John 12:1-8 + Lent 5
April 3, 2022 + Smithtown
I.
Just before Passover, Jesus comes to Bethany for a dinner at the home of his friends, Martha, Mary, and their brother Lazarus. Jesus has recently raised Lazarus from the dead. During the meal Mary takes a large amount, nearly a pound, of very expensive perfume and uses it to anoint Jesus’ feet, wiping them with her long hair. The aroma permeates the whole house.
When we call Jesus by the title, “Christ,” the word is Greek for the Hebrew word "Messiah," which means "anointed." The gospel has no other story of Jesus being actually anointed with oil except here. Which means that when we refer to Jesus as “Christ” we are in some ways remembering this particular event, the time when he was anointed by Mary, six days before the Passover. What Mary does to Jesus is literally what makes him the Messiah, the Christ. That’s how important it is.
Yet it is a very disturbing story on several levels. Presbyterian ministers are required to receive what we call “boundary training.” This is where we learn to recognize and respect various kinds of boundaries between the professional, personal, financial, family, ecclesiastical, romantic, and other aspects of our lives. Blurring and even crossing these boundaries can lead to misconduct and often disaster for churches as well as pastors and their families.
But here, as in so many places in his career, we see Jesus throwing boundaries out the window. Imagine the firestorm of indignation and complaint that would result if this sort of thing were to happen to a pastor today! Charges would be filed! Indeed, this event is the final catalyst that sets in motion the apparatus that eventually brings Jesus to the cross within a week!
Not only is it way too intimate for our comfort level even now; but there is the question of the profligate waste of very pricey perfume. So Jesus manages here to offend both the sexual morality of conservatives and liberals’ concern for social justice.
Jesus is an inveterate boundary-breaker. He looks at the separations, the divisions, the classes, the different forms of enmity which societies impose on people, and he sets himself to undermining and even overturning them. He leads one, unified, integrated life. His faith is not separate from his economics, or his politics; his personal life is his public life; he is the same person saying and doing the same things when he is with his friends, and when he is with his disciples, when he is teaching a crowd of people, and when he is standing on trial in court.
Our problem is not that we don’t have enough boundaries, separations, distinctions, and regulations in our existence; it is that we don’t have enough integrity to bring our faith and discipleship into the center and let it pervade every part of us, like the fragrance of Mary’s perfume filled her whole house. Then I wonder if boundaries wouldn't become superfluous.
In Luke, Mary makes a point of sitting with Jesus and listening to his teaching, for which he commends her. Here she goes further than simply listening to Jesus, and performs a beautiful and meaningful act of worship. She doesn’t just sit at his feet; she massages them with a heavily aromatic ointment, wiping them with her long hair.
Mary's act is a response to Jesus' raising of Lazarus from death, which represents the breaking into the present of the end times. The resurrection, according to Jewish theology, wasn’t supposed to happen until the end, “on the last day." Yet here is Lazarus, walking around and having people over for dinner, after having been dead in a tomb for several days. He serves as a living anticipation of what Jesus will finally do in Jerusalem.
II.
Jesus is himself the resurrection and the life. He makes present and available and real now something that Jews affirmed as part of their faith, but no one expected to experience any time soon, certainly not in this mortal existence.
Jesus takes that future hope and hauls it into our lives today. He shows that resurrection is something that can begin to happen now. It is not relegated to some far off termination of linear time; it isn’t even something that we have to wait to receive until after our body physically dies. Jesus makes God’s promised future a present reality. He makes it possible for us to die now to our old selves, and be reborn now as our new, true, original selves. This is a truth that transcends whatever may or may not be happening with our physical, biological organism.
It is like when Paul says we are the Lord’s whether we live or die. We have his new life within us, the resurrection life, Christ-in-us, and it is real and true whether we realize it now in this mortal existence or later, after our body ceases to function. That’s why we sing “Alleluia!” when we bury a dead body or inter someone's ashes. Not because we’re glad the person is gone, of course, and not even because we’re thankful that they are free from death and pain, but because we celebrate that not even death can keep them from the new and true life we all have in Christ.
So when Mary makes Jesus the Anointed One, the Christ of God, she does not apply the oil to his head, as was the case for the kings of Judah and Israel, and the occasional prophet. But in anointing his feet she addresses the places where his body meets the earth, where he is literally grounded. His feet are the contact points between Creator and creation, the connection that closes the circuit and allows the energy to flow from heaven to earth. She anoints the interface between God and the dust upon which we all walk and from which we are all made. Her anointing prepares him for the day when he will, like all of us, go down to that very dust. For she is massaging the same feet that will, in a few days, have hammered through them a long, rusty, iron, Roman nail, fixing his body to a wooden cross. She prepares him in advance for his burial.
Meanwhile, Judas, one of Jesus’ disciples, also attended this dinner. The narrator reminds us that he will shortly betray Jesus. Judas complains bitterly about the apparent waste. “Why was this perfume not sold for three-hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?”
Three-hundred denarii was nearly a year’s wages for a common laborer; a lot of money. Judas attacks Mary for even having such a luxury item, let alone slathering it sensuously all over Jesus' feet. That much money could do a lot of good in the community. It could have been given to people in need.
He has a point. I know I get impatient when a big, rich church spends thousands of dollars on a pipe organ, or a new steeple, or stained-glass windows, or some other expensive trinket, when there are hungry people around the corner who need to be fed. I once expressed indignation in a presbytery meeting when a particular church actually cut their mission budget so they could retain the bragging rights of having the highest paid pastor in the presbytery! Doesn't Judas have a point here? Shouldn't money be used for mission, not squandered on perfume to anoint someone’s feet, for heaven’s sake? Why does Jesus allow this? Isn't this the equivalent of buying the pastor a Mercedes?
We may be even more shocked because Jesus rebukes Judas and approves of Mary’s use of the costly ointment. “Leave her alone,” he snaps. “She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.”
III.
In order to understand Jesus’ attitude, we have to see that Jesus in these stories, and in the whole gospel of John, embodies deeper essential truths about our life. When he, the Word of God, becomes flesh to dwell among us, he takes on and reveals our true humanity. It is through this humanity which we share with Christ, that we are also connected to all people, and even to all of life, and all of creation. In him we identify with and connect with everyone, especially those in need, the marginalized, the suffering, and disenfranchised.
That is why Jesus calls out Judas’ hypocrisy here. “You will always have the poor among you,” he says, “but you won’t always have me.” Without Christ as our spiritual connection to all, people remain strangers to us. We see them as just "others," like objects out there among us; we may think about them or not; we may decide to serve them or find an excuse not to.
But with and in Christ, we are connected to them, we are them because we share a common humanity, and so we serve people, not as separate, distant, different beings, but as part of a larger "us," indeed, as us. Christ affirms this explicitly in Matthew 25 in which service to suffering people is service to him.
To minister to others while still in our egocentricity, without this realization of our solidarity in Christ, easily becomes paternalistic, or guilt-driven, or manipulative and calculating, or forced, or transactional…. It is inevitably self-serving in some way, maintaining and strengthening the walls separating people. It is better than neglect or violence, of course; but it is not the transforming love that Jesus embodies.
With the realization that Christ-in-us is the common humanity we share with all people, we are freed from our differences, inequalities, and divisions. In Christ "there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male and female," as Paul says. In truth, the boundaries have been broken; all are united. Christ is the basis for a radical empathy in which we relate to people at their deepest places of need.
IV.
Our life depends on our understanding that in Jesus Christ we see still further that sharing his true humanity also unites us to God’s living Presence. For, as the creeds say, he is both "fully God and fully human," two natures in one person. He breaks the biggest boundary, that between humanity and God, between creation and Creator. Christ is the Word made flesh, the union of true humanity with God. When we realize his humanity in ourselves by following him, we at the same time realize the Creator's Presence with and in us. In and through him we too are connected to, and in truth by grace are made one with, God.
That is what Mary expresses in her act of worship. Like in a work of performance art, Mary’s perfume represents the way we keep that awareness in ourselves open and working and fragrant and lubricated and cherished and alive. In our devotional and prayer life we need to let the rich scent of our thanks and praise permeate our souls, to keep that connectivity alive and functional. It is worth more even than thousands of dollars worth of imported aromatic ointment. It is the pearl of great price and the treasure hidden in a field. To realize this in ourselves, and express it in our actions of witness and service, is worth everything we have and are. It is the doorway to true and eternal life.
Jesus finally demonstrates that not even death separates us from each other or from God. Killing the physical organism doesn’t have the permanent effect the killers think it will have on people who have discovered their true life in a deeper and higher and wider place. We live on in each other and in God.
To the degree that we find, even for a moment, that connection, that place where we are all one, that Christ within, we live on. To the degree that we participate in God’s love, poured out into and for the world in Jesus Christ, even a little, we live on. To the degree that we discover that our life goes far deeper than any of our boundaries, and that we share together in the life of the One who is “the true life of all,” as one old hymn puts it, we do indeed and in truth, live on.
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