Which of them will love him more?”
Simon said in reply,
“The one, I suppose, whose larger debt was forgiven.”
He said to him, “You have judged rightly.”
From this we can understand what Saint Therese of Lisieux meant when she said, "How happy I am to see myself imperfect and be in need of God's mercy." Most of us would prefer to be perfect without any intervention. We would prefer to be holy without the need for healing. But if we can't find within ourselves the places that still need healing, if we can't recognize the need that each of us has for mercy, we risk being able to love only a little.
So I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven;
hence, she has shown great love.
But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.
Therese was not a great sinner as the world reckons sin. But she was able to recognize her need for growth. The further she progressed with God the more things which would seem small to others seemed to be great faults of selfishness to her. In the face of such generosity and love on the part of God who are we to argue about what is small and what is great? But the important thing for Therese was that she did not tell herself these things to beat herself up. She didn't have time for self-hatred. It was rather that she realized that the greatest sinners are entitled to the greatest mercy, and she wanted that mercy to heal her as well.
I perform works of mercy in every soul. The greater the sinner, the greater the right he has to My mercy (Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska, 723).
It is not likely that the Pharisee really needed less mercy than the woman. It is rather that the woman was able to identify her need for it. Doing so did not make her life worse, no matter how she might seem in the eyes of the world. The amazing love she showed to Jesus is proof of the immense gratitude for Jesus, for being able to approach him at all, even before he spoke the words she must have desired to hear.
He said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”
Christ came to call sinners, not the righteous (see Luke 5:32). It is the sick who need the Divine Physician (see Matthew 9:12). He not only called sinners, but died for our sins and was raised on the third day. We will love this Passion, we will anoint this body of Jesus with our own love, to the degree that we find the need of it ourselves, to the degree, finally, that we let ourselves be loved.
Whatever the ways in which we have sinned and need mercy God wants to transform us into people of thanksgiving, people made effective in their toil for the kingdom.
But by the grace of God I am what I am,
and his grace to me has not been ineffective.
Indeed, I have toiled harder than all of them;
not I, however, but the grace of God that is with me.
Let us learn the beauty of the words of the psalmist. With him let us sing, "His mercy endures forever."
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