Here’s a riddle: how is a table like a
well? Answer: in the Bible, at least,
lots of things happen around them. Biblical
romances develop around wells: Moses meets his Midianite daughter at one, and
Jacob first catches a glimpse of the hard-to-get Rachel as she waters the
livestock. And in John’s gospel, this
romantic undertone plays beneath Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the
well. And as we saw last week, table
fellowship is very important -- it figures at some level into many of the gospel
stories. Over in Matthew, Jesus eats
with assorted sinners, folks who were considered to be outside the pale, who
were considered unclean. In Luke, the
king invites all the riff-raff from the highways and hedges in to eat at his
wedding banquet with him, thus admitting of the hilarious possibility that the
all the homeless and road-crazies, all the blind-beggars and widowed orphans,
would be rubbing shoulders with the Kim Kardashians of the day. I like to imagine the dialog . . . Kim,
turning to the dirty fellow scratching an open sore on her right: “that new
chef at ‘Metropole’ is marvelous: his rack of lamb just melts in your
mouth.” To which the dirty fellow scratching
an open sore replies: “Uh, yesterday, the bread in the dumpster out back was
only 3-days-old . . .”
Anyway, over in John, the table imagery is
less specific, less in your face, but it’s there nevertheless . . . the wedding
in Cana, where Jesus turns the water into wine, the feeding of the five
thousand, where the people are told to recline, as if they were at table, and
of course the last third of the book, most of which occurs at the Passover
table. And I think this scene around
Mary and Martha’s table should be viewed in that light . . . the significance
of the table should not be ignored in this scene . . . it’s a foreshadowing of
the last supper – where in a stunning turnabout, Jesus will anoint the disciples’
feet – and the upper room, where the resurrected Jesus will eat and drink once
again, and the great Messianic banquet that we ourselves foreshadow at our communion table.
So let’s try to picture the scene around
Mary and Martha’s table . . . who’s there?
Well, we know that Lazarus is there, don’t we . . . as a matter of fact,
this comes right after the scene where he’s raised from the dead, and all the
people were murmuring about it, they were wondering about it, they were being converted over it, or so John tells us,
and it was making the religious authorities real nervous, and John is very
careful to emphasize the fact that he’s there, he mentions it twice . . . and so maybe we should ask
ourselves what Lazarus represents in our little tableau . . . death is the
ultimate unclean, and here Jesus is eating with someone who until recently was
very dead, four days dead, as a matter of fact . . . and Lazarus’ death and
resurrection clearly prefigures Jesus’ own, so we’re clued in to a central
theme right at the outset . . . this episode is about Jesus’ upcoming
crucifixion, just seven days away.
And if there is any doubt, here comes Mary
with a whole pound of perfume made out of pure nard, and the smell of it
saturates the room, so that it overcomes even the heavy Middle-Eastern cooking,
and the scent reminds each disciple there of the best times they’ve ever had,
times when they’d snuggle up to their own mothers as children and smell her
rough-soaped hair, or the exotic caravan women with their black-kohled eyes and
sinuous glide, passing on the road to Egypt . . . it was a wildly feminine
scent, an extravagantly female aroma, and Mary takes the perfume and kneels with
graceful flow at Jesus’ feet and begins to massage in the perfume, and the
scene is both incredibly intimate, as she wipes them with her own hair, and
overtly symbolic, as she clearly anoints him for his burial.
And why is she anointing him now? Why is she anointing him when his
death is still a week away? Could it be
that this is one more symbol in this over-packed scene? Could it be that we – who know about the
empty tomb – are supposed to recognize what she apparently gets implicitly, in
her heart? That somehow, in some way,
Christ won’t be around for her to anoint when they go to the tomb?
And just who is this Mary, anyway? We see
her at least two other times, in the episode just before this, when she mourns
her brother’s death, and over in Luke, where she sits at Jesus’ feet while
Martha bustles around the house, getting more and more annoyed. There, as well as here, she seems to be the
only one who gets the true nature of Jesus’ mission.
Well. We’ve talked about Lazarus – symbol of death,
symbol of resurrection, symbol of unclean made clean – and we’ve talked about
Mary, but there’s another person here besides Jesus, and that’s Judas. And when John introduces him here, he does so
with an editorial comment: Judas Iscariot, he says, was “the one who was about
to betray him,” and by pointing it out John makes sure we understand who this
is, but it also has the effect of cutting
off further consideration in the scene . . . we immediately dismiss him as The
One Who Betrayed Jesus in big capital letters, and will believe anything . . .
of course he steals from widows and
orphans, he’s The One Who Betrayed Jesus, it’s expected . . .
But in this episode Judas is more than
that, in this episode he fulfills the same role as Peter in so many others, the
role of symbol, of stand-in, of exemplar
of something larger than the sin of just one human being. Mary
gets what this scene is trying to foreshadow . . . she gets it that Jesus – far
from leading them in a glorious re-establishment of the Davidic throne, far
from being a great revolutionary leader in the manner of Che Guevara or Mao Tse
Tsung – she gets it that Jesus was going to die on a cross just about a week
from that time.
Judas . . . doesn’t. He doesn’t
understand . . . and here, maybe, is the crux of the matter, the crux of the difference between him and Mary . . .
she treats him with royal respect, treats him like a king while still acknowledging that he is going to die. Her anointing of him carries the dual
significance of royalty – kings were
anointed with pure nard – and death. She
treats him as one who is already dead, but
who is king nevertheless. And that’s the opposite of what the disciples
thought – including and perhaps especially
a certain one named Judas Iscariot. Like
the rest of the world, like their society at large, Judas believed that might
makes right, that it took the strong
to survive. To the world – and was it so
to Judas as well? – a dying Messiah was a walking oxymoron . . . Messiahs
didn’t die, they led glorious re-takings, glorious revolutions. The world had no use – and it still has no use – for a leader that
gets spiked to a tree. That’s the
foolishness that is the cross, as Paul would memorably come to say.
In the film The Last Temptation of Christ, Judas is pictured as a fiery,
red-headed zealot, who grows weary – and wary
– of Jesus’ preaching of peace, of his insistence on not resisting his march toward crucifixion . . . and is this why Judas betrays him? In the film, it's Judas the zealot who
perhaps loves him best, piles all his hopes upon him, and like other spurned
lovers in literature, reacts violently when the object of his adoration turns
out to be other than he supposes . . . Is this what drives Judas to betray him?
When Jesus doesn’t fulfill his role as rabble-rousing revolutionary, does he
get him done in?
Regardless . . . this story is essentially
about two ways of looking, two ways of being,
and it illustrates them by contrasting Mary – who understands that Jesus’
true glory, his true king-ship lies
in his death – and Judas, who doesn’t.
One way, John is saying, belongs to the world, to the powers that be,
the other, is the way of the believer, the way of the true follower of
Christ. The true follower of Christ
knows that Jesus’ royalty, his glorification lies precisely in his death, and
will acknowledge, will anoint him
king in that dying. Mary’s anointing of
Jesus is acknowledgement of that, it is a symbol of her conversion, her belief
that it is the way of humility, the way of service
that signals genuine faith.
You will always have the poor to serve,
Jesus says, and by this he isn’t resigning himself to that fact, or giving us
permission to ignoring them . . . to believe that you have to ignore all the rest of his teachings, by both word and
deed, in which he fed and housed and healed the least of these who walked on
earth. What Jesus means by this is that
you can serve the poor anytime, don’t let me stop you, be my guest, but you
will not always have me around to anoint.
But I think it goes deeper than that . . . if Mary’s anointing constitutes true
belief, if it symbolizes her conversion to genuine faith, then perhaps Jesus is
linking true service of the poor to the anointing of the crucified Christ in
our hearts, that unless we too understand, like Mary, that true power lies in
humility, that Christ’s kingship lies
in pouring out his life for us, just as Mary poured out that expensive nard,
our service of the poor will end in scandal and ineffectualness, like it did
for Judas. True service is grounded in a
self-emptying love, not the other way around.
And that’s the way in for us in this
passage, the way to see ourselves here, to apply it to us today . . . it’s the notion
that Judas is somehow representative of – and a symbol of – the other
disciples, who mirror the world’s inability to understand the true nature of
the gospel – that true power, God’s power,
lies in Jesus’ oft-repeated phrase that the last shall be first and the first
last, in the Apostle Paul’s insistence that the power of God is weakness to the
world.
And speaking of Paul, in his beautiful
Christ hymn, he characterizes what Christ does as kenosis, as self-emptying: emptying himself of all he is, his God-hood
and taking the form of a human, even until death on a cross. And we shouldn't miss the parallel as Mary
does the same thing, extravagantly emptying herself by pouring the fabulously expensive
perfume all over the body of her beloved.
Judas didn't understand the significance of that any more than he understood when Jesus did it a week later.
The upshot of it is that Judas feathered
his own nest at the expense of the poor – John spells it out, to be sure we get it – and that hasn’t changed
much since his time, has it? All the wealth of Western society is built on
the backs of the poor, who produce our goods and services at less-than-living
wages so they remain cheap and affordable.
We trickle help down to them in dribs and drabs, in food banks and
ever-cut social-welfare budgets . . . wouldn’t want to cut the national security budgets, gotta get the money
from somewhere, and the poor don’t
have a lot of lobbying power . . . and so we give ‘em a little palliative help,
just to keep ‘em happy, throw ‘em a little welfare bone . . . western society
feeds off the poor every bit as much as Judas did, because Western society
believes just as he did, that those
with the most stuff, the most power, the most money, win.
But you know what? Even though it obscures our view of Judas,
even though it over-simplifies this undoubtedly complex man, John’s insistence
on rubbing in the obvious, on pointing out the fact very clearly that Judas was the one who crucified Christ, serves a
purpose. We know what Judas’ beliefs got him, don’t we? We know that he died, some say he hung
himself, some say he fell into a hole and burst his stomach, but the fact of the matter is that he was wrong, wasn’t he? The way to happiness doesn’t proceed from power, it doesn’t proceed from money, from
climbing the old social or political or monetary ladder . . . what proceeds
from all of that is death . . . the way to life is the tougher way, the more narrow way, the way of Mary, the way of self-emptying,
where you will lose your life to save it, paradoxically enough, the way to life
is through death. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment