It’s the tears that really get to me in this story. Everything that the woman does is unexpected: the bold entry into the house of a Pharisee, the weeping, the anointing, the contact with the rabbi’s feet, the loosened hair. The reality and the symbolism of each of these actions is quite extraordinary. Even more so if we consider them in historical context, which I assure you that we will. We need to do that, in order to understand their prophetic power. Since we don’t do a lot of anointing or footwashing over the dinner table these days—outside of Holy Week—we’ll have to work a little harder to see what these actions might have meant at the home of Simon the Pharisee.
But the tears, well, tears we still understand. We may not know exactly the reason for the woman’s weeping 2000 years ago, but we still know what it is to weep. Maybe it was shame over her sin—I suspect that’s the uncritical way we tend to read this passage—but maybe she was grieving someone or something we don’t know about. Or maybe hers were tears of joy because she had so longed to be with Jesus, or maybe they were tears of relief because something bottled up within her had been set free. The fact that the text is silent about why she cried does not mean that we have to be. What I call the “blank spaces” in our scriptures may well be the Holy Spirit’s invitation to find our own stories within it.
So let’s consider tears for a moment. They’ve gotten a fair amount of press recently. I’m thinking, for example, of President Obama, who famously cried during a January speech addressing gun violence. Tears of genuine grief, redefining what’s permissible for a man in a position of public leadership. We may not have expected those tears, but in context we can understand them. Or the nameless young woman who was raped behind a fraternity on the Stanford campus last year, whose righteous cry for repentance and justice for her attacker was released to the press last week. It hurts to hear about them, but we do understand tears of pain.
Or consider this week’s historic nomination of Hillary Clinton as the first woman presidential candidate of a major political party. On Tuesday the Huffington Post published a series of tweets by women watching her acceptance speech, and one of them had written “tears streaming down my face, on behalf of all those women who came before, and on behalf of all who will come behind.” 140 poignant characters. No matter whom we support for president, we can all understand the emotional impact of breaking through what had seemed an insurmountable barrier to leadership. So which one of these emotions did the woman who anointed Jesus feel? It could have been any of them, but right now I am considering the possibility that it was the latter. That hers might have been tears of joy at discovering within herself the power to minister to Jesus.
And let me remind us that she was indeed ministering to Jesus. Luke describes her as a sinner and Simon the Pharisee clearly didn’t think much of her, but there’s no indication that she thought so little of herself. She did not come asking for forgiveness, as far as our gospel tells us. Rather she came boldly bearing the best gifts she had available to do all those diaconal ministries—washing, kissing, anointing—that the host had failed to do for his honored guest.
If she were trying to avoid further public humiliation by going unnoticed, she chose the wrong strategy. But who knows, maybe she was just too tired of other people’s judgment to care any more. Because there is a particular kind of power that can emerge from the tomb of shame and self-doubt, no? I think we’ve all experienced it at one point or another: that moment when we realize that we have to do what we know to be right, even though everyone else may be telling us that it—or we—are all wrong. So maybe she was ashamed of her identity as a public sinner, but it’s just as possible that she approached Jesus with courage and generosity because her love for him was so great.
Which bring me back to the reality and the symbol our anointing woman’s actions. Jesus asked the skeptical Simon to actually see what she did, so let us do the same. Notice that she entered a house that was not hers and touched a male guest. For Luke’s listeners, this would have set off alarm bells, as it surely did for Simon. And not just because of her coming uninvited to the party, but also because her physical contact with the rabbi would have violated purity codes. Then there’s the question of the very expensive ointment she poured out upon Jesus, casting Simon’s minimal hospitality in an unflattering light. Actually, seems as if he was the character who had the most reason to be ashamed at this point in the story.
Finally, she let down her hair. Which seems to us like a rather poor substitute for a towel, but which in her time was an unmistakable symbol of female sexuality. So yes, she cried… but she did not hide. And because of that, we like Luke’s listeners have the privilege of seeing for who she was: a woman of courage, of means, and unashamed of her attractiveness. In need of forgiveness like all of us, and able to receive it because she was willing to make herself vulnerable.
I recently returned home from Washington DC, where I had been attending a Christian education conference hosted at Virginia Theological Seminary. In part because I knew I would be preaching this text on Sunday, and in part because the Christian educators in our church are so often women, I had been acutely conscious of woman’s leadership all week. But it was only after de-boarding the flight that carried me home that I realized the pilot was female. Which struck me as unusual in the moment, and in fact my further research confirmed that fewer that 6% of commercial airline pilots are woman. So at the top of the jetway, I suddenly found myself convicted that I could not let her go unseen. I threaded my way back down to the plane—literally against traffic—and thanked her for safely shepherding us through the skies. I told her I am a pastor who knows the responsibility of guiding people too, and that I didn’t want to let the ministry of brave women go unseen.
Her response was to tear up. Not unlike our president, she was a professional unafraid to show her vulnerability. Not unlike the woman who tweeted her joy in the democratic presidential nomination, our pilot was someone who’d known glass ceilings. And perhaps not unlike the anointing woman, she was boldly doing what she was called to, regardless of what the 94% of her male pilot colleagues might think of her.
As she wiped at her eyes, she told me her name was Deborah, and that she took courage from bearing the name of the Biblical judge. And right there in the fore galley of her jet, she confessed that she that she is Christian, and that she knows in her heart that her work is ministry, but no clergy person had ever told her that. Which made me cry too, because it meant that she had seen me as well. And as the passengers and crew squeezed by with puzzled looks, we embraced, anointing each other with tears.
