“A woman of the city, who was a sinner—brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and standing behind Him at His feet, weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears, and wiped them with
the hair of her head, and kissed His feet, and anointed them with the ointment—.‘I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much’” (Luke 7:37,47)
The host of the dinner who had treated Jesus with disrespect couldn’t understand why the Lord permitted the woman to act in such an outlandish way. To be that carried away with ardor for Christ transcended all standards of decorum and propriety, even for a known prostitute. Such a bizarre act of affection was hardly appropriate, as Simon the host pointed out, but the Lord contrasted his own boorish lack of hospitality to the love act of the woman.
Jesus replied: It’s a matter of love. He had turned her life around. She had gone looking for love from one man to another, yearning for a return of her affection, but each time proved to be a disappointment. They themselves satisfied their lust on her, but they left her unfulfilled. Many men are like that, so they understand one another. But this man was more—the God-man taught her how to convert her erotic desire into an inexhaustible love for God.
Jesus taught the same lesson to Photina, the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well (John 4:7ff) who had loved and left five men—or they left her—and was living with a sixth when the Lord pointed her the way to convert her burning emotions into a yearning for the Almighty Creator.
St. John Climacus wrote: “I have seen impure souls, who were possessed by carnal love to the point of fury and madness, at least embrace penitence and, thanks to their experience of physical eros and its conversion into divine eros become inflamed with love for the Creator, transcending all servile fear. That is why Jesus Christ did not say of the chaste sinner that she had feared much, but that she had loved much—” (Ladder of Divine Ascent Step 5.6.57)
We might ask where St. John had met such men, having spent nearly all his life in St. Catherine Monastery atop Mt. Sinai in the middle of the Arabian Desert. Those men had come to that monastery in search of a love that nothing on earth can satisfy. They were men who learned the same love lesson comprehended by St. Mary of Egypt, St. Photina and the unknown woman who poured out her love from the expensive flask of perfume and the more precious tears from her eyes.
Now in our time we have hundreds of thousands burning with the same sensual lusts throughout our civilization—for example, the many professional athletes who don’t bother with marriage to find sexual fulfillment, lest it cause them tax and divorce troubles. They just go around the cities in which they play their games having paramours in each and all. Their devotees who pay the exorbitant prices that make them millionaires emulate them as best they can, causing havoc in their own lives with their wives and families. Film stars at least keep the fiction of marriage somehow alive by lurching from one spouse to another in a ridiculous imitation of fidelity and fulfillment in an ever-changing cycle of marriage, divorce and remarriage. Who can understand why they do it? This is one reason why so many in the world ape Americans while millions of other despise us.
Freud and others say that we must sublimate erotic desires for the sake of society, suppressing those passions as improper civil behavior. Our loving Lord encourages us rather to evaluate the need for love and turn it towards the only real and lasting Partner, who is God Himself. The love He brings into our hearts is above and beyond whatever experience we have with another human being regardless of our relationship. “He who loves father and mother more than Me is not worthy of Me” (Matthew 10:37), and so it is with all affiliations here on earth. Blessed are they who contemplate, comprehend and act upon His profound meaning.