It's a wonderful story. At least, it is to me. Others might not like it so well. It is certainly astonishing.

Put it in the context of a dinner party at your own home or even a supper in the church's fellowship hall. By this time in Jesus' ministry, he had garnered quite a bit of public notice. All sorts of people had been attracted to him — rich, poor, educated, illiterate, from the highly respectable to the lowly riffraff. To have this famous rabbi come to dinner was very special and everyone would have been excited and perhaps a bit nervous at the same time — after all this teacher had had some not too complimentary things to say about the religious folks who were his hosts at the moment.

Suddenly, an uninvited guest appears — a woman described in the text as one "who had lived a sinf…