New Provincial Audiences
Upon sending the Twelve on their first preaching circuit, Jesus began to preach in their “cities,” according to Matthew, or rather, their polesin. Ever notice the suffix -polis attached to names of cities? This is a Greek civic term for a polity—not just a kind of community but one that has regular order to it. “Cities” can work for describing Greek polities, just don’t automatically assume an urban quality or high population. Why this matters on this occasion, I think, has to do with Jesus’s ministry progressing or evolving: whereas Jesus had frequented lakeside villages with synagogues, he now appears to venture into civic communities bearing an ordered legal structure of the Greco-Roman variety, and this will mean Jesus adapting his message to new audiences, particular people with different backgrounds and everyday lives than the previous Galilean Jewish villager communities. This also sets the stage for Jesus to use less legal juxtaposition between Torah and his teachings, and for him to employ more storytelling (i.e., parables) and moral reasoning adapted to a mixed population. We’ll see less of his messaging inflected with Torah and prophetic vocabulary.
We’re still within the occasion of John’s disciples approaching Jesus in mixed company somewhere within or near one of these provincial polities. Jesus replied to John’s question and then continued addressing some rejections, which suggests (without having further detail from the gospels) that Jesus had left or had been forced out of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and/or Capernaum. Again, Jesus compared these towns to Sodom and Gomorrah, and again, as in the Nazareth synagogue, found gentile audiences like those of Tyre and Sidon more receptive than the Jewish people of upper Galilee. Remember—Jesus didn’t use the medieval word “hell” even though this appears in the King James Version. In these instances, he referred to Hades, which in context, meant only the realm of the dead who awaited God’s judgment. Such context makes better sense of the passage, since Jesus referred to God’s judgment hanging over certain covenant people who had rejected Jesus’s gospel and miracles. Whereas the latinate “hell” connoted suffering, “Hades” doesn’t. Jesus emphasized the sadness of “finding oneself in Hades” when otherwise one would have already dwelt with God in the heavenly society.
“Come unto Me”
And here Matthew records one of Jesus’s most well-known and comforting teachings (as it reads in the KJV): “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” These words are among the most elegant and poetic of the entire King James Bible and strike a chord for touching on the stressors of life and the invitation to find rest in Jesus. Who wouldn’t want this rest? Who wouldn’t want Jesus’s comfort and reassurance?
Still, the translation is off (as so frequently happens with the KJV). Consider this alternative that more closely aligns with the original Greek. I think it offers some specific comforts that greatly apply to the travails of life all the same:
Come to me!
all you who are worn out and weighed down
and I will give you relief
Take my yoke upon yourselves
and learn from me
for I am tame and low in heart
and you will find relief for your minds
for my yoke is resplendent
and my load is effortless
In English, we only detect one part of context that actually runs through the whole passage, what the word “yoke” implies. Like you, I’ve heard many lessons at church asking what Jesus meant by taking upon ourselves his “yoke,” and I’ve heard many speculations that point back to yokes as instruments of hauling plows or loads. But the passage runs through more words, from start to finish, that play off this metaphor to describe the relationship Jesus invites us into. It’s all Greek and all so important—so let’s dig into it.
The key words that, like yoke, enhance the metaphorical image of Jesus’s invitation are the following, with translation possibilities included:
Δευτε/Deute: “here!” “come!”
κοπιωντες/kopiōntes: “worn out,” “exhausted”
πεφορτισμενοι/pephortismenoi: “weighed down,” “overloaded”
ζυγον/zygon: “yoke”
πραυς/praus: “tame,” “domesticated”
ταπεινος τη καρδια/tapeinos tē kardia: “low in heart”
tapeinos: “low-lying,” specifically the position of a horse, camel, or bovine to receive a yoke or lift a person to its back
ψυχαις/psychais: “psyches,” “minds,” “lives”
χρηστος/chrēstos: “finest quality,” “fine craft,” “best-made,” “in pristine condition”
φορτιον/phortion: “load,” “cargo”
ελαφρον/elaphron: “effortless,” “without strain”
So much poetry here… The whole line relates to domesticated animals and the pastoral lifestyles of Jesus’s new audience. Away from laketowns and fishermen, these people work the fields and raise flocks. The most regular thing Jesus could draw upon would have been their everyday agrarian work. From the start, Jesus sets up how he is the driver, the farmer, the shepherd, and he directs the invitation as though the audience occupies the position of the animal. But Jesus inverts the dynamic: letting Jesus drive us with his yoke means relief, ease, effortlessness. Jesus doesn’t describe us, the ones in the position of the farm animal, as time/wild, but rather describes himself as tame; he doesn’t describe us as lowing down like a horse or camel to pick him up, but rather describes himself as lowing in heart—a saying that had a double meaning, what also meant “despised” and “humiliated.”
Remember, ancient Judaeans and Romans made only single yokes, not the double arrangement that could join two animals to a load. So imagine an ancient Galilean farmstead where farmers shared resources across rural acreage of fields and hillsides, and the farmstead had at most one or two cattle for plowing and hauling. A farmer borrows the farmstead yoke, something made of wood and nearly always crudely made, nothing like the regal yokes attached to resplendent Roman chariots. He takes this wooden yoke and fastens it to the lowing cow, then attaches ropes to a cart with a load maximized to the animal’s limit, since the farmers of the area all must economize with their shared resources and have scarce chances for moving cargo. The cow walks a few miles over uneven terrain until they reach a marketplace at crossroads between cities and they unload for others to barter and sell the farmstead owner’s produce. The cow is borrowed by the next farmer, who takes it to his field and the process repeats day after day, year after year, until the animal is slaughtered and its hide used for leather and its flesh for farmstead banquets.
The arduous life of this farm animal—this is the image Jesus’s new audience could immediately recognize. And they could hear in the invitation Jesus invoking the image of the overburdened farm animal. The very first word—Deute—was the summoning word for domesticated animals, kind of like pet owners today saying “Here boy!” or “Here girl!” to their dog or horse. The word also appears in the exclamatory form, something we denote in English with an exclamation point but in other languages could be expressed with a change in word form, as is the case here. Jesus calls us like a farmer to his animal, but then everything changes: you who are worn out and weighed down, here is relief, not work. Take this yoke, I’m not wild but tame; I bend low to lift you, I am despised and humiliated. Here is relief to your whole mind. My yoke isn’t crude but the very best quality, the resplendent kind. When you wear mine and I drive the chariot, there is no load, nothing to haul, all is effortless. I will lead you on, I will carry you, I will relieve your load.
So often we Christians debase ourselves when approaching God and Jesus. We say we’re not worthy, we apologize, we insist on behaving better as a premise before anything else. But this image compels me. I who get worn out sometimes, I who can feel heavy, I whose mind is fraught and busy—I’m called over to the Good Driver who offers me relief and ease. Before I have a chance to say some self-deprecating thing or make some apology, he says, There, there, just rest your mind, I have nothing to heap on you, no load to give, no cargo to burden you with.
A City Woman Washes Jesus’s Feet
Luke continues with a story of a city woman washing Jesus’s feet during a dinner with Pharisees. James E. Talmage provides a careful and useful analysis of this pericope in Chapter 18 of Jesus the Christ, making a strong case why this episode shouldn’t be confused with the anointing at Bethany during the last week of Jesus’s life when Mary brought spikenard ointment and applied it to Jesus’s head. Because of a couple of shared elements between these two episodes, readers have conflated the two, even going so far as to associate Mary with washing Jesus’s feet and the Pharisees calling her a sinner. The conflation has done a terrible service to Mary Magdalene by further stretching the insinuations of “sinner,” creating an old folkloric tradition that she was a prostitute at the time she met Jesus. (Not remotely defensible in the gospels.) Talmage’s analysis in both the chapter text and in an extended footnote smashes this error and rightly separates the two episodes.
This means at this moment, the woman in the story goes unnamed, and her background only hinted at. What can we make of the episode?
First, here’s how I might set up the scene: Luke has a Pharisee named Simon somewhere among the provincial audience who invites Jesus to dinner. We know some others also attended because of a reference to “they that sat at meat with him,” but the story really revolves around Simon, Jesus, and an unnamed woman who interrupts the dinner. Luke makes a clear reference to a banquet, what the King James renders as “sat down to meat.” The group would have surrounded a low central table with individual cushions within a kind of dining area. Once the host would bring food to the table, the group would take seats and recline one side against the edge of the table, and then use their table hand to eat. Jesus likely sat at a corner of the table, meaning his back would have faced the outer rooms and his table-arm and posture would have faced the others dining with him.
A woman from the town or city heard that Jesus dined at Simon’s house. She brought an alabaster phial of unguent (more on this in a second), and approached the dining area from behind Jesus. She moved toward Jesus’s feet, and weeping, bent low and wet his feet with her tears. She took her hair and wiped the dirt from his feet, then kissed them, took the phial, and rubbed unguent into his feet, ankles, and heels.
Let’s take a break here to bring in some additional context.
Hospitality Culture
In a previous post, I discussed hospitality customs of Jesus’s time, particularly how guests in a house or village would be given a cushion or couch to sit on, how hosts would bring a basin of water and a towel, and how hosts would wash their guests’ feet as a courtesy. Unguent, a kind of fragrant essential oil similar to menthol, worked as a kind of analgesic, a soothing balm for feet. Hosts would use marble or fine-metal phials as unguent containers for their esteemed guests; alabaster was the knock-off material, the cheap imitation of marble.
The woman who approached Jesus came with no basin. She had no water to wash his feet with. She had no towel. And the unguent she brought was visibly of the cheap kind, carried in alabaster. Contextually, the Lukan narrative sets up an impoverished woman, certainly someone lacking in fashion and etiquette for the area. The men in the room, Pharisees all, look on and are embarrassed. This woman seems odd, out of touch, and among the unclean class of residents who don’t properly attend to daily purification, hence, a “sinner.” As Simon looks on, he thinks Jesus couldn’t possibly be a prophet, otherwise he would know how an unclean, impure woman was touching him, thus rendering Jesus unclean by Jewish law and needing to perform miqveh purification.
Jesus addresses the hospitality expectations head on. He asks Simon to see this woman—“I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water for my feet: but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head. Thou gavest me no kiss: but this woman since the time I came in hath not ceased to kiss my feet. My head with oil thou didst not anoint: but this woman hath anointed my feet with ointment.” When these men took notice of the woman’s poor attempt at hospitality, Jesus stood up for her and pointed out their relative inhospitality.
Sins, Which Are Many
The King James has Jesus telling her that her “sins, which are many, are forgiven.” In context, the original text sets up something else entirely. The phrase rendered as “sins” appears multiple times throughout the pericope, which in the original is the same term used in the Greek Old Testament (which pre-dates the Hebrew text), the New Testament, and other Greek texts to describe expulsion or rejection from society. It deals particularly with social codes that established etiquette and proper civic conduct. One could say this woman, by her lack of proper hospitality elements, made certain faults of etiquette, like someone barging into the old English royal court, calling the King and Queen “buddies,” dressing all wrong, and walking across the room without bowing and curtseying. Such impertinence punishable among royals was not the case with Pharisees. But nonetheless, the Pharisaic and regional custom treated such bad etiquette as shameful and even exacerbating of the purity of those present: the woman made Jesus unclean by her crude behavior, and that could have easily brought a sneer or a chuckle, or even a gasp from the men in the room.
One could read Jesus as saying, “her many blunders are acceptable.” He even used a short story to illustrate, describing a creditor with two debtors, one who owed ten times as much as the other, and the creditor letting their debts go out of charity. In context, this suits the situation: you all notice her faults and her gaffes, but the one with the most gaffes who is accepted appreciates it more than the one with almost perfect etiquette.
Jesus’s reaction here is so monumentally instructive, in my view. He reorients everything by his response to this woman. For him, none of the outer hospitalities looked out of place—for she loved much, he said. He saw what no one else apparently had been willing to see, that she approached Jesus in love. He stood up for her in the company of the most technically astute readers of the Torah and of tradition, the Pharisees. He received her authenticity without hesitation and to the shock and dismay of his hosts, he elevated her in their presence and sent her with his blessing.
Only Her Tears and Her Hair
This woman who loved much broke all the protocols while trying to observe them. Her version of honoring Jesus with her hospitality looked to others like a pitiful, embarrassing encounter. But she brought all she had. She cleaned Jesus’s well-traveled feet with her own tears, she took her own hair to wipe the dirt, and massaged her rudimentary balm into his footsoles. Jesus showed something of his unfailingly good soul by his response. If we were to hear that Jesus were near, and if we were to try to approach him, even getting things all wrong, if all we had were our tears and our hair, Jesus would receive us and stand up for us and bless us. Like this humble, lovely woman—do we love much? Or like the Pharisees in the room, do we concentrate on whether people do things to protocol?
The story further demonstrates what Jesus had promised by his invitation to take upon ourselves his yoke. A woman in tears approached him, and he lifted her, literally from the floor, and offered her peace and comfort. You can’t shame Jesus—not with social customs, not with scripture, not with tradition, not with etiquette or fashion or your incredulity or spite. She loved much, and so does he.
Sources
- B. Hudson McLean, The Cursed Christ: Mediterranean Expulsion Rituals and Pauline Soteriology (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996).
- Stephen Finlan, “Atonement,” Oxford Bibliographies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
- Jean-Louis Flandrin, Massimo Montanari, and Albert Sonnenfeld, eds., Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
- Catherine Hezser, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life in Roman Palestine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
- James W. Ermatinger, Daily Life in the New Testament (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008).