A Woman Anoints Jesus' Feet

It may not be what you think

    Prompted by the chaos in the US at the present, 
    and by a need to speak from what I know, 
    this series is an examination of the Gospel of Luke 
    and its message of liberation and inclusion.  
    To see the introduction to the series, click here.
    To read about how I interpret Scripture, click here.  

Over the past three months we’ve read about Jesus and John the Baptizer, about Mary and Elizabeth, about Jesus’ dramatic proclamation at the beginning of his public ministry, and his work of teaching and healing.

So far, the author of this gospel narrative has made it quite clear that Jesus is committed to fulfilling God’s ancient promises of freedom from oppression and fear and poverty and disease. He has defeated Satan in the desert, healed the lame and the blind, healed a Roman slave, and even raised a dead man. His reputation has spread far and wide, and at this moment, still early in his story, he seems unstoppable.

Chrispijn van den Broeck, 1544 - 1591, wikimedia commons

And then, late in the 7th chapter of Luke’s gospel, this happens. He is invited to dine at the home of a Pharisee named Simon. Apparently Simon thinks he’s a good host, politely addressing Jesus as Master, or Teacher. Yet we quickly see that Simon is severely lacking in the honored practices of ancient Near Eastern hospitality: no kiss of welcome, no water to wash the dust from his feet, no oil of anointing for his head. Instead, Simon is fixated on the woman who arrived unannounced and performed all the gestures of hospitality at Jesus’ feet, washing, kissing, and anointing, in a posture of deep humility.

Simon accuses her of being a ‘sinner,’ hamartolos, a term which Luke uses here and in 16 other places, including in reference to Peter when he was first called to follow Jesus. It would seem that this Parisee is trying to judge, and thereby exclude, this woman based on her behavioral track record, something Jesus is not about to do.

Text and context: The issue here is ancient Near Eastern social strata - who’s above, who’s below, who has influence, who needs protection or forgiveness. I refer back to John Dominic Crossan’s excellent analysis in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, in which he discusses ‘open commensality’ as a challenge to Roman social structure. Instead of an exclusionary system based on power and status, Jesus deliberately and graciously includes all members of society at table, even when the table is not his own.

Reading back and forth: Mark, Matthew, and John all have variations on this story, and many readers end up making one of two essential errors in reading the story: assumption, and conflation.

In Mark and Matthew, the host is named Simon, but he is a leper, not a Pharisee. The dinner takes place in Bethany, home town of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, although in these two accounts these individuals are not named. The woman who anoints Jesus is criticized for wasting an expensive resource, the perfume, not for being generically ‘sinful.’ And Jesus explicitly connects the anointing with his impending death, as anointing with oil would have been a normal part of embalming the body.

The account in the Fourth Gospel, attributed to John, is different from both Luke and Mark. Here the dinner takes place in Bethany, and the hosts are Lazarus (after being raised from the dead) and his sisters Martha and Mary. The complaint is the same as in Mark—that the perfume is expensive and the money should have been given to the poor. And Jesus’ rejoinder again points to his death, which John suggests will happen within the week.

The similarities are striking, but the differences are critical, and the errors in reading and interpreting this story are easy to make. Assumption means exactly what you think it means—that the woman’s sin means she’s a prosititute, or that the ‘sinful’ woman is Mary Magdalene. Conflation means mixing details from different accounts and combining them so that they end up meaning something that each unique author didn’t really say. Together these mistakes create a pattern known as eisegesis, which means reading our own biases into Scripture rather than taking the time to discern what’s really there and what’s not.

So what? Because this version of the anointing story is the one that differs most markedly from the other three, we need to pay attention to what Luke is doing that the others don’t.

In Luke, the host is a Pharisee, a Jewish religious leader who would have been in a precarious position vis-a-vis the Roman authorities. He would likely have been invested in those social niceties that gave him a measure of prestige in an occupied land. Luke sets up this dinner party as a chance for Simon to show off his guest, Jesus, the local ‘rising star.’ But Simon uses his own status to denigrate both Jesus (by not showing proper hospitality) and the woman (by denigrating her person and her acts of generous love).

And then Jesus asks Simon this critical question: Do you see this woman? Is she nothing more than an annoyance to you? Or do you see her as a whole human being, one who has lived much and learned to love much? Jesus is challenging Simon to see what is in front of him, a person in her wholeness rather than someone whose presence may be used either to advance or prevent his progress on the social ladder.

Some readers may be concerned that the woman isn’t named, but that turns out to be true of many characters in Biblical narratives. We do not know the name of the Roman centurion or his slave whose healing was described earlier in this same chapter, despite the centurion’s faith being praised above that of ‘all Israel.’ Luke has chosen not to identify the woman with either Mary of Bethany or Mary of Magdala; to attribute either identity to her here is to conflate this account with the others, or with later legend. Instead, Luke’s version allows us to identify ourselves with her as someone who approaches Jesus with simple, unlimited love.

She is also NOT a prostitute. That’s assumption at work. As if that’s the only ‘sin’ a woman could commit. We at least owe her the dignity of seeing her as Jesus did, as a whole human person, recognizing that if she is a sinner, then so was Peter, and so are we. And none of us are tools to be used in other people’s agendas.

One last note, on Jesus’ mini-parable in the midst of dinner, asking Simon who loves more, the one who is forgiven much or the one forgiven little. It’s a trick question, a trap into which Simon falls only too easily. Where the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John make this episode into a question of economics or a prediction of Jesus’ death, Luke sees the irony of showing the state of someone’s heart and soul as the subject of casual dinner conversation, something to be debated and exposed with no regard for personhood. Jesus here is suggesting that it is Simon who needs forgiveness for his callousness, far more than this woman who has already been forgiven and is now free to love extravagantly.

Next up: some more women, and some more parables.