Extravagant Love

Extract

In Luke 7: 36—50 there is a story, found with variations in all four gospels, of an expression of extravagant love for Christ by a woman, a woman with a certain reputation in town, who came to dinner uninvited and anointed his head or his feet with tears or myrrh, and in Luke and John wiped his feet with her hair.

The story is presented as a lesson Our Lord taught about the Jubilee legislation in Deut. 15, in which every seventh year all debts would be forgiven, all slaves released and all property revert to its original owners (probably a greater challenge to the excesses of capitalism than anything Karl Marx ever said or wrote). Deuteronomy stresses that this should not be an excuse to fail to help the poor in the land when the Jubilee year approaches. Deuteronomy claims that there would be no poor in the land if all Israel obeyed God and all his commandments; but the truth is, Deuteronomy goes on, you will always have the poor with you in the land; therefore, open wide your hand to the poor and needy. Those in the gospel story who apparently knew the law in Deuteronomy quite well were the indignant disciples in Mark and Matthew, Simon the Pharisee in Luke, and Judas in John’s gospel. They were offended by the woman’s apparent extravagance, and especially this woman’s extravagance, seeing who she was.