Luke 6-7

[Josh]

Post your comments, questions, and discussion starters for any part of Luke chapters 6 and 7 as replies here.

[Josh]

The story of the prostitue who anointed Jesus' feet while he dined at Simon the Pharisees' house (Luke 7:36-47) is to me, along with the Prodigal Son story, a sublimely beautiful moment.

I shared on Sunday how this story was instrumental in my life at a pivotal crisis of faith. Like the Prodigal Son story, it has so many layers, it would be hard to exhaust the teaching possibilities it presents.

But here are just a few of the things I brought out that were important to me:

1) The woman's actions such as touching and kissing Jesus' feet and letting her hair down would have been considered by the general culture as scandalously sexual. Luke doesn't try to soften the shock of this story, even to someone like Theophilus (the man to whom the book of Luke is addressed). It's a powerful statement of Christ as the bridgegroom and the Church as the bride represented by the harlot, who has been forgiven and cleansed.

2) It appears that this woman had already had an encounter with Jesus, because she came well prepared with perfume.

3) The NIV translates verse 47 as if she was forgiven because of this act, but the NRSV translates it the opposite: that she had been forgiven already, and because of that forgiveness showed her love to Jesus in this way. I like the ambiguity, because that's how love and forgiveness are; it's difficult to clearly separate cause and effect. But in general, I'd side with the NRSV a bit more because of how the New Testament is quick to point out that God loved us first, before we loved him.

4) Simon's the real loser here because he doesn't see himself clearly. The woman knows her sins but also knows forgiveness and true love for perhaps the first time. But Simon, presumably, misses out because he is still clinging to his decency.

I think we see here a bit of what Jesus was after when he said we must become like children to enter the kingdom. Kids are afraid to show affection, to cry, to fling themselves at their parents in any environment, just like the woman in this story. But the respectable, restrained Simon, whom society holds in esteem, misses out on what God is all about.