No Water for His Feet

A dinner party is defined as much by who is left off the list as by who is on it. Simon, a Pharisee, has invited the teacher from Nazareth to recline at his table. Then the door opens on the one name no such list would carry: a woman of the city, known for her sin, holding an alabaster flask.

She stands behind Jesus at his feet, weeping, and begins to wash them with her tears. She lets down her hair — a breach of public modesty in later rabbinic law¹ — and wipes his feet with it, kisses them and pours out the ointment. It is impossible to misread. Simon misreads it anyway. If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him (Luke 7:39).

Jesus answers the thought Simon never spoke. A moneylender had two debtors, one owing ten times the other; neither could pay, and he canceled both debts. Which will love him more? Simon gives the careful answer and judges his own case without knowing it.

Jesus turns toward the woman but keeps speaking to Simon. You gave me no water for my feet (Luke 7:44). No water, no kiss, no oil — the ordinary courtesies of a host, all skipped by Simon and all supplied by her. He had kept a careful ledger of her sins and none of his own. We keep the same books, rounding our own entries down.

The line everyone remembers is easily heard backwards. Her sins, which are many, are forgiven — for she loved much (Luke 7:47). The grammar could go either way, but the story Jesus just told settles it: the debt is canceled while the debtors have nothing to pay, and love comes after, the one thing a forgiven person cannot help doing. At the end he says it plainly: Your faith has saved you (Luke 7:50).

Nor does Jesus pretend her debt was small. Her sins are many. Forgiveness is not a shrug; a canceled debt is a debt the lender agrees to carry himself. The guests feel the scandal — Who is this, who even forgives sins? (Luke 7:49) — and he would carry it to the cross, where the record of debt against us was nailed (Colossians 2:14).

Simon had Jesus at his table all evening and went home no lighter. The woman came in a sinner and went out in peace, the flask empty. The one name that was never on the list is the only one that leaves the table free.