The Forgiveness
of the Sinful Woman
In another episode, in Luke 7:36-50,
Jesus dines at the home of a Pharisee named Simon. A “sinful” woman in the city
learned that Jesus was there (Luke 7:37). Like Zacchaeus, having learned where
Jesus would be, she wants to see him. Unlike Zacchaeus, she comes intending to
show her devotion. She enters the house with a flask of presume oil and gets
down at Jesus’s feet, weeping. She washes his feet with her tears, wipes them
with her hair, and then anoints them with the oil. Simon grumbles that Jesus is
allowing such a woman to touch him. Jesus responds to him with an instructive,
parabolic question. Two people owed a certain creditor. One owed ten times as
much as the other, but neither was able to repay the debt (Luke 7:42). So the
creditor forgave both. Which debtor will love the creditor more? Simon
responds, “I suppose the one for whom he canceled the greater debt.” “You have
judged rightly,” Jesus says (Luke 7:43).
Jesus’s parable depicts two people who
owe a “debt,” a common metaphor for sin—a sort of debit in God’s heavenly
ledger. Both are sinners, and one is a much greater sinner than the other. But
neither, not eve the one with the lesser debt, is able to repay it. We can
think here of Simon and the woman, or of the prodigal and his brother, or of so
many other examples. They have different kinds and degrees of particular sins,
but both are sinners in need of forgiveness. And in Jesus’s parable, the
solution to forgive the debt of sin lies ultimately with the creditor, with
God. As Psalm 49:7 has it, “no man can . . . give to God the price of his life”
so as to be spared death (ESV). There are many ways to petition God for
forgiveness in Scripture, of course, whether through sacrifices of animals or
contrition or fasting. But in this conception of God as a divine creditor, none
of these work automatically or mechanistically to cause forgiveness in
themselves, even when they are described as having “atoning” value. God, as the
creditor, must choose to have mercy and remit the debt.
One with greater debt will have
greater gratitude and love for the forgiver. This is what is evidenced in this
woman’s behavior. If Simon indignantly thought her actions were presumptuous,
daring with her defiled hands to touch Christ, Jesus reframes her actions as
those of a penitent. She has come humbly to Jesus, not as a host and not as an
equal, but as a servant, making herself lowly and washing her feet like a
slave. Indeed, she honors Jesus more greatly than does Simon, who only honored
Jesus as a “prophet” and “teacher” (Luke 7:39-40). She cries over her sin and
submits herself to Jesus, lavishing care and love on the Lord she knows loves
her. Because she has acted with “great love,” Jesus says to Simon, her sins are
forgiven (Luke 7:47). Then he goes further, pronouncing forgiveness on her
himself:” Then he said to her, ‘Your sins are forgiven’” (Luke 7:48). Some
guests balk at Jesus’s presumption to forgive sins, of course, but it remains
with the divine creditor to remit a debt. And the divine Christ does so, for
sins large and great, to those who approach him in penitence and love. She is
forgiven and saved, released from her debt of guilt. Jesus sends her off, now
at peace with God, to begin her life anew: “Your faith has saved you; go in
peace” (Luke 7:50). (James B Prothro, The Bible and Reconciliation:
Confession, Repentance, and Restoration [A Catholic Biblical Theology of
the Sacraments; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2023], 130-31)
There is an interpretive tension in
the relation of love to forgiveness here. The parable, applied to the woman,
seems to imply that her great love is a result of her having already been
forgiven at some unknown point. The NABRE and NRSV interpret Luke 7:47 in this
way (she is forgiven and “hence” has shown love). In that case, Jesus’s
pronouncement of forgiveness in 7:48 would be more a word of assurance for her
than a pronouncement. However, the term Jesus uses in 7:47 (hoti) means
“because” and seems rather to suggest that she is forgiven because she loved,
not the other way around. Further, the verbal form (apheōntai) he uses
in 7:47—usually translated “have been forgiven” or “are forgiven”—is regularly
used by Jesus not as a description of a past event but as an authoritative
speech act pronouncing forgiveness. He pronounces forgiveness in 7:48
with the same phrasing, which people take to be him claiming divine authority
to forgive sins (as in Luke 5:20-21). In the canonical text, overall, Jesus’s
explanation of the woman’s behavior seems to add to or redirect the parable
slightly, rather than tell a parable that mirrors the situation exactly. Jesus
tells Simon that her sins are forgiven because of the love she has shown
(7:47), and then he pronounces it directly to the woman after rebuking Simon
(7:48). (Ibid., 131 n. 25)