Dr. Stephen Boyd, the John Allen Easley Professor of the Study of Religions at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina has these enlivening insights into Luke 7:36-8:3, the revised common lectionary gospel reading for Sunday, June 12.
One day, when Jesus is a guest at the home of Simon, one of the Pharisees, he notices that Simon is silently hostile toward a woman at the table, who is also a guest, but an uninvited one.
Professor Boyd observes:
"As Jesus' comments to Simon reveal, Simon's hospitality is only skin deep. By contrast, the woman, called a 'sinner,' who crashes the dinner party, weeps, bathes Jesus' feet with her tears, kisses them, and wipes them with her hair. Her lavish hospitality, motivated by gratitude and love, serves as a contrast to the actions of Simon, who obeys a code of etiquette but displays no deep love."
Dr. Boyd concludes: "So the story in Luke is fraught with tensions: dinner guests who are really enemies, a hospitable host who is not really hospitable, and a woman known as a sinner who embodies the love and grace of the gospel. When Jesus is present, surprising transformations and experiences of healing are possible. Even a begrudging Simon, in opening his home and table to Jesus, moves into a new kind of space where unexpected things happen."
May we, like Simon, risk opening ourselves to the surprises that happen when Jesus is near. May we, like this courageous woman, find ways to embody God's newness in our hurting world, even where divine creativity and healing are uninvited, unexpected, and sometimes, at first, unwanted.
Professor Stephen Boyd's reflections may be found in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary, Year C, Volume 3, 2019, p. 85.