Thursday of the Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time (opt. Hildegard of Bingen / Robert Bellarmine)

Binding thread: Love is proportioned to a person's own sense of how much they have been forgiven - which means the respectable can love least, and the visibly sinful can love most, depending entirely on what each one actually believes about their own debt.

Exegetical notes:

• 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 is widely regarded by scholars as a pre-Pauline creedal formula, likely received by Paul within a few years of the crucifixion itself - making it among the earliest datable Christian confessions of faith, older than any of the Gospels in written form.
• Paul's phrase "as to one born abnormally" (Greek ektroma) is unusual and stark - the word typically denotes a miscarriage or stillbirth. Commentators read it as Paul's own harsh assessment of the timing and manner of his call, set against the ordinary sequence of the other apostles' calls during Jesus's earthly ministry.
• The two debts in the parable, 500 and 50 denarii, are roughly twenty months' and two months' wages for a day laborer - both real, substantial sums, not a token debt versus an enormous one. The point is proportion, not the difference between something and nothing.
• Simon's omissions (water, kiss, oil) were each ordinary courtesies of Near Eastern hospitality, not extravagant gestures. Jesus's list indicts a failure of the bare minimum, which sharpens the contrast with the woman's excess.
• If observing Robert Bellarmine's memorial, note his authorship of two catechisms (the Dottrina Cristiana Breve and a longer version) that remained standard texts in Catholic religious education for over two centuries - a detail that pairs naturally with today's first reading on handing on the faith received.

Pastoral turn: This Gospel is frequently preached as being about the woman's sin. It is more precisely about Simon's blindness to his own need for mercy. A homily that spends all its energy rehabilitating the woman's reputation risks missing that the sharper rebuke in the passage is aimed at the man everyone in the room considered blameless.

Entry points: "Simon never says a word out loud. Jesus answers him anyway - because he can see exactly what Simon is thinking." / "Paul calls himself the least of the apostles in one sentence and says he outworked all of them in the next. Both things are true at once."

Avoid: Speculating about the woman's specific sins, a habit as old as the medieval identification of her with Mary Magdalene, which the text itself does not support and which distracts from the actual point Jesus makes about proportion and gratitude.