Simon the Pharisee is watching a woman cry on his floor.
She is not supposed to be here. Everybody in the room knows her file. She came in off the street with an alabaster box, and now she is on the ground behind a traveling preacher, wetting his feet with tears and wiping them with her hair, and the dinner is ruined. Simon is doing what religious men do when the wrong person gets close to the right God. He is auditing. He does not say it out loud. He says it within himself: if this man were a prophet, he would know what manner of woman this is.
Jesus answers the audit. Not the woman. The audit.
“Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little.” Luke 7:47.
The woman with the file is the only person in that room who loved much, and Simon, who had the verses and the standards and the clean floor and the right dinner guests, sat at his own table and loved little, and the Lord read both of their works out loud in front of everybody.
Then He says the line the audit never quotes. “Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.” Luke 7:50. Her faith did the saving. The tears, the hair, the alabaster box - that was the fruit, not the purchase. Works preach. They do not save. The same chapter says both, and I will not cut either one out.
I have been Simon.
Dolly Parton died Tuesday, and my feed split in half before the day was out. Half posted rhinestones and called her a legend. The other half, my half, the world I grew up in, went quiet. For fifty years that world kept Dolly Parton in the same file it kept Billy Graham.
Ours, but not ours.
Down in the mountains she came from, this is not a celebrity death. It lands the way the Queen landed in England, the way Dale Earnhardt landed in NASCAR. Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg, Asheville. People down there will gauge time by it. I grew up in Asheville, and my family made the run to Dollywood more times than I can count, and some of those days were the best days we had. I honeymooned with my wife in Pigeon Forge. My children and now my grandson have grown up with her books on their shelves. That is three generations of my family in one paragraph, and none of us ever met her.
You know the file. Everybody raised where I was raised knows the file. Graham filled stadiums and preached the cross to more souls than our churches will touch in a century, and the file said he shook hands with Rome and put modernists on his platform and would not separate, so we said “not one of ours” with our chests out and let the stadiums be somebody else’s problem. Her file said the hemline, the movies, the gay day at Dollywood, the judge-not religion, rock and roll with a thin veneer of Jesus. The watchdog ministries printed it by name. We filed her the same way.
I kept the file too. I did not get it from the Book. I got saved at twelve and did not read the Book for myself until I was thirty-four, which means for twenty-two years my theology was whatever the room said, and the room said the file was discernment. Some of it was. I am not burning the standards down. Immodesty is immodesty. Doctrine matters. The Bible is not shy about either one. But here is what I cannot get past this week. The audit never once weighed a work.
She gave away two hundred million books to children. Free. No strings. Some of them sat on my own grandson’s shelf. She stayed with one man for fifty-eight years in an industry that eats marriages. She built jobs for her own mountain people when she could have built towers in Nashville. Graham’s file never weighed the stadiums either. We counted his handshakes. God counts what He counts.
Here is one the file never held. We broke down once driving through Pigeon Forge, out-of-state plates, and I braced to get taken. The mechanic on the back side of the mountain turned out to be kin to her. He was kind and he was sincere, and before we left he was pointing us toward the churches her people had pastored. The file had the hemline. The mountain had the fruit.
Now hear me plain, because I can be misunderstood here and the misunderstanding matters. Works preach louder than uniforms. Works do not save. I do not know what Dolly Parton did with the Lord, and I am not preaching her into heaven. Nobody gets preached into heaven, and nobody gets audited into hell. That was never my chair. The woman in Luke 7 was saved by faith, the Book says so in so many words, and whatever happened between Dolly and the Lord happened between Dolly and the Lord.
Paul asked the Roman church who they were to judge another man’s servant. To his own master he stands or falls. Her master was never me, and it was never the watchdog ministries. I have been Simon at that table, auditing a woman on the floor while the Lord read her works out loud. She never defended herself. She never posted a rebuttal. She just kept loving much. And the woman in the story, the only one in that room, went home forgiven. On faith. The Book says so.
Dolly never asked whether we were one of hers. That question was ours, and it said more about us than it ever said about her.
So here is the fork, and I am standing in it with you. The next time a believer the whole world can see does the works in public, the imperfect kind, the kind with a file attached, I can reach for the audit or I can reach for the works. One of those reflexes came out of the Book. The other came out of the room.
Simon went home with a clean floor and a small heart. The woman went home forgiven, on faith, with the Lord’s own words over her.
Close the file.
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Adam
