The Rev. Dr. Barbara Ewton
Lent 5
He Will Walk
Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus' feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, "Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?" (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, "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."
“Then he will come up behind us, and say our names so that we can say his, forever.”
He must have said his name once to Mary and in many ways, her story is about how she learned to say it back to him. We first met Mary in another story – the one about her squabble with her sister over who gets to sit and listen to Jesus and who gets to do the dishes. We also know her from the story about her brother Lazarus dying and her extraordinary belief that Jesus would have power over death itself. “Lord, she said to him, “if you had only been here, my brother would not have died.”
That was when Jesus had cried –he cried for the family’s pain, and maybe even for his own loss and then he cried out with a loud voice to call Lazarus from the tomb. Did he know before he shouted that he could call Lazarus back to life? All we know is that - from the depths of his compassion, and against all human understanding – he tried - and he succeeded. Lazarus stumbled from his tomb and amazed his friends and relatives. But in the doing so, he terrified the religious authorities and became the reason that the Pharisees set the plot that would take Jesus’ life into motion. Jesus’ calling Lazarus out of the tomb ensured that he would have to enter his own.
Because of the uproar caused by the raising of Lazarus, the Pharisees called a meeting of their highest court which met and came to the conclusion that, if they continued to let Jesus teach and preach, the Romans would destroy their nation. It is better, they decided that “one man die for the people, than that the whole nation perish.”
And so the end grew near. But all unaware that they were headed for disaster, the celebration of Lazarus’ new life was going strong in Bethany. The family was serving another dinner in Jesus’ honor and this time, Lazarus’ sister Mary brought out an extravagantly expensive perfume – perfume worth a full year’s pay – and anointed Jesus’ feet and dried them with her hair.
And the question we need to ask here is why. Why was it so important to the writer of this gospel to point out that she anointed his feet – those feet that walked from Nazareth all the way to Jerusalem, and then on to Calvary and even to Resurrection?
In the gospels of Matthew and Mark, the story of Mary’s tribute is remembered as one in which she anointed his head.[1] What the gesture means there is that it reminded people of stories of the prophets – stories like the one we heard last week of Samuel who anointed the shepherd boy David as king in the presence of his brothers. What Matthew and Mark are saying is that Mary anointed Jesus king over a kingdom of people too lost to recognize him – in the presence of disciples too obtuse to realize what she was doing.
In the gospel of Luke, Mary is portrayed as a sinner who anointed Jesus’ feet in an expression of faith and love for which, Jesus said, “her sins were forgiven.”
But what is John’s point and what might it mean in our world where anointing and foot washing are ancient forgotten gestures? Well, one way to go about figuring it out is to notice that – while Matthew and Mark looked back to the anointing of David, John seems to be looking forward.
We will miss the gospel’s point if we miss the link between this meal and Jesus’ Last Supper. Then, Jesus would wash his disciples’ feet as an expression of his love for them, as a sign of drawing them into his own life. He would ask them to repeat this act of service to each other as a sign of God’s love. I will be your servant and wash your feet, he said, so that you, and everyone who comes after you, can begin to understand that serving each other is the way human beings actually live God’s love. Who hasn’t heard the saying that we are the only hands God has in our world today? That was the point Jesus would make in that upper room. God uses us – not odd manipulations of nature – to create changes in our world.
So what did Mary do when she washed Jesus feet and dried them with her hair? Being able to say Jesus’ name, to be called one of his own, has little to do with creeds and rules and buildings. It has everything to do with love – with outrageously extravagant love. What Mary did when she anointed his feet and dried them with her hair was to give to Jesus what Jesus would later give to the disciples when he washed their feet at the Last Supper. She fulfilled his desire that we love and serve each other before he even expressed it to the twelve.
“I give you a new commandment,” Jesus would say at his last supper, “that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Like Jesus’ own, Mary’s was a faith that says “no matter what others may think, no matter what the respectable may say, no matter what it costs, no matter whether I will be ridiculed, this is how God loves and this is how I will love also.
No one in this room – or any other – loves like this on their own. Human love tends to be measured out in chunks of time, or bursts of available energy. It comes, I suppose, from the simple fact that human beings are defined by two primary delimiters: time and energy. That’s not an accusation of sin, but simply a statement of who we are.
But God’s amazing love, of course, comes to earth as unlimited grace, sometimes even as grace expressed as things we do for others out of love. We love because God loved us first. Because Grace once walked the streets of Jerusalem carrying a cross. Grace once died in a way none of us would choose to die. Grace rose on the third day, because that’s how God so loves the world.
The limitless grace that is Jesus does not give up. He does not give back the sin of the world. He takes it away - into death, into hell if necessary, so he can lead us to life. Then he continues on in faith - and with us along – towards resurrection. Amen.