Part 2

“When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee?s house, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume, and as she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.” Luke 7: 37-38 (NIV).

Although her estrangement from her community causes the woman great pain, it is her estrangement from God that causes her more suffering. Her sin alienates her from God.

We understand well her flowing tears. They are no crocodile tears. There is no pretension in them. They express fully her innermost feeling. She is a woman in deep pain, anguish, turmoil, misery, dejection, misery. And she realizes that the only One who can truly come to her aid is none other than God. More than anything, she needs God to bring wholeness to her brokenness. She needs Him to give her His shalom.

So she takes the posture of humility and comes to Jesus whom she believes is the One who can help her. And Jesus proves her right.

We remember our own conversion story when we confess to God and to one another our weakness, our frailty, our inability to save ourselves, our need of outside resource to pull us out of our pits and to empower us. We cry out to God to restore us back to Him and to our community. The picture of the woman weeping at Jesus? feet moves us because it depicts us. She expresses our brokenness, our vulnerability, our weakness, our hopelessness, our humanness, our need of God. Like her, we present ourselves to God to be received and accepted. We want to be held lovingly and securely by Jesus? arms. We come to Jesus wanting our tempests to be hushed. We long to bask again in our humanness lost in our alienation.

Sin can harden our hearts such that we lose our sense of uprightness. It can alienate us from God forever. It can cloud and darken our minds such that we shun God. Not all who are caught in the abyss of their folly end up broken. It is possible to harden heart while in error.

But the woman refuses to be overcome by her sin, to be captivated by it, or to be controlled by it. Instead she takes the posture of humility and comes to Jesus abased. In Luke’s narrative we find her not in a brothel or in the outskirts luring innocent men but behind Jesus weeping and wetting his feet with her tears.

She comes to Jesus because she recognizes Him whose mission on earth is to seek the lost and bring them back to God.

Written by Millicent Guarin