Sumballo

And a woman in the city, who was a sinner, having learned that he was eating in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment. (Luke 7:37)

In this story, a notorious prostitute dared to enter the home of a Pharisee to anoint Jesus’ feet and express her gratitude. Jesus found a rich soil with sinners (those who recognized their sins) while the righteous (those who overlooked their sins and thought their actions white-washed any “minor” sins) had little use for Jesus. Luke has established, in preceding chapters, Jesus’ authority and how different people respond to Jesus. The new thread – the refusal of the Pharisees to join the celebration – continues here.

Credit Simon with enough curiosity or sense to invite Jesus to a meal. It would seem he wanted to hear first hand what Jesus was teaching. Or maybe he wanted to guide Jesus onto a “better” path for a rabbi to follow. In any case, he struggled with classic Pharisee separatism.

Pharisees had misunderstood God’s command in their history to be holy. Holiness means set apart for a purpose. God asked the Israelites to separate themselves from the diluting of other people and their religions. The Pharisees took that a step further, to seeing themselves as superior in their separation. They missed the point. The separation was not about being clean but about avoiding further stain. Separation was about fleeing temptation, not about remaining pure. The Pharisees were never pure.

But Simon misinterpeted. He thought the prostitute would stain Jesus. But Jesus, who came to fulfill the law, shows Simon the fullness of the separation pact. Like Nehemiah’s walls protected the people and gave them identity, the separation of the Jews guarded them from temptation and identified them as children of God. But the full intent of the separation was not to maintain purity, for they never had it apart from God. And so Jesus shows how God wanted to bring people in, to nurture them, to draw them close to his presence.

Purity would not come from avoiding evil but by being washed clean. The woman understood that. She knew well her sin. Simon thought he was clean by avoiding her kind of people and her kind of evil. He would only be clean when he trusted Jesus.

The woman understood what Simon had not yet perceived. She was washed clean but Simon remained in the dust.