Hair Care

OK ladies let’s talk about hair. As we all know hair is an important part of being a girl. We spend tons of money on cuts, color, and styling. We buy all the latest tools and product and we would rather stay at home in the dark than face the world on a bad hair day. We will do just about anything TO our hair to achieve the perfect do, but have you ever thought about what you could do WITH your hair? The woman in Luke 7 (vs. 36-50) used her hair unconventionally in one of the most important moments in her life. This woman used her hair to clean the feet of a carpenter and in the process changed her life.

In this time people wore open sandals. The road was dirty and dusty so just imagine the feet of the people that walked everywhere they went. In this passage Jesus had entered a home and had not had his feet washed, which was a custom of that time. So we can imagine that his feet were still dirty. The woman wet the feet of Jesus with her tears and then began to clean them with her hair. Let’s stop and break this down. First, hair is very close to the face so if she had her hair on his feet her face was not far behind. Second, she used her hair as a cleaning rag. I don’t know about you, but my cleaning rags are permanently stained, are only used for cleaning purposes, and are stored in a cabinet nowhere near my hair products. If the story stopped here we would walk away wondering why in the world would she do that with her hair, but if we keep going we see what a beautiful gesture it was.

You see this was not just the girl next door. This woman had a reputation. Everyone in the town knew are and identified her as a sinner. So we can read between the lines and know that she was the outcast, looked down on, ashamed, hurt, and damaged. The woman would have never been invited into the house Jesus was at, but she went anyway. She may have heard him speak before or heard rumor of the healing he was doing. Whatever the case she had hope that he would be her salvation. So when she entered into his presence she used everything she had to show how much she needed his grace. She was bold. She took her sinful self into a place she was unwelcomed and cleaned the dirt of a man’s feet with her tears and her hair. That took faith. She knew she needed redemption, and she believed that Jesus could give it to her. So in the grand scheme of things using her hair as a dirty rag was just a very small price to pay for the gift of grace, redemption, and eternal life.