not my will but Thine be done," when the will of the Father that the cup should not pass from us, is declared.

W. F. Hook, Sermons on the Miracles, vol. i., p. 174.

References: Luke 7:13.—J. Oswald Dykes, Sermons, p. 340. Luke 7:13, Luke 7:14.—Preacher's Monthly, vol. iv., p. 177. Luke 7:13-15.—Clergyman's Magazine, vol. v., p. 32. Luke 7:14.—J. E. Vaux, Sermon Notes, 2nd series, p. 32; R. W. Evans, Parochial Sermons, vol. i., p. 41; J. Thain Davidson, Forewarned—Forearmed, p. 275; W. H. Cooper, Thursday Penny Pulpit, vol. iii., p. 195. Luke 7:14, Luke 7:15.—R. D. B. Rawnsley, Village Sermons, 1st series, p. 278; J. Vaughan, Sermons, 14th series, p. 37.

Luke 7:15

I. Note the mournful occasion which called forth this miracle: a widowed mother following the corpse of her only son.

II. Observe the sympathy which was shown for the widow's affliction. "Much people of the city was with her."

III. Our Saviour addressed the broken-hearted mother in words of comfort.

IV. The same Divine Lord who wrought this miracle shall hereafter awaken not one but all the dead, and restore all who have fallen asleep in Him to the beloved who have mourned their loss.

J. N. Norton, Golden Truths, p. 405.

"He delivered him to his mother." That is the Saviour's one comment in act on His miracle. Life has many purposes. Death has many secrets. Here was a soul, one among the very few that have recrossed the great gulf, have been in the world of substance, and come back to the world of shadows. What would we give to ask questions of it! But we cannot. "Something sealed the lips" of all concerned in the story. We know not if that momentary glimpse of another life faded as a dream fades when we wake and seem to remember vividly for a moment, and then all vanishes and cannot be recalled. Did life look changed to him? Had temptation lost its power? We might have thought that such a recall from eternity to time would have been the prelude to some great demand on faith and resolution, some great renewal of spirit and life. But our Lord does not say, "You know now what in life is worth anything; sell all that thou hast, and come, follow Me." "He delivered him to his mother." That was the aspect of the young man's life most in the Saviour's thoughts. The son's place was by his mother's side—his place of duty, his place of safety. If his life was to be lived again, the first note of its renewal would be truer filial devotion, more complete filial service. Note—

I. A mother's love. What else is like it? in its tenderness, its unselfishness, its inexhaustible patience; the love that finds no tasks too humble or too exacting; the love that waits for us, unchanged, even deepened, by the sorrows which strike deepest, by fears, by wrong.

II. A mother's claim. It is a claim which grows more urgent as her need grows sorer; when her burdens are no longer divided; when the greatest desolation that life can bring has fallen upon her; but it is a claim that belongs to her from the first, resting on nature, on God's primal law.

III. A mother's sorrow. Death is not the only one, not perhaps the saddest. Death, the death of the dearest, is not to us, if we are Christians, what it was even to the widow of Nain in that hour of desolation. There is to us light and love behind the veil. But a mother may lose a boy in another way, and one in which it is harder to gain trust and peace. Her son is going a way that she cannot follow him, a way that never meets again the way he has left.

E. C. Wickham, Wellington College Sermons, p. 181.

References: Luke 7:15.—R. D. B. Rawnsley, Village Sermons, 2nd series, p. 205. Luke 7:17, Luke 7:18.—C. C. Bartholomew, Sermons Chiefly Practical, p. 89. Luke 7:17-19.—Clergyman's Magazine, vol. iii., p. 293; Luke 7:18-23.—Homiletic Magazine, vol. xii., p. 286; Ibid., vol. xiv., p. 305. Luke 7:18-24.—E. de Pressensé, The Mystery of Suffering, p. 191. Luke 7:19.—Preacher's Monthly, vol. ii., p. 107. Luke 7:19-28.—Ibid. vol. i., pp. 128, 211.

Luke 7:22

The description of His own work which Jesus returned for the instruction and encouragement of the Baptist presents these three features: (1) it is a ministry of abundant charity to the temporal needs of needy men; (2) it is a ministry of Divine promise and help—"the poor receive glad tidings;" (3) these two are blended naturally and simply together.

I. On part of this ground we are at one; it is that of desire to minister to the good and increase the happiness of our fellowmen. To ask in what good and happiness consist might seem pedantic and abrupt. But on the way in which these things may be increased men feel that they have learned something. We have two results of present teaching: (1) that happiness is a harmony between man and his surroundings; (2) the rule or method of charity, making charity to consist in giving our personal help and service, and in bringing to the needy those things which, for ourselves, have given brightness and interest and worth to life. Can we bring the two into relation with one another, and then with Christ's type of ministry as suggested in the text?

II. Turn back your thoughts upon the history of human happiness, and think of its earlier stages. Under simple and primitive conditions, nature seems to provide man with a stock of happiness, or of material for happiness; he gains happiness from his harmony with his surroundings, as proved in the pleasures of the bodily instincts or functions, in the glad response of vital energy, in muscle and limb, to moderate demands for exertion, in the earliest forms of human intercourse in family or clan, and by degrees in the exercise of skill or resource, and in the power to appreciate beauty or grandeur in nature around him. In proportion as consciousness becomes articulate, and reflection awakes, man must, by the very nature of his mind, grasp all that is outside himself into a whole. He must look before and after and above. What then if there comes a time when the world's face is darkened? Civilisation has developed, but man seems to be no gainer. The effect of increased wealth and knowledge seemed to have only sapped old-fashioned simplicities and virtues, and substituted the power of money for the power of loyalty and right. What can we do to minister to men's needs. The answer has been forming in men's minds, even when they have not realised all its meaning. Make it possible for men to believe in happiness; make it possible for them to believe in love. Give them the things which will brighten their life, glimpses of the beauty of nature or art or intellect; recover for them the simple pleasures of the poorest and humblest thing that can be called a home. Make impossible regions of human life visited by no light of human sympathy, or lightened by no hope of human succour. Open to them possibilities of aspiration. Restore in this way gently a sense of harmony with the order of things into which they have been born. Soothe the dumb exasperation which comes of having to live in a world that means nothing but darkness and want and fear. And then give yourself, your personal help; use your freedom of time, your money if you have it, your acquirements of understanding, knowledge, still to convince them that there is such a thing as unselfish and compassionate love. And leave the inference to them. The very poverty and misery which have once blossomed for them with the miraculous fruit of a true charity will never seem the same again. You have gone among them to carry as far as in you lies whatever of bright and beautiful, of good and pure, of loving and tender, could bear witness that life carries hope with it. And thereby you have given them an alphabet by which to read the witness of the beauty, the greatness, the tenderness of Christ. You can speak to them of Christ, not only as a witness of what may be or what shall be, but as a present Giver of all precious gifts. Or, more truly, of one gift which implies the rest—the gift of God's love certainly known, and with a joyful confidence of faith actually received and welcomed into their souls.

E. S. Talbot, Oxford and Cambridge Journal, Jan. 31st, 1884.

References: Luke 7:22.—Parker, Hidden Springs, p. 316. Luke 7:23.—Preacher's Monthly, vol. i., p. 135. Luke 7:24.—Clergyman's Magazine, vol. i., p. 39.

Luke 7:28

What can these words mean? Well, let us consider what constituted the highest, that is, the spiritual greatness of the prophets, and try to discover whether in relation to all these things it is not true that the very least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than the greatest of the prophets.

I. They were inspired men. Some of them had great natural genius. All of them received the supernatural illumination of the Holy Ghost. They had revealed to them the eternal principles of righteousness by which God governs the world. But your knowledge and view of the Divine character and will is far larger than theirs was. The very least knows what they did not know—the story of the Lord Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh.

II. But the prophets, you may say, were illustrious for their sanctity. How can the very least in the kingdom of heaven be greater than they were? Here again we must distinguish between what may be called the natural force of moral character and supernatural holiness. There is a genius in some men for heroic forms of goodness, as there is genius in others for poetry, music, eloquence, and art. The magnificent energy of Elijah, the chivalry of David's better days, the stately dignity of Abraham—these may not be ours; but the very least in the kingdom of heaven has an element and a spring of holiness which did not belong to any of them. In the sense in which we are in Christ they could not be; and in the sense in which we are regenerate they were not. The Spirit that Christ possessed is granted now to us. We have possibilities of holiness higher and greater far than belonged to the saints of the old dispensation.

III. The third element in the greatness of the prophets consists, no doubt, in the intimacy of their relations to God. They were God's chosen servants; they were trusted by God with great duties: some of them were called God's friends, but a nobler title belongs to the very least in the kingdom of heaven than belonged to the very greatest of them. We belong to the race that has sprung from the Second Adam, and the very least of those who have sprung from the Second Adam must be greater than the greatest of those that sprang from the first.

IV. They had close access to God. This was an element of greatness in the old prophets, and yet remember that their access to God was access to God under the conditions of the old economy. It was to be had, not as we may have it now, by the immediate approach of our soul to the eternal Father, through Christ Jesus our Lord, but it was to be had through the ministry of the priests, and through the efficacy of sacrifice. Now we are greater in all this than the prophets were, for God is nearer now to the least in the kingdom of heaven than He was to the greatest in the old days.

R. W. Dale, Penny Pulpit, new series, No. 394.

References: Luke 7:24-28.—Preacher's Monthly, vol. i., p. 208. Luke 7:28.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. v., p. 89. Luke 7:29.—Ibid., vol. x., p. 99. Luke 7:29-35.—W. Hay Aitken, Mission Sermons, vol. ii., p. 183. Luke 7:31-34.—D. Fraser, Metaphors of the Gospels, p. 127. Luke 7:31-35.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. xiv., p. 91; R. Lorimer, Bible Studies in Life and Truth, p. 293. Luke 7:33-35.—G. Calthrop, Pulpit Recollections, pp. 57, 69.

Luke 7:35

Wisdom is justified, i.e. approved, of all her children.

I. None but the children of Wisdom can justify her. What a really unread page is the whole page of nature; what a riddle is providence; what an inscrutable mystery is the method of Divine grace in saving a sinner; what an unreality is the inner life of a spiritual man to anyone in whom there has not yet taken place a certain inward transformation—a teaching, purifying, assimilating process. Hence every heart, in its natural state, is always mistaking God, always misjudging Him in everything God says and everything God does. And the misconstruction is always deepening, just in proportion as the subject rises. In the outer circle of God's works there is ignorance, and in the inner circle of His glorious Gospel utter blindness and universal distortion. Just like the children in the market-place, in the music of God's love they see nothing but melancholy; and in the solemn denunciations of His wrath they find no fear.

II. In God's great universe—the house of creation—all are either servants or children. Everything serves Him. Some of His servants serve as His children. Here is the difference. The servant knoweth not what his Lord doeth; the child does. Wisdom, all wisdom, is justified, vindicated, honoured, loved, understood, of all her children. Therefore, be one of Wisdom's children, and sooner or later the blessed consequence must follow. The dark place in the experience of life, the hard passage of Scripture, the difficulty in the character of that Christian, the offensive doctrine, will all be cleared up. Be the enigma and the difficulty what they may, the declaration is that they shall all be justified in Christ. And the justifying process will go on and on, more and more, till that very wisdom shall come again in His unveiled beauty. At that moment the series will be consummated, when no longer shall He be justified only but glorified in His saints, and admired in all them that believe.

J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 2nd series, p. 303.

Luke 7:36-50

I. The narrative encourages sinners of every name and degree to go at once to Christ. He will in nowise cast them out. There are no more touching stories in the Gospels than those which tell how Jesus dealt with the most degraded class of sinners. Recall His conversation with the woman of Samaria, at the well of Sychar. Bring up before you once again that scene in the Temple, where the scribes and Pharisees dragged in before Him the woman who had been taken in the very act of sin. Then read anew this narrative, and say if the prophecy regarding Him was not true, "A bruised reed shall He not break; the smoking flax shall He not quench." Where man perceived no promise of success, and would have been tempted to give up the individual as hopeless, He would labour on until the reed which had given forth a note jangled and out of tune was restored to its original condition, and gave its own quota to the harmony of Jehovah's praise.

II. If we would be successful in raising the fallen and reclaiming the abandoned, we must be willing to touch them and be touched by them. In other words, we must come into warm, loving, personal contact with them. What an uplift Christ gave to the soul of this poor woman, when He, the pure and holy, let her thus approach Him. When the Lord wished to save the human race, He touched it by taking on Him our nature, without our nature's pollution. So we must take the nature of the degraded, without its impurity, if we would help Him.

III. If we wish to love God much, we must think much of what we owe to Him. Low views of sin lead to a light estimate of the blessing of pardon, and a light estimate of the blessing of pardon will lead to but a little love of God.

W. M. Taylor, The Parables of Our Saviour, p. 210.

References: Luke 7:36-50.—Phillips Brooks, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxi., p. 342; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iv., p. 75; A. B. Bruce, The Training of the Twelve, p. 28; W. Hanna, Our Lord's Life on Earth, p. 184; Preacher's Monthly, vol. i., p. 214; Expositor, 1st series, vol. vi., p. 214. Luke 7:37, Luke 7:38.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iii., p. 129; Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiv., No. 801; Christian World Pulpit, vol. iii., p. 312; E. Blencowe, Plain Sermons to a Country Congregation, vol. ii., p. 153. Luke 7:38.—Spurgeon, My Sermon Notes: Gospels and Acts, p. 90.

Luke 7:39

Christ in Simon's House; the Pharisee's Mistake.

I. As it regarded Christ. (1) He could not read Christ's nature, and undervalued it; (2) he mistook also Christ's way of rescuing from sin.

II. As it regarded the woman. (1) The Pharisee thought that as a sinner she was to be despised; (2) he did not see that into her heart a new life had entered.

III. As it regarded himself. (1) The Pharisee showed that he did not know his own heart; (2) he did not see that in condemning this woman he was rejecting the salvation of Christ. (a) Those who profess religion should be careful how they give a false view of it, by uncharitable judgments and by assumptions of superiority. (b) We must remind those who profess to be seeking religion, that they are bound to form their judgment of it from its Author.

J. Ker, Sermons, p. 16.

Reference: Luke 7:39.—J. Armstrong, Parochial Sermons, p. 323.

Luke 7:40-43

A State of Sin a State of Debt.

I. We are all debtors to God. Having failed to discharge the debt of obligation, we now owe a debt of punishment.

II. We are debtors in different degrees.

III. We are unable to pay our debts. Not only debtors, but bankrupts.

IV. God is willing, for Christ's sake, freely to forgive us all.

V. Our love to God should be proportioned to the amount of the debt which He has forgiven.

G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines, p. 55.

The Forgiveness of Sins the Remission of a Debt.

I. Sin is a debt—that is the primary idea of this parable. But I can well understand a thoughtful person saying, "I can see the beauty and truth of this illustration. There is a burden which each man bears—the burden of the sense of sin, from which he yearns to be delivered. But there are other aspects of sin which the parable of a money-debt does not seem to me to include or to cover, because such an obligation lies altogether outside the sphere of morals. A debtor need not be a sinner; the creditor may have no cause for anger against him. Moreover, if the money were paid, the obligation would be at an end. I want to know how far offences of another kind, moral derelictions of man against man, are analogous in nature and in remedy to our sins against a just and righteous God?"

II. We are all debtors. We owe to God that which we can never pay for ourselves. What we need, therefore, is a remission of the debt. If we bear this well in mind, we shall look upon sin and death with truer eyes. Exemption from any penalty, supposed to be incurred by non-payment of the debt, could not benefit us. "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors." Here the word debtors is clearly used for all who have failed to pay us our due, whether that due be money or the commoner obligations of everyday life. Every time an offence is committed against us, it is a debt that is incurred. Our friend owes us something which he has not paid. The language of the Lord's Prayer, as recorded by St. Matthew, strictly accords with that of the parable of the two debtors. A friend does us a wrong. It is for us either to retain or remit the debt he has incurred. We are willing to remit his debt, if he is willing that it should be remitted. It is impossible to forgive where forgiveness is not desired. I cannot remit the debt of sin which my brother has incurred unless he is willing that it should be remitted. His debt is love, and no suffering or penalty could restore that broken link. Reconciliation is a bond of righteousness. The offender cannot be forgiven without penitence on his side. If it pleased God to save us from hell-fire, still He could not save us from an avenging conscience. It is idle, and worse than idle, for us to murmur against a revelation of hell. If there is a heaven, there must be a hell. If the pure in heart see God, the vision of the impure must be sin and Satan.

A. Ainger, Sermons in the Temple Church, p. 115.

Reference: Luke 7:41-44.—W. Hay Aitken, Mission Sermons, vol. iii., p. 218.

Luke 7:42

Our State of Debtorship before God.

I. What does the Saviour mean by representing sin as a debt? We can well understand in the abstract what a debt is. In looking at our state of debtorship towards God, we should take the simplest and the most meaning view of the subject first. We look simply at ourselves as being creatures of God's creation. "It was He that made us, and not we ourselves." Everything that we have comes from God—our existence, our friends, our blessings, our indulgences, our faculties, our powers; everything that we have has come from the same hand, poured plenteously upon us by our God. And if all this be so, we have a foundation here of obligation. Let the relationship be admitted and the consequence follows, that we are placed in a state of subserviency to God, and that God has a simple right to our services.

II. Look next at man's state of utter insolvency. You will see at once that the parable is constructed according to the usages of the courts of law. There is a certain charge for a debt incurred lying against the debtor, and a demand that that debt should be paid. When we look to the question of the liquidation or the removal or satisfaction of crime, there are four ways in which it may be done: (1) we may traverse the indictment altogether; (2) we may plead palliation; (3) we may propose to offer an atonement; and (4) failing these three, we may throw ourselves on the mercy of the court. In none of these ways is it possible that man can be cleared of his offences. God can only afford to be merciful through Christ Jesus. There must be a compensation given to offended justice, otherwise God cannot be just and the Justifier of those who believe. When the Saviour came into the world and took our transgressions upon Himself, when He looked upon the mountain of iniquity that was crushing us down, and shed His own precious blood as an atonement, then justice was satisfied, and mercy was open to plead along with justice. It is in this way that the Gospel makes clear to us the only method by which any sinner can expect mercy.

A. Boyd, Penny Pulpit, new series, No. 121.

References: Luke 7:42.—Spurgeon, My Sermon Notes: Gospels and Acts, p. 93; Ibid., Sermons, vol. xxix., No. 1,730.

Luke 7:44-50

The Forgiveness of Sin the Remission of a Debt.

I. There are a peculiar tenderness and quiet pathos about this narrative which have commended it to many, even of those who have no taste for dogmatic religion. It is one of those incidents which, like the sickness and death of Lazarus, can be separated from the general Gospel narrative; little idylls, if the expression be allowable, of human sorrow, and the aspirations which arise out of it. We know nothing of this woman save that she lived a profligate life in the city: she had been a sinner; she is now a penitent; and that is all we know. There had been something which was a part of this woman, and which had kept her distant from God; and this was sin. It was not that she was on earth and God in heaven—this was not the gulf between them; nor that He was a powerful despot and she a weak slave; but that He was holy and she unholy. And now her old waywardness and pollution, which had hung like a millstone about her neck, had dropped off. She had become sorry and ashamed of self, through companionship with a holy life, and through being admitted to share a love which was the love of God. The debt which she had not paid He could pay and was paying.

II. A question about a simple Greek conjunction, that which in the English version is rendered "for"—"her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much"—has introduced doubt into the meaning of a passage which is otherwise quite free from difficulty. The whole drift of the story, and the parable introduced to interpret it, point to the true meaning. The love is the fruit of the discovery that reconciliation is possible. For it is impossible to separate forgiveness from reconciliation. If forgiveness were the remission of a penalty, it would be possible to be forgiven and yet to be unreconciled. For the exemption of a soul from penal suffering does not and cannot unite a soul with God. In the case before us, forgiveness was only valued by the woman, as it was the beginning of a new life. Till she had met Christ, sin seemed no sin to her; but it rested with unutterable bitterness upon Him. She had not grieved for herself, but He had grieved for her, and for every sinner who was living in exile from God. Surely He had borne the griefs and carried the sorrows of the world, and was bearing them; and as she awoke to feel this, she was abased with shame which showed itself in tears, but filled also with the surest sign of humility, the gratitude which brought Him of her costliest and best.

A. Ainger, Sermons in the Temple Church, p. 130.

Luke 7:47

We learn from this story that such love as the Magdalene showed to our blessed Lord is the point of forgiveness, of forbearance, and of service. "Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much."

I. Now it is this which differences the Gospel from all other systems of religion, that it promises reconciliation only to the loving. One code of morals declares that obedience is the only avenue to pardon; but this may be merely deistic. Another code of morals asserts that repentance is the only road to forgiveness; but that may be merely Jewish. Jesus Christ proclaims that absolution is only pronounced upon the affectionate. Now there is in this no confusion between right and wrong, no pretence that guilt is as beautiful as grace; but since all men sin, and since all need pardon, they gain the richest, the blessedest gift of forgiveness, whose hearts are warmest of love for the Saviour.

II. Love is the fountain of reverence. This woman was conspicuous for the earnest, devout, uncalculating veneration which she paid to the Redeemer. The Pharisee had his notion of the proprieties which belong to reverence; but they were very unlike the unaffected, the passionate, worship of the Magdalene. The fastidious Pharisee would have been quite shocked to start aside, even by a hair's breadth, from religious decorum and etiquette; but the woman's heart was all aglow with the gifts and the sense of pardon; and with the vision of a higher life she can only tell her veneration in the accents of reverence which were too real to be restrained. Like her, we must go boldly to the throne of grace, blending confidence with worship, respect with affection, and reverence with rapture.

III. Love is the fountain of service. The Pharisee had his idea of this service. He had coldly and carefully regulated all his obligations. He paid tithe of mint and anise and cummin. He could set down in order his notions of duty, and formulate them into a code of morals; but all this obedience was as a cold light shining upon his intellect and not in his heart. But one single feature in his character attracted the notice of Christ—he had no heart filled and overflowing with love. It was not an enormity; it was a lacking. But this woman, who is only known to us by her contrition and her reverence, won the Saviour's heart by the simplicity and the beauty of her service. Only the heart of a woman could have conceived a service or a gift so full of tender pathos, so fragrant, so exquisite. It was her best—it was her all; for it is the instinct of love to give not only largely, but also sweetly. Her generosity had no stint, and her method had no rudeness.

H. White, Penny Pulpit, new series, No. 964.

The point to which we specially direct our attention is the self-accusing spirit of this woman; its necessity and its blessedness.

I. For, first of all, it may be said, that the kingdom of Christ is founded upon those who accuse themselves of their sins. It has both an exterior and an interior foundation, an outer and an inner court. On His part it is a perpetual ministry of absolution; on our part, a perpetual confession. In. the midst of the visible Church, Christ numbers, by direct intention, the fellowship of true penitents. In them He dwells, and to them He listens. He has no communion with those who do not know their need of His absolving pity. The law of repentance is laid on all, even on the greatest saints; it often seems to press more heavily on them than on others; for as they have more of sanctity, they have more of love; and as they have more of love, they have more of sorrow. As the light rises upon them, they see more clearly their own deformities. It is the greatest light of sanctity that reveals the least motes of evil; as things imperceptible in the common light of day float visible in the sunbeam.

II. Self-accusation is the test which separates between true and false repentance. Under all the manifold appearances of religion and of repentance, there are at last two, and only two, states or postures of mind; the one is self-accusation, the other self-defence.

III. The true source of the self-accusing spirit is love. A heart once touched with the love of Christ no longer strives to hide its sin, or to make it out to be little. To excuse, palliate, or lighten the guilt even of a little sin grates upon the whole inward sense of sorrow and self-abasement. So long as we defend ourselves, and God accuses us, we go heavily all the day long, our hearts glowing and smouldering within; so soon as we accuse ourselves at His feet, God and all the powers of His kingdom shelter and defend us. This is our true solace and relief. Now there are two signs by which we shall know whether our confessions are the self-accusations of penitent and loving hearts. (1) The first is, that our confessions be humble; (2) the other is, that it be an honest self-accusing. Where these two signs are, we may be strong in hope that the grace of a loving and penitent heart has been bestowed by the Spirit of God.

H. E. Manning, Sermons, vol. iv., p. 135.

I. From the doctrine that God is personal, and as personal the object of love, flows out the unique character of the Christian as against other forms of penitence. For other moral systems tell us that the only true repentance consists simply and entirely in amendment of life for the future, and that all the energy which, instead, is spent in sorrow for the past, is merely a waste of labour that might be otherwise employed. "The only true repentance," says a great philosopher, "is moral amendment." But still, the Christian Church, in her age-long ministry to the souls of men, has gained a deeper, truer insight into the springs of human action than is possible to speculative thinkers or to average men of the world. And as the result of her thinking, she proclaims repentance based on sorrow as not only far truer, but far more fruitful in noble practice, because born of the great desire to atone for wounded love.

II. The problem of the life of penitence is how contrition may be gained. God, men say, though we believe in Him, seems very far away from us, and the sufferings of the Cross are past and over long ago. There is no present object to help me realise that I have wounded the love of God. Go back to the history recorded in my text, and see what kind of love it was which there merited forgiveness. This poor woman in her misery did not know that she was worshipping the everlasting Son of the Father, very God of very God. But she felt, as she looked and listened, that there was a presence in humanity, on which her life of sin had been an outrage and a shame; and in the rock-like shelter of that presence, overshadowing the weary world, the faded instincts of her true womanhood revived and blossomed into action; and her sins, which were many, were forgiven her; for she loved much. We are not bold enough in realising how true it is that the knowledge of God must be learned inductively from His presence among men.

III. Though contrition is only the first part of penitence, it is one of those halves that contains in itself the whole. For real contrition must express itself first in word and then in deed; and so it leads us onward to confession and satisfaction.

J. R. Illingworth, Sermons in a College Chapel, p. 90.

I. We have Christ here standing as a manifestation of the Divine love coming forth among sinners. (1) He, as bringing to us the love of God, shows it to us, as not at all dependent upon our merits or deserts. "He frankly forgave them both" are the deep words in which He would point us to the source and the ground of all the love of God. God, and God alone, is the cause and reason, the motive and the end, of His own love to our world. (2) Whilst the love of God is not caused by us, but comes from the nature of God, it is not turned away by our sins. He knew what this woman was, and therefore He let her come close to Him with the touch of her polluted hand, and pour out the gains of her lawless life and the adornments of her former corruption upon His most blessed and most holy feet. (3) Christ teaches us here that this Divine love, when it comes forth among sinners, necessarily manifests itself first in the form of forgiveness. (4) Here we see the love of God demanding service. God's love, when it comes to men, comes that it may evoke an answering echo in the human heart, and "though it might be much bold to enjoin, yet for love's sake it rather beseeches us to give unto Him who has given all unto us."

II. Look next at "the woman" as the representative of a class of character—the penitent lovingly recognising the Divine love. All true love to God is preceded in the heart by these two things: a sense of sin and an assurance of pardon. There is no love possible—real, deep, genuine, worthy of being called love of God—which does not start with the belief of my own transgression, and with the thankful reception of forgiveness in Christ. (1) Love is the gate of all knowledge. (2) Love is the source of all obedience.

III. A third character stands here—the unloving and self-righteous man, all ignorant of the love of Christ. He is the antithesis of the woman and her character. Respectable in life, rigid in morality, unquestionable in orthodoxy; no sound of suspicion having ever come near his belief in all the traditions of the elders; intelligent and learned, high up among the ranks of Israel! What was it that made this man's morality a piece of dead nothingness? This was the thing: there was no love in it. The Pharisee was contented with himself, and so there was no sense of sin in him; therefore there was no penitent recognition of Christ as forgiving and loving him, therefore there was no love to Christ.

A. Maclaren, Sermons Preached in Manchester, p. 28.

Note:—

I. That gratitude in a living heart rises with the occasion.

II. Gratitude cannot be the same in two individuals of equal spiritual sensitiveness, but of different conditions.

III. Strong gratitude is very free in its utterance. It breaks the laws of propriety which a formalist would recognise.

S. Martin, Westminster Chapel Pulpit, 2nd series, p. 147.

References: Luke 7:47.—J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 1874, p. 256; E. Bickersteth, Church of England Pulpit, vol. v., p. 149; J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 1881, p. 37; Homiletic Magazine, vol. xv., p. 288; J. M. Neale, Sermons in a Religious House, vol. ii., p. 535. Luke 7:50.—Clergyman's Magazine, vol. 111., p. 283; Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xx., No. 1162; Homiletic Magazine, vol. xii., p. 321. Luke 7—F. D. Maurice, The Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven, p. 126; Parker, Christian Commonwealth, vol. vii., p. 89. Luke 8:1.—Homiletic Magazine, vol. xiv., p. 297. Luke 8:1-3.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iii., p. 230. Luke 8:1-4.—G. Macdonald, The Miracles of Our Lord, p. 87. Luke 8:2.—Preacher's Monthly, vol. vii., p. 56. Luke 8:2, Luke 8:3.—A. Maclaren, Christian World Pulpit, vol. ix., p. 273. Luke 8:3.—J. Baines, Sermons, p. 214. Luke 8:4—H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, The Life of Duty, vol. i., p. 114. Luke 8:4, Luke 8:5.—C. Girdlestone, A Course of Sermons, vol. i., p 227. Luke 8:4-8.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vi., No. 308; H. R. Haweis, Church of England Pulpit, vol. iv., p. 132. Luke 8:4-15.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. i., p. 55; Ibid., vol. xvi., p. 107; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. ii., p. 84; A. B. Bruce, The Training of the Twelve, p. 40. Luke 8:5.—J. B. Mozley, Sermons Parochial and Occasional, p. 141; J. M. Neale, Sermons in Sackville College, vol. iv., p. 72. Luke 8:5-8.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. ii., p. 50. Luke 8:7.—H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday Sermonettes for a Year, p. 44. Luke 8:8.—Clergyman's Magazine, vol. iv., p. 89; Homilist, new series, vol. iv., p. 233. Luke 8:10.—Homiletic Magazine, vol. x., p. 77.