Big Idea: Jesus’s work of salvation extends to people shunned or ignored by Jewish society; women play an unusually large part in his mission.

Understanding the Text

After the characterization of Jesus as a bon viveur and a friend of the disreputable (7:34), we now find him at a dinner party and befriending a disreputable woman. Two themes from earlier in the Gospel reemerge in this story: Jesus’s openness to and welcome by unrespectable members of society (5:27–32) and his claim to forgive sins (5:17–26). It develops further Luke’s characteristic theme of Jesus’s concern for those who lived outside the circles of privilege and respectability. In particular, this story (7:36–50) together with the following verses (8:1–3) shows that Jesus valued women as much as men, and that women were c…