For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God (Romans 5.6-9; emphasis added).

Doesn’t this mean that we were once sinners but now we’re not? Isn’t that what the text says? In fact, the entire a forteriori argument assumes that it is much more likely to save one who has already been justified and thus no longer counts as a sinner. And that is exactly what Paul has already stated–that one might die for a righteous man but never for a sinner. Since God’s son has died for sinners, much more will he save his saints.

Christians still sin, but the Bible seems to mean something deeper by the term “sinner”–something that it does not use in reference to believers.

Which brings me to another passage:

One of the Pharisees asked him to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee’s house and took his place at the table. And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was reclining at table in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head and kissed his feet and anointed them with the ointment. Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner” (Luke 7.36-39).

I just heard a preacher use this text to prove to his audience that they must acknowledge that they are sinners in order to be justified. He based this on the negative example of the Pharisee who, he claimed, believed that he wasn’t a sinner. After all, why would he call the woman a sinner unless he believed that he himself was not one?

I find this really frustrating because there is nothing in the text that indicates that the Pharisee believed he was sinless. The term, “sinner,” does not refer to mere sin or depravity. It refers to an unbelieving lifestyle in the worst case, or, in many cases, merely a non-Pharisee. This latter definition is highly problematic and was a source of great contention between Jesus and the Pharisees, but in this story the term is used in an appropriate way. We know this because the first person to use the term to refer to the woman is not the Pharisee but Luke. He is the one who singles out the woman as a sinner in distinction from everyone one else in the story. Probably, she was a prostitute.

Claiming the Pharisee thought he was sinless completely denudes the challenge of this text. It simply leads us all to congratulate ourselves because we were properly catechized. No, Jesus ends up rebuking the Pharisee, not because the Pharisee denied his own sinfulness, but because the Pharisee had an aversion to a prostitute coming into his home uninvited and touching Jesus.

How would you have responded?