Luke 7:39 Commentary and Bible Study

The moment she arrives, Simon the Pharisee is given some fuel for his prejudice by what she does. You notice he says to himself ‘this man’; that is interesting. The people were saying that Jesus was the Messiah, or that at the very least he was a prophet, but when Simon is thinking about him he uses the very lowest term available to him in his language: ‘this fellow’, ‘this man.’ He doesn't say anything more than that. ‘If he were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him.’ He doesn’t speak out loud; he doesn’t want to voice his thoughts openly to the Lord or to others gathered there. He is not yet trying to challenge the Lord, having invited him into his house, or to be openly hostile, and he imagines that his private thoughts are his own alone. He continues to behave respectfully to the Lord, and presently addresses him as ‘Master’, but inside himself he is thinking very differently, and he is watching carefully. It is unclear exactly how he is looking at this situation. Possibly he is embarrassed at the way Christ is behaving in letting this woman do as she does. Possibly he thinks: ‘Here is this so-called prophet, and he is allowing this woman to touch him. Everyone else here knows what sort of woman she is, and yet he seems to be completely ignorant about her. A prophet is supposed to be able to read people’s hearts, and certainly to protect himself against being polluted by the touch of an unclean woman. When this woman touches anyone, it is for a shameful reason, and yet this supposed man of God is letting her touch him in the most overt way, and he has made a terrible mistake. Simon concludes that the Lord lacks any real knowledge about what is going on, because his claim to be a prophet is a sham. He is naïve about what she is. Everyone else knew her character, how is it that this prophet does not know? He seems to know less than all others. That is not the mark of a prophet. But Simon has totally misread the situation, and there is a reason for that. The real shame and embarrassment lies on him. The Holy Spirit has revealed his inner thoughts to us, so that we can understand something of the prejudices of his heart. His inner thoughts show that he is cynical about Christ. They show that his idea of religion isn't about God forgiving people their sin, but that, in order to be acceptable to God, you have got to be someone who is righteous in themselves, someone who keeps the ceremonial law and the diet rules and who does things outwardly in a correct way. You have got to have a fine external show, and if you are a member of a religious elite such as the Pharisees, then you can be sure of your good standing with God. This sinful woman, this prostitute does none of those things, and so he looks down on her from a lofty height. He has considered only one category of sin, and he has forgotten about sins of the heart: pride, self-righteousness, hypocrisy, lack of mercy. The very possibility that anybody who was a notorious sinner could ever be freely forgiven has never entered his thinking at all. And therefore when he saw this woman coming into the house instead of being glad of it, instead of thinking, ‘Well, perhaps she has had a change of heart. Perhaps she wants to be forgiven’, he feels immediately that she is in the wrong place, that she does not belong there, and that she is behaving in a foolish way. He has misread the Lord; he has misread this woman; and he has misread his own heart. That was his immediate reasoning, and although these were only thoughts – he didn't say it out loud; Luke is very careful to say he spake within himself – yet it was characteristic of the man.