Luke 7:36-39
How would you like that for an appellation? "Sinful Woman." Sounds exotic only for the depraved. Mostly it sounds degrading, like you diss yourself and then everyone else disses you more. Nothing but a pile of freshly laid fertilizer. I have a feeling that is exactly what she felt like.
That was her reputation in the town: "a woman who had lived a sinful life." Two thousand years ago the unspoken was the same as it would be today. Funny how we assume that the sinfulness doesn't mean gossip or jealousy or even pride. By looking at the Written Guide He's left us, it is evident God measures sin quite differently than we do, sin being anything that separates us from His love. For us humans there are sins and then there are SINS. And this woman had committed the ones in caps.
To be a sinner of the capital sort, you sins had to involve witchcraft (which didn't seem to be as prevalent in the Gospels), idol-worshipping (something rarely found by then among the Jews), swindling other people's money (tax collectors) or sexual immorality, especially selling your body for sex, apparently the worst sin of all. This woman was a hands-down bet to be in the last category. She'd earned her reputation fair and square. Somehow she'd been so degraded in life that her body meant little more than economic exchange even to her.
Pharisees were the opposite of sinners, at least of the capital sort. And so when one of the Pharisees in a particular town invited Jesus to dinner, Jesus was entering a holy house, a home where you would never find that kind of a woman, of all people.
When That Woman heard that Jesus was having dinner at this particular Pharisee's house, she did a very brazen thing. She bought an alabaster jar of perfume, slipped into the house and started anointing Jesus' feet with that perfume, her tears and her kisses. The custom of the day was to lay down (recline) while eating, which meant your feet were behind you, away from the eating area. So when she came to Jesus' feet, she was behind him -- where Jesus wouldn't necessarily see her approaching, but almost everyone else could.
Guaranteed the minute she entered the house, everyone knew it. An awkward hush would have settled over everyone and all would have looked at the master of the house to see what he would do. The master of the house, avoiding even glancing at such a woman once he recognized her, looked straight at Jesus as if to say, "What have you done, Jesus, allowing this woman to enter my house?"
Sounds strange to us today, having someone washing your feet while you're sitting at the dinner table. But such was the custom of the day. Servants washed the feet of a guest who entered the house, sandled and therefore dusty. So the fact that someone was washing his feet while he was reclining at the dinner table would have been scant attraction, to Jesus or anyone else for that matter. Servants weren't even acknowledged, let alone thanked for such a mundane task.
The Pharisee is not amazed that Jesus doesn't notice someone is washing his feet. The Pharisee is amazed that either a) Jesus doesn't discern who this person is or even worse b) doesn't care. No one properly obsessed with righteousness would have been found lacking 24/7 vigilance to make sure nothing or no one sinful would get anywhere near. Maybe Jesus being a prophet didn't have to keep on the lookout, his spiritual sensors doing the work for him. But those spiritual sensors, if he as a respectable prophet had them, were letting him down now.
The Pharisee didn't want to say so, but he feared the unthinkable, that Jesus didn't care. Did he care that his own righteousness could be so stained, that his own reputation could be so tainted? It was beyond appalling. And everyone except Jesus froze as this woman carried out her dastardly deed. Jesus, meanwhile, carried on as if nothing were out of the ordinary at all. I wonder, just wonder, if that is the same way Jesus acts any time I approach him, too.
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