Many sins are remitted to her: the sinful woman and the disciples of the Lord

They have many sins forgiven, because they love much. But he to whom little is forgiven, loves little.
Lk 7:47

The eleventh Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C, proposes one of the richest and most literarily elaborate pericope from the Gospel of Luke: Lk 7:36-8:3. The episode of the banquet in Simon the Pharisee’s house, with the intrusion of a “sinful woman” who anoints Jesus’ feet with tears, hair, and precious perfume, is immediately followed (Lk 8:1-3) by a list of women who accompanied Jesus on his itinerant mission, including Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna, “and many others.” The first reading (2 Sam 12:7-10.13), the prophet Nathan before David after his adultery with Bathsheba, and the second reading (Gal 2:16.19-21), Paul on justification by faith, frame the Gospel within a broader context: grace that forgives, liberates, and calls to follow.The identity of the “sinful woman” in Lk 7 has been one of the greatest exegetical debates in biblical history. Gregory the Great (+604) identified her with Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany, creating the “Composite Magdalene” that dominated Western iconography and devotion for fifteen centuries. Modern exegesis rejects this identification: Luke does not name the woman in Lk 7, and nothing in the text links her to Mary Magdalene or Mary of Bethany. Mary Magdalene, as described by Luke in 8:2, is a disciple healed “of seven demons,” not necessarily moral sins, but a condition of suffering or psychic/spiritual disturbance. The distinction matters: the “Sinful Magdalene” of Western tradition is a later theological construction, not a biblical fact.## I. Simon’s Banquet: The Irruption of LoveThe context of the episode, a Pharisee’s banquet, is theologically essential. The Pharisees were the representatives of ritual law and purity. The presence of a “public sinner” at this gathering was a grave violation of norms of purity. What Luke narrates is the clash between two logics: the logic of purity (which keeps the sinner at a distance to not contaminate the righteous) and the logic of Jesus’ merciful love (which touches the repentant sinner and transforms him through his contact). This clash is not merely a dispute over ritual norms, but a question about the nature of God: does God reject the impure, or go to meet the lost?The woman’s gesture is extraordinarily complex in symbolic terms. She enters “with an alabaster jar of perfume,” an object of great value, probably her means of livelihood. She weeps over Jesus’ feet, wipes them with her hair (a gesture of extreme submission and intimacy, for a woman to let down her hair in public was itself socially transgressive), kisses them repeatedly, and anoints them with the perfume. This sequence is a silent love liturgy: the broken jar, the spilled perfume, the tears as baptismal water, the hair as a ministry towel. It is the language of love that surpassed words.**Reaction of Simon:** “If he were a prophet,” said Simon, “he would know who this woman is and what a sinner she is” (Lk 7:39), reveals his logic: holiness is incompatible with contact with sin. Jesus responds with the parable of the two debtors (Lk 7:41-43): two debtors, one owing fifty denarii, the other fifty, both forgiven freely. To whom more is forgiven, loves more. Jesus’ logic reverses Simon’s: it is not contact with sin that contaminates the holy, but the love of forgiveness that transforms the sinner. Holiness is not separation from impurity, but love directed towards impurity and its transformation.**II. “Remittuntur ei peccata multa”: Theology of Forgiveness**The formula of forgiveness, “Her many sins are forgiven because she loved much” (Lk 7:47), is theologically delicate and requires precise exegesis. Misinterpreted, it suggests that love is a condition for forgiveness: the woman loved so much, therefore she was forgiven. This reading would be a soteriology of merit, human love earning divine favor. But the parable of the two debtors preceding the formula states the opposite: the debtors were forgiven freely by the creditor, and thus they loved. Love is the fruit of forgiveness, not a condition to obtain it.The Greek syntax of verse 47 allows this interpretation: the *hoti* (“because” or “since”) can be causal (she is forgiven because she loved) or evidential (her love is evidence that she was forgiven). The parable preceding clarifies that the correct reading is evidential: she loves much because she has been forgiven much. This theological distinction is fundamental: God’s grace precedes and generates human love. Love does not precede and generate grace. The woman who poured the perfume did not “deserve” forgiveness, but responded with love to a forgiveness already received in her encounter with Jesus.This theology of forgiveness that generates love has immense spiritual and pastoral richness. Spirituality starting from awareness of one’s own sinfulness and the greatness of God’s love, what Bernard of Clairvaux called *cognitio sui et Dei* (knowledge of self and God), is more fruitful than spirituality beginning with the presumption of merit. Teresa of Lisieux expressed this intuition in an unparalleled way: awareness of being “the smallest” was not an obstacle to love but its foundation. Whoever has been forgiven much, loves much, and whoever loves much, bears much fruit.**III. The Disciple Women: Lk 8:1-3**The section immediately following, Lk 8:1-3, is one of the most important texts in the New Testament for the history of women’s condition in the early Church, often underestimated in catechesis. Luke explicitly states that Jesus traveled not only with the twelve but also with a group of women who “served him with their own resources”: Mary Magdalene, Joanna (wife of Cuza, administrator of Herod), Susana, and “many others.” This group of women is an historical fact mentioned explicitly by Luke in the pre-Paschal phase, not just during the Passion and Resurrection as the other synoptists.The presence of these women in Jesus’ itinerant company is sociologically revolutionary within first-century Jewish context, where women were not disciples of rabbis. Luke uses the verb *diakoneo* (to serve, to minister) to describe their activity, the same verb that describes apostolic and diaconal service in the primitive Church. The phrase “of their goods” (or “with what they had”) indicates that they contributed materially to the support of the missionary company, a form of apostolic patronage without which Jesus’ itinerant mission would not have been possible. They are, in this sense, the first “material supporters” of Christian missions.Mary Magdalene, who heads this list, holds the highest place because she is the most significant: “from whom seven demons were cast out” (Lk 8:2). The number seven is likely symbolic, representing fullness of liberation rather than literal. Mary Magdalene was healed from a condition of radical suffering and responded with complete devotion: she is present at the Cross (Jn 19:25), at the tomb (Mt 28:1; Jn 20:1), and is the first witness to the Resurrection (Jn 20:11-18). Thomas Aquinas called her “the apostle of apostles” (*apostolorum apostola*) for having been sent by the Risen One to announce the Good News to the twelve, a recognition in the Roman calendar with the elevation of her feast to a celebration in 2016.IV. Mary of Nazareth and the community of disciplesThe relationship between Mary of Nazareth and the women disciples of Lk 8:1-3 is not explicitly narrated by the Gospels, but theological tradition, supported by Jn 19:25-27 and Act 1:14, suggests that Mary was part of the broader group of women who followed Jesus and formed the core of the primitive community. In Jn 19:25, at the foot of the Cross, we find “her mother, Mary of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene,” a convergence of the female disciples at the most dramatic moment of the mission. In Act 1:14, after the Ascension, we read that “Mary, the mother of Jesus” was in the upper room with the apostles and other women, persevering in prayer.This community of disciples around Mary is the nucleus of the emerging Church as Luke describes it. Mary is not an isolated figure; she is the “mother” of the community in a more than biological sense, having walked the longest and deepest path from the Annunciation to Pentecost, and whose presence guided and encouraged the others. Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna, “and many others” learned from Mary what faithful following entails: staying when others flee, waiting when all seems over, recognizing the Risen One at dawn in the garden.John Paul II, in *Mulieris Dignitatem* (1988), reflected at length on the “female genius” embodied by these female disciples: a form of following characterized by personal fidelity, concrete attention to suffering, and the ability to remain present during moments when human projects collapse. This dimension of feminine following, not exclusive to women but lived by them in a paradigmatic way, has its supreme model in Mary: the “first disciple,” the “woman of the Fiat,” who stood at the cross while the twelve fled, and who prayed with the community awaiting the Spirit in the Cenacle. She who loved much because she received much is the model for every Christian response to the ineffable gift of grace.