In the name of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Today’s
Gospel text is like a masterpiece painting. It is full of symbols, and the more
we look at it, the more we find. If you didn’t have time to understand the
whole story of Jesus’ passion, these eight verses from John would give you the gist.
If we had kept reading, the very next event recorded in John in the Palm Sunday
procession, so this story about Jesus, Mary, and Judas is an overture to the
story of Holy Week.
Often
when we read about Martha and Mary, people talk about which one suits their
personality. They contract the contemplative Mary with the industrious Martha.
But that’s not the dichotomy presented to us this morning in John. Instead, we
are giving the option of seeing ourselves as either Mary or Judas. I don’t
anticipate many of us being in a rush to identify with Judas, but it’s worth
our consideration.
Throughout
John, belief is a constant theme, and that’s what we see going on between Jesus
and Mary and Jesus and Judas. Belief, in John, has nothing to do with what you
think. Instead, belief is a codeword for being in a relationship with Jesus. In
fact, this is what the word “belief” has traditionally meant. In the Biblical
context, belief was about trust, commitment, and loyalty. Belief was a matter
of the heart, not the mind. Our English word, “belief” comes from an Old
English word that meant to “love” or “hold dear,” and even today, you can hear
how the words “believe” and “belove” are related. What happened was the
Scientific Revolution of the 16th century and the rise of “proofs”
for hypotheses. Some long held beliefs came to be disproven, and so that word, “belief,”
came to mean “ideas that have no evidence.” That isn’t at all what John, Jesus,
Judas, or Mary would have thought. For them, belief was all about relationship.
To belief in Jesus is to trust him, to love him, to be loyal to him. And with
that definition in mind, the question about whether or not we are closer to
Mary or Judas when it comes to belief becomes more poignant.
It’s
not exactly easy to forget a dead man coming back to life, but lest we forget
that detail, John starts by reminding us that Jesus came to the house of Lazarus,
the dead man who had been raised. As if the story wasn’t already full of
symbolism, John tells this story about Jesus, who is a “dead man walking,” in the
home of a literal walking dead man. Lazarus and Jesus are foils to each other –
just on the opposite sides of the grave. Just a few verses before our reading
today began, the Temple authorities were discussing this “Jesus problem,” now
that he had brought a dead man back to life, and the Bible records that “From
that day on they planned to put him to death.” So keep in mind that the mood is
quite grave.
Mary
takes a pound of costly perfume and anoints Jesus’ feet with it. This scene
drips with irony and meaning. Why would Mary have that much perfume at the house?
It’s likely the leftover perfume that had been used to anoint the corpse of her
brother, Lazarus, who was very much alive and reclining at the table with them.
And this isn’t just ordinary perfume, John makes it clear that it is “pure.”
The word in Greek for “pure” is pistikos
and the word in Greek for “belief” is pistis.
John is wanting to make sure that we catch the connection between Mary’s action
and her love and loyalty to Jesus.
She
then anoints Jesus with the oil. The word “Messiah” literally means “anointed
one,” so it may not be surprising that in preparation for the Passion, that
Jesus is anointed. But there’s a twist. Kings of Israel were anointed, but it
was their heads, not feet, that were anointed. In that culture, the only time you
would anoint someone’s feet is when they were already dead and you were
preparing the body for burial. In modern terms, Mary is putting a toe-tag on
Jesus. Again, he’s a dead man walking. She then wiped his feet with her hair,
which does seem like and odd act, but it’s certainly one of love.
John
then wants us to know that “the house was filled with the fragrance of the
perfume.” Just a handful of verses earlier, Martha had told Jesus “already
there is a stench” because of Lazarus’ corpse. But because of Mary’s faithful
act, that stench has been replaced with the smell of sweet perfume. The smell
of death has been replaced with the aroma of love. It’s a powerful statement that
reminds us that love has palpable effects. When love in the air, it can change
everything. Scientists tell us that the sense of smell is the strongest when it
comes to memory. I know that’s true for me. The smell of fresh cut grass takes
me back to mowing the lawn as a teenager in Florida, diesel fuel takes me to
the Dominican Republic, and certain perfumes remind me of certain people. It would
have been common in Mary’s time to anoint dead bodies with perfume. And so
every time she, and everyone else in that house, would smell those perfumes, they
would be reminded of Jesus, they would be reminded of Lazarus, who was dead and
then raised. That fragrance would remind them that death is only a comma, not a
period.
In
one of his letters, St. Paul’s urges his readers to “be a fragrant offering” to
God. Fragrances spread. Something as simple as the smell of freshly baked bread
can pick up your mood and remind you of good memories. How much more can our
love do the same in the world! With all that plagues our society right now,
which is on full display during this Presidential primary process, I can’t help
but think we need more fragrant offerings of love. Love is contagious. May you
be a fragrant offering of God’s love to those around you.
Mary acts as a prophet
who correctly reads the situation. While many around her still don’t understand
that Jesus is heading toward the Cross, she does. While many still think that
Jesus’ Kingship is about power and glory, Mary realizes that it’s about love and
service, so she anoints his feet as a servant would. Jesus will do the same at
the Last Supper when he washes the disciples’ feet. Though Mary speaks no words,
her actions prophetically speak loud and clear – she is a follower of Jesus,
who is in it, not for the prestige or good times, but for love and loyalty.
Judas,
though, apparently doesn’t have much of a sense of smell. He asks “Why was this
perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?”
John then adds the rhetorical comment that his is because Judas was a thief,
not charitable. It’s interesting that the only other time in John that the word
“thief” appears is when Jesus talks about himself as the Good Shepherd. The
thief, Jesus says, is someone who doesn’t belong to the flock and tries to break
in to do harm. In other words, a thief isn’t in relationship with the shepherd;
in the language of John, the thief does not believe.
Judas
is the opposite of Mary in this passage. He can’t see what is right in front of
him. He speaks of righteous sounding intentions, but is sorely lacking in
righteous action. Judas can talk a good game, but he lacks love. Mary shows
belief without words; Judas uses words without belief. Judas is an example of
St. Paul’s statement that “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but
do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” You can watch the
news, read the newspaper, or listen to radio and find a lot of noisy gongs. We
have plenty of examples of people pledging to do things, when in reality they’re
just being self-serving. It’s easy to say things like “we should take care of
the poor,” and it’s something else completely to kneel down at someone’s,
especially a poor someone’s, feet and lovingly wipe them with your hair. What
Judas does is actually quite common: to condemn someone for not thinking like
us. It’s been said that we prefer to judge others by their actions, and
ourselves by our intentions. It is so very easy to be Judas – to focus on what
could be instead of noticing the love that is right under our nose.
Jesus
takes up for Mary and says “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might
keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do
not always have me.” It can be a puzzling statement, as we might think that
Jesus is saying that it’s okay, or even possible, to serve God apart from
serving the poor. Jesus’ response is a quotation from Deuteronomy, and Mary and
Judas would have known that. The full verse is “Since there will never cease to
be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the
poor and needy neighbor in your land.’” Jesus doesn’t give the full quotation
because he didn’t need to, everyone knew what he meant. When I say, “Six of
one,” I don’t have to say “Half a dozen of the other” for you to know that I’m
saying that two things are equal.
Judas
is trying to distract attention away from this act of love by using giving to
the poor as an alternative to loving service. Serving God and giving to the
poor are not competing acts. But more than that, Jesus is saying “Of course you
should be taking care of the poor, as they are always with you. When was that
ever up for debate?” The idea that you could even ignore the poor is anathema
to belief in Jesus. Perhaps the love was too deep, too pure, too vulnerable for
Judas to stand, so he tried to stop it. As a society, we don’t handle
vulnerability or pain very well. Our population is the most addicted,
overweight, overworked, and medicated cohort in US history. We’re clearly
trying to avoid something with our screens, pills, and drinks, and that makes
us a lot more like Judas than we’d like to admit. When we come face to face
with the vulnerability of true love, do we embrace it, or do we dismiss it as
being too wasteful, too lavish, too emotional?
But Jesus will not always
around, and Mary gets that. This is a truth we know. Sometimes, it’s fairly
easy to be aware of God’s presence – perhaps you walked our labyrinth in
beautiful weather this week and that brought you closer to God. But, I’ll admit
that when I was getting all of the paperwork together to file our taxes last
week, I wasn’t as aware of God’s presence as I sometimes am. Perhaps you know
what that’s like? And so this narrative tells that it is a good thing to hang
onto those holy moments when you experience them. Don’t worry if people think
you’re crazy if you take time to smell the roses. Who cares if people think it’s
a waste of time to spend time in prayer each day? Mary shows us how to believe
in Jesus: it is to invest time with him.
Next Sunday, we will
enter Holy Week, and as we do so, may we carry the wisdom of this story with
us. May we remember that though death will be present, it will not have the final
word. May we remember our call to be a fragrant offering of God’s love. May we
remember that it is easy to, like Judas, avoid the vulnerable depths of love.
And may we always be ready to spend time at our Lord’s feet in loving service.
Amen.
