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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadPaul Kretzmann Commentary - Luke 7:36 - 7:38
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
The First Anointing of Jesus.
The anointing:
v. 36. And one of the Pharisees desired Him that He would eat with him. And He went into the Pharisee's house, and sat down to meat.
v. 37. And, "behold, a woman in the city which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster box of ointment,
v. 38. and stood at His feet behind Him weeping, and began to wash His feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed His feet, and anointed them with the ointment.
Jesus was the friend of publicans and sinners, hut not in the derogatory sense in which His enemies used the word. The true nature of His relations to the, classes of people that were held in such contempt by the self-righteous Pharisees is shown in this story. One of the Pharisees invited Jesus to take dinner with him, and Jesus accepted, going into the house and reclining at the table. There is no mention of the preliminary usages and customs by which a host among the Jews honored his guest. Then a strange incident took place. A woman of the city, a notorious character, heard of Christ's presence in the house of the Pharisee. She had been deceived by the apparent pleasures of sin, she had received gall and wormwood instead of the expected honey, and now she was, in desperation, looking down into the abyss of a life of shame. But the news of Jesus, the Savior of sinners, whose kindness to the lowly and outcast was heralded far and wide, had brought her to the realization of her position; she now felt the full weight of her corruption and misery. So she bought an alabaster vase of costly ointment and, coming into the house, she stood at the feet of Jesus, weeping so bitterly in the full consciousness of her sinfulness that her tears washed the feet of Jesus, and she could try them off with her hair. And she kissed His feet again and again and anointed them with her precious salve. It was an exhibition of overwhelming sorrow, combined with an almost pitiful clinging to the Lord as the only one in whom she could put her trust. And the tears of her sorrow, as one commentator has it, became tears of ineffable joy that Jesus did not spurn her, that she had a Savior with a heart full of loving sympathy and boundless grace for even the worst of sinners.