The Sinful Woman

A dark storm, she cries. She wets Jesus’ feet with her tears. She “rains,” it reads; in the original Greek Brecho. She rains, she’s this brecho that breaks. 

She’s this full rain, falling. 

She’s this heart-water let loose. 

Him so pure and his feet so dirty. Her so filthy and Him  her only purity.

Will anyone was his feet with their love?

And that woman, she has no pitcher but she has passion—the kind no Pharisee could ever understand, and she has no water but she has her heart.

She pours it out. She pours it out. 

And with no towel but tresses, no hand cloth but her hair, she does the unthinkable, the scorned and the disgraced.

When all Jewish women were required to keep their hair done up, lest they be seen as shameful and loose, she lets her locks down.

Rabbis, men of the law, said that if a woman loosed her hair in public, let her hair flow mingled down, it was grounds for divorce. Grounds to be shamed and sent away.

But there is a love far greater than the law. 

That Luke woman, she lets her hair loose, lets her love loose, and she looks loose and there are always Michals who will scorn David’s dancing before the ark.

But Jesus? He lets her kiss Him.

It seems shocking, appalling, too intimate, and this kataphileo, these kisses, this is the same word of the father kissing the prodigal son, a symbolic picture of God embracing, the father falling on the neck of his child and kissing, and doesn’t the whole realm of earth need to be seized with a power of a great affection, “for we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones.” (Eph. 5:30)

Ann Voskamp