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Have you ever met or had to spend time with a person who made you feel very cautious?  There are people who send some kind of message by their expression or their appearance that almost yells out at you, “Keep your distance!  Be careful, this person is trouble!”  

Sometimes it is pretty obvious why that person makes you want to stand back.   There could be intimidating tattoos or bizarre body piercings or very tattered clothing or a look that says you are about to be attacked.   The person may have a creepy smile or that person may be taking far too much of an interest in you.  The person might be exactly the kind of person Mom and Dad always told you to avoid, so you do as well as you are able.

There are other people that raise your instinct to be cautious and it isn’t really obvious why.  They appear decent enough at first, but you just don’t trust them.   It might be because there is some kind of look in their eyes or that they have a sour expression that they have to work to hide behind a polite smile.   Whatever it is, there is something about that person that says, “Get too close to me and you will end up in tears one way or another.”  

It’s hard to know sometimes if it is instinct or experience.  It’s hard to know sometimes if it is something in you that makes the difference or if it is something in them.    There are simply some people that you find to be very approachable and others that make you want to run the other way.   There are things about some people that make you feel free to pour your heart out to them and things about others that make you afraid to even tell them your name.   

A similar thing exists when it comes to our response to Jesus Christ.   Some people find Jesus to be very, very approachable.   They find Him to be very easy to trust and very easy to believe.  Others spend their lives running the other way.   Of course, we know that the problem is not Jesus, but the people whom Jesus wants to include in His grace.   Thank God that He has made Himself approachable so that we may approach Him in faith, and be blessed!

 

There are people who insist that the problem is definitely on God’s side when they find Jesus  to be very unapproachable.  They don’t like the idea of God keeping track of who is saved and who is not.   They don’t like the idea that people could lose their faith by openly rejecting God’s Will and stubbornly refusing to repent of their sins.  They don’t like the idea that God could possibly hold people responsible for their sins even if God is supposed to have forgiven them.  They don’t like the idea that James brings up in James 4:4, “You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God”.  They think that God makes life much more difficult than it needs to be with expectations for godly living that are simply far too high.  For them, God is  someone to avoid because He leaves them feeling very uneasy indeed!

There is an example of this in our Old Testament lesson this morning with King David.  He was someone who most people would say was a friend of God, which was true for much of his life, but not at the time of our lesson this morning.   By the time of our Old Testament lesson, the same thing happened to him as what happened to King Saul before him and King Solomon and most of the kings of Israel who came after him.  King David got used to the power of the throne.  He got used to the admiration and the adoration of the people.   He got used to seeing how the people allowed him the right to do anything he pleased.    He got so used to that, that he started to become a friend of the world.   He started to take far too much of an interest in how other kings of ungodly nations did things.   He started to be a stranger to God and he started to do the things that only people who have fled from God would do.  He drifted into that sad reality that anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.

How can we use such strong language about King David?  Well, you can’t exactly say that what David did was some kind of innocent oversight or excusable little mistake!    In our Old Testament lesson this morning we read that “The thing that David had done displeased the Lord.”  (2 Samuel 11:27)   Just how displeasing was that?  It was murder.  David put Uriah into a situation that he would never have been in if David had not put him there for the very purpose of making sure he would be killed in battle.   He exploited Uriah’s duty to obey his king so that he could steal the man’s wife from him.  It was planned.  It was pre-mediated.  It was a very intentional thing.  It was a very evil thing to do.  It was the kind of thing that a humble child of God simply knows is wrong and would never do.   It is was so wrong and so deliberate that our Old Testament lesson literally says, “The thing that David had done made God evil in the eyes.”

What, God evil?  No, of course not.  The Hebrew word for evil here, yera, actually refers to the opposite of grace.   In those most beautiful words of Benediction we hear most Sundays, we hear the words, “May God look upon You with His favour and give you peace.”   In our Old Testament lesson that one word translated as “displeased” in English takes all of that away.   Instead of looking upon David with favour and instead of giving David peace, God looked upon David with the opposite of His favour.   He looked upon David with the kind of look that David deserved.   David had turned away from God in order to do what he did, so God turned away from him and made it impossible for David to be at peace.  That Hebrew phrase, “made God evil in the eyes” meant that  David was officially un-blessed.   He received what you could call an anti-Benediction.   David had thrown away God’s grace, and God was not happy with him at all!  

Is that going too far to say that David dropped right out of the embrace of God’s grace, mercy and peace?  Ask David.   He explained in some of his Psalm 32  what that felt like.     David said, “When I kept silent, by bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.  For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as  in the heat of summer.”   There is definitely no sense of an “oops” here.   David tried to cover up his sin.  He tried to run away from God.  He thought he could hide from God.    He had become so tied up in his sin that it slowly but surely destroyed him and his faith.  No wonder David did not find God to be particularly approachable.  David made himself a very difficult person to approach!

You have to admire the prophet Nathan and his courage to approach such an unapproachable person as King David!   Can you imagine how hard it would have been to approach a king who had the power to have him put to death?  Could you imagine what kind of a risk Nathan took to speak God’s Word to someone who could have reacted to those words with fury and abused Nathan horribly?    

David was definitely an unapproachable man, but that did not stop God from approaching him through a humble believer like Nathan.  That did not stop God from showing David that He loved David enough to confront him with his sin.  As angry as God was, God Himself was making Himself approachable, and that was a very good thing for David.   It made all the difference so that we could remember David not as another Saul, but as an example of repentance and forgiveness and restoration!   

This brings us to the concept of understanding.  God understood what was going on with David, even if David worked so hard to not understand what he was doing.  God understood the issues exactly and by that understanding, David was brought to repentance.   He was restored to salvation.  David was given the gift of understanding just how far he had run from God and just how much God did to bring him back again so that David could come to understand how extremely important it was for David to confess his sins.  

The words of Psalm 51 that we use so frequently when we confess our sins to God were clearly written by someone who understood just how lost he has been and just how blessed he was that God had approached him to save him.  David prayed, “Let the bones you have crushed rejoice.”  He prayed  “Create in me a pure heart.”   He prayed, “Do not cast me from Your presence or take Your Holy Spirit from me.”  He prayed, “Restore to me the joy of Your salvation.”  These are not the words of someone who was simply worried that he might some serious mistake some day.  They are the words of a person who knew that he had thrown all that away and that he deserved it if God were to give up on him.   They are the words of someone who understands exactly how serious it is to make yourself unapproachable to God and to risk that God would make Himself unapproachable to you in return!

It is astounding, really, just how merciful our God truly is.   God restored a willing spirit within David and created in him a clean heart once again.  He washed away David’s iniquity and cleansed him from his sin so that Nathan could pronounce absolution on David and say, “The Lord has taken away your sin.  You are not going to die.”     Talk about overwhelming; talk about intense!  David understood right down to those very bones that had felt so crushed how awesome it is to be forgiven by God so much as David was forgiven!

What happens when a person understands that?   We have an answer to that question in our Gospel lesson for this morning.  Jesus said some interesting words to Simon, the Pharisee, who didn’t seem particularly concerned about his own sins  and who seemed quite secure and comfortable in his place before God.   He made it clear that Simon the Pharisee didn’t understand a whole lot.   He made it clear that Simon was a very unapproachable, unloving person because Simon did not understand what it means to be forgiven.   Jesus said, “Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven – for she loved much.  But he who has been forgiven little loves little.”  (Luke 7:47)  

If you have a person in your life who is cold and unapproachable, your first reaction might be to try to make them like you, or to try to give them an example of how to be warm and loving and approachable.   Our Bible readings remind us that there is a better way to warm up a cold heart.   It is a hard way, but it gets to the root of the problem.  

Nathan took that hard step by pointing out David’s sin.  Paul took that hard step by opposing Peter to his face, pointing out that Peter was not dealing with his sinful behaviour that was causing such grief among the Gentile Christians who were feeling very much unloved by Peter’s actions.  Jesus took that hard step by making it clear to Simon the Pharisee that Simon was underestimating his sins.   It is repentance and forgiveness that warms up a heart, and it is only the heart that has been warmed up in sincerely repenting and gladly receiving God’s forgiveness that can truly be an approachable heart!

You might be wondering, then, that if only a person who has been forgiven much can genuinely love much, where that puts Jesus Himself.   He was the perfect man, the sinless Son of God.  If He was perfect and sinless, then He can’t really know what it means to be forgiven as King David understood it.   He can’t know it the same way that the sinful woman in our Gospel lesson understood it.    How can Jesus be approachable to us if He hasn’t gone through what we go through?

There is an interesting answer to that question.   That answer as a lot to do with what actually happened when Jesus was on the Cross.  Do you know what it actually means when we say that Jesus died on the Cross for us?    Peter tells us in 1 Peter 2:24 that , “He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by His wounds you have been healed.”      

You might get the picture that Jesus somehow filled a basket full of our sins, carried them up onto the Cross with Him and then dumped them out. The words of the Greek are not like that.  The Greek words tells us that what Jesus actually did was to absorb something foreign.   

Our sins may not have entered into His heart, but they seeped through every pore of His body, poisoning His body with the same poison that has made death so much a part of our world.  Jesus was sinless, but He allowed His body to be filled with our sins.  He allowed His body to be loaded up so fully that the weight of every sin of every one of us broke His body apart.   

Instead of being a delivery boy, Jesus was our substitute.    Instead of being the hospital orderly who wheeled us in for surgery, He absorbed the cancer of sin into His own body and then underwent the surgery so that you yourself did not have to go under the knife!    It is as Isaiah prophesied in Isaiah 53:6, “The Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”   All of our hurts and all of our stubbornness and all of our refusal to bring our sins before God were laid upon Jesus.  Everything that would make us want to run away from God rather than approach God was stacked onto Jesus so that He Himself could approach God with it.  It was all laid on Jesus so that Jesus could go where we simply could not go, and Jesus Himself could bring us to the place that was too fearsome for any of us to want to enter.

There, Jesus asked God to forgive us, and there our sins were forgiven.  That means that when those sins were forgiven by God, Jesus experienced the forgiveness of every sin of everyone who would believe in Him!  He experienced the forgiveness of your sins just as surely as He carried your sins in His body.   He was forgiven much.  He was forgiven far more than anyone else could ever be forgiven.   He was forgiven far more than anyone of us could ever understand.  He was forgiven much and He loves much and He understands much.  The sinless Son of God was forgiven completely and so He loves completely.  He loves so completely that by His righteousness you now are righteous and by His wounds you are healed!

Can anyone really understand that?   Well, you don’t have to understand that.  All you have to understand is that someone who took your most private, secret sins and absorbed them into His body like that really, really knows you.   All you need to understand is that someone who would could through all that suffering and pain as God Himself, and yet as a man, really, really understands you.  Jesus cares for you deeply and that very deep caring and that very deep love makes Jesus as approachable as approachable can be!

You are not always going to approach God as you should.   You are not always going to be as approachable as a witness for Christ as you should be.    At times, you might be more like Peter, who needed to be corrected, than like Paul who confronted Peter with the truth; more like David, who was blind to his sin than like Nathan, who courageously brought David back to his senses.   

In all those cases, though, the people involved were children of God who had the privilege of approaching God in faith and the joy of receiving God’s forgiveness.  In all those cases, the people involved knew God’s love upon them and thanked God that He has sent them caring, supportive Children of God who were not afraid to share God’s Word and to hold their fellow believers accountable to that Word!

We have a Lord who is as approachable as approachable can be!  May God’s own Spirit move you to trust our Lord and to approach our Lord by the gift of your saving faith.  May God move you to be approachable, too, made approachable by the confidence that you, who have been forgiven much, may also love much in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord!  Amen.