Simon-the-Pharisee
Short answer: Simon the Pharisee was a religious man who invited Jesus to a meal and then silently concluded that Jesus could not be a prophet, because Jesus allowed a sinful woman to touch him. Luke 7:36-50 records how Jesus answered Simon, not with an argument but with a parable about two debtors, and then with three ordinary courtesies Simon had withheld. The point is not that hospitality is wrong or that Simon was a villain in a story. The point is that Simon had no sense of his own debt, so he had no love to give. The woman, who knew exactly how much she owed, loved much because she had been forgiven much. The passage does not tell us Simon's final response; it leaves the question with every reader who has ever hosted religion without receiving grace.
Who Simon the Pharisee was and why the invitation matters
Simon appears only in Luke's account of this dinner, though the name is common and the man is not to be confused with Simon Peter or with Simon the leper in the Bethany accounts. He was a Pharisee, which in first-century Judaism meant a layman committed to careful observance of the law and to the traditions that surrounded it. Pharisees were not automatically hostile to Jesus; some invited him to eat, some warned him of danger, and some believed. Simon's invitation was therefore a real gesture, not necessarily a trap. He opened his house and his table to a traveling teacher whose reputation was growing.
That matters for reading the story fairly. Luke says only that one of the Pharisees invited him to eat with him, and that Jesus entered the Pharisee's house and sat at the table. Jesus accepted. He did not treat the invitation as a snare or refuse the company of a man who would later be described as judging him. Whatever Simon's private motives may have been, the meal began as an ordinary act of religious hospitality, the kind of thing a serious man in that culture would consider a duty and perhaps an honor to offer.
What the invitation reveals is that Simon was near Jesus in body and distant from him in understanding. Proximity to Jesus is not the same as knowing him. A person can sit at the same table, hear the same words, watch the same mercy, and still misread the whole scene. Luke tells us what Simon thought only after the woman arrived, and that thought is the hinge of the passage.
The woman's entrance and Simon's silent verdict
Luke identifies the woman simply as a sinner, a word that in this setting means a woman of notorious reputation. She came into the house carrying an alabaster jar of ointment, stood behind Jesus at his feet, weeping, and began to wet his feet with her tears. She wiped them with her hair, kissed them, and anointed them with the ointment. Every detail is undignified by the standards of the room. A woman of her reputation did not belong at a Pharisee's dinner, and she certainly did not belong at the feet of a guest.
Simon watched and drew a conclusion: if this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner. That verdict is the engine of the passage, because it tells us exactly what Simon valued. He valued accurate assessment of people. He valued the separation between the righteous and the unclean. He believed that a true prophet would share his categories and would recoil. In his mind, Jesus' tolerance of the woman was evidence against Jesus, not evidence about Simon.
Notice that Simon never said any of this aloud. The passage presents it as his inward reasoning, which means the confrontation that follows is not a public shaming but a private diagnosis. Jesus was about to address a thought, not a speech. That is a sobering detail for any reader who has ever judged another person silently in a religious setting and assumed no one noticed.
The parable of the two debtors and the question Simon could not avoid
Jesus answered him, and his answer began with a story. A certain creditor had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii and the other fifty. When neither could pay, he forgave them both. Then came the question: which of them will love him more? Luke 7:40-43 records the exchange. Jesus said, and Simon answered that the one who was forgiven more would love more, and Jesus told him that he had judged correctly.
This is the heart of the passage. The parable does not say that the fifty-denarii debtor was a worse person or that the five-hundred-denarii debtor was a better one. It says that forgiveness, when it is truly received, produces love in proportion to the sense of debt that was forgiven. The woman was not accepted because her love earned it; her love was the evidence that she had received something she could never have paid for. Simon's problem was not that he was too great a sinner to be forgiven. It was that he did not think he needed much.
Jesus then drove the point home with three ordinary courtesies. Turning to the woman, he said to Simon that he had given Jesus no water for his feet, but she had wet his feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. He then continued, contrasting the kiss Simon had not given with the woman's kisses and the oil Simon had omitted with her ointment. The parable and the comparison are one argument: Simon's love was small because his sense of debt was small.
Why the woman's tears are not a payment for her sin
It is easy to read the woman's weeping as an attempt to pay a debt with devotion, and that reading distorts the passage. Jesus did not say that her tears purchased her forgiveness or that her ointment outweighed her sins. He said that her sins, which are many, are forgiven, and then added that the one to whom little is forgiven loves little. The order matters enormously. Forgiveness comes first; love is the response. The woman did not love her way into forgiveness any more than a debtor loves his way out of a ledger.
This is the difference between religion and the gospel, and the passage makes it sharply. In a religious ledger, devotion offsets debt. In this parable, the creditor simply forgives, and love flows from relief. The woman's actions were extravagant, public, and costly, but they were the behavior of a person who had already been set free, not a person trying to earn release. Her tears were not a transaction. They were the overflow of a heart that had grasped something Simon had not.
Christians have sometimes turned this woman into an example of what we must do to be forgiven, when the text presents her as an example of what forgiveness does in a person. If we reverse the order, we lose the parable entirely and end up back at Simon's table, counting our own courtesies and wondering why our love feels thin.
What Simon got right, and what he could not see
Simon was not wrong about everything. He was right that the woman was a sinner. He was right that a prophet would know the difference between the righteous and the unclean. He was right that Jesus, if he were merely a prophet, should have recoiled. And he was right in his answer to the parable: the one forgiven more loves more. His error was not in his doctrine of sin but in his application of it to himself. He drew the line between the woman and the wicked, and he stood on the righteous side of it.
What Simon could not see was that he too was a debtor who could not pay. His respectable sins were quieter, but they were not smaller. Pride, self-sufficiency, and the habit of ranking people by their visible failures were all in the room with him, and he had no tears for any of them. The story does not tell us that Simon was a hypocrite or a fraud. It tells us that he had a category for other people's sin and no category for his own need, and that this blindness kept him from receiving what the woman received.
That is why the passage ends the way it does. Jesus said that her faith had saved her and told her to go in peace, and then the guests at the table began to ask among themselves who this is who even forgives sins. Luke does not record Simon's answer. The question is left hanging over the table, and over every reader who has ever been the respectable one in the room.
How this passage has been read, and where readers differ
Many readers assume that the woman is Mary Magdalene, or the Mary of Bethany who anointed Jesus before his burial, or the adulterous woman of John 8. The text here does not name her, and the other passages involve different settings, different homes, and in some cases different cities. The anointings in Bethany, recorded separately, are not the same event as this anointing in a Pharisee's house, and linking them requires reading details into the text. It is safer to let this woman remain unnamed and to let her story stand as Luke tells it.
Faithful Christians also differ over how sharply to press the parable's arithmetic. Some read the fifty and five hundred denarii as a statement that some people have sinned more and will therefore feel more gratitude, while others read it primarily as a contrast between self-righteousness and honest need. Both readings find support in the passage, and neither requires us to rank sins in a way Scripture does not rank them.
A further point of difference concerns Simon's spiritual state. Some see him as a hostile opponent, others as a sincere man with a blind spot, and others as a potential convert whose response Luke simply does not record. The text is honest enough to leave the question open. That should make us cautious about pronouncing on someone's eternal state from a single dinner scene.
What this means for self-examination and table fellowship
The most natural application of the passage is not to Simon but to ourselves. Most of us who have grown up around church have a little of Simon in us. We know the right categories. We are comfortable in religious settings. We can spot the obvious sinner across the room. What we struggle to see is the debt that has been forgiven us, and when we lose sight of that, our love grows cool and our hospitality becomes a performance. The remedy is not to manufacture tears but to look honestly at the ledger and then at the cross.
There is also a lesson about the table. Simon's table was a place of judgment, and the woman's presence at it became a scandal to him. Jesus' table, by contrast, is a place where debtors are forgiven and sent away in peace. The church is meant to be a place where people who know they are forgiven sit with people who are learning that they can be, without the whispered assessment that ran through Simon's mind. That does not mean abandoning discernment. It means remembering that discernment was never meant to be a wall.
The passage also warns against using another person's repentance as material for our own self-congratulation. The woman's tears should have produced awe at the mercy of God, not irritation that a scandal had entered the room. When our first instinct on seeing someone come to Jesus is to calculate what it says about us, we are sitting at Simon's table, and it is time to move.
Biblical fidelity check
The passage establishes several things clearly. It establishes that Jesus accepted a Pharisee's invitation, that he knew Simon's thoughts, and that he answered them with a parable and a comparison. It establishes that the woman was a sinner, that her sins were many, that her faith saved her, and that she was sent away in peace. It establishes the principle that the one who is forgiven much loves much, and it establishes that forgiveness precedes and produces love rather than the reverse.
The passage does not establish that Simon was unregenerate, that he rejected Jesus, or that his final condition is known. It does not name the woman, identify her with Mary Magdalene or Mary of Bethany, or connect this event to the anointings in Bethany. It does not say that hospitality earns favor or that tears earn forgiveness. A common misreading treats the story as a lesson about how much we should love Jesus in order to be forgiven, which reverses the parable and turns grace back into a wage. The text plainly says her faith saved her before it describes the table guests marveling at his authority to forgive.
Other passages that speak to Luke 7:36-50
Several passages help fill out the themes Luke raises here. The prologue of 1 John grounds the Christian message in what was seen and touched, which matters when a woman touches Jesus at a meal: What Does 1 John 1:1 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application. The same letter insists that claiming sinlessness is self-deception, which is precisely Simon's error: What Does 1 John 1:8 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application. It then promises cleansing to those who confess: 1 John 1:9 Meaning: Confession, Forgiveness, and Cleansing. And because love for the world and love for the Savior cannot both rule a heart, What Does 1 John 2:15 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application speaks to the divided affections Simon never examined.
Frequently asked questions
Was Simon the Pharisee saved, or was he a hypocrite?
Luke does not tell us. The text records Simon's inward judgment, Jesus' correction of it, and the reasoning of the other guests, but it never reports Simon's response. He is not called a hypocrite in this passage, and he is not called a believer either. He was a religious man who invited Jesus to dinner and misjudged both his guest and his guest's mercy. Whether that dinner was the beginning of conviction or the end of the conversation is left unsaid. We should resist filling in what Scripture leaves open.
Is the sinful woman in Luke 7 the same as Mary Magdalene or Mary of Bethany?
The text does not name her, and there is no textual basis in Luke for identifying her with Mary Magdalene, with Mary of Bethany, or with the woman taken in adultery in John 8. The anointing in Bethany, recorded in Matthew 26 and Mark 14, takes place in the house of Simon the leper near the end of Jesus' ministry, while this event occurs earlier in a Pharisee's house and involves a different host. Treating them as one story requires importing details the passages themselves do not give.
What does it mean that the one who is forgiven little loves little?
It is not a cap on God's willingness to forgive but a statement about how awareness of debt shapes love. A person who believes he has little to be forgiven for will feel little gratitude, while a person who knows the size of her debt will respond with extravagant love. Jesus applied this to Simon, whose love was small because his sense of need was small. The remedy is not to sin more but to see our sin truly and then to see the forgiveness that meets it.
