Witness (Easter 2C, John 20:19-30; Revelation 1:4-8)

One of my seminary professors taught us—it might have been Anna Carter Florence—that preaching two lectionary passages in the same sermon is risky. First of all, the lectionary creators—bless their hearts—often create false correspondences.  That is, they group passages together for certain reasons, and those reasons are often not germane to the text.  The various books and passages of scripture were written by a diverse bunch, for various reasons, and—we were told—we should respect that as we preach.  Which sounds reasonable to me … there are a lot of things we impose on scripture—like capital letters, verse numbers, and in the Hebrew text, vowels.  So I took my professor’s words about preaching only one lectionary text at once to heart—I have a hard enough time figuring out what onepassage means every week, much less two . . . and all I can say is “thank God for the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.”

But as they say, rules are made to be broken, and I find myself talking about our two New Testament passages this morning: the one Phil read, from Revelation, and John’s story of Jesus’ first appearance to the disciples, there in the upper room.  And by doing so I’m breaking another of my own rules: never preach from Revelation, the reasons for which are too long to go into, but suffice it to say that it takes too much energy to explain why it’s nota prophecy of the end times, and that it almost certainlywasn’t the same John wrote it who wrote the Gospel. But maybe I ought to preach from it at least oncein a while, seeing as how it is, you know, part of the Bible.

So I grumblingly started looking at the Revelation passage, with plenty of time to spare—I think it was yesterday afternoon—and one part stood out, and it’s not what you think:  it’s not alpha or  omega, not the beginning orthe end, as famous as that line is.  Nor is it the vivid, strange imagery of we—his followers—as the kingdom of God ourselves.  No, it’s one word:  witness. Witness—that Janus-headed, double-meaninged word that is so important to Christians, both of that time and this time, although sometimes I wonder if it’s lost a bit of its luster lately.

Of course, it’s mightily misunderstood these days, at least popularly . . . I know everyone here understands perfectly what it means, but just in case, let me remind y’all that the Greek for witness is marturos which in English, of course, ismartyr.  And to us, this word—martyr—has almost entirely the connotation of death: specifically, death for a cause.  It’s entered large into our language: we say somebody has a martyr complex if they’re always emphasizing how long-suffering they are.  We say “don’t play the martyr with me” to our annoying acquaintances who persist in playing that game. I am proud to report that we Olsons are extremely good at it—I think my great-grandfather won a prize for it at the county fair.  “That’s ok,” he’d say “use me for a doormat.  That’s just my lot in life.”

But the thing is, in the New Testament, the noun marturoswithout fail is translated as “witness”—I know because I used my handy-dandy Bible software to do a word search.  Except for one instance where it is converted into its verbal meaning of “testify.”  And that brings up an important connotation of the word: it is legaljargon, as in a courtroom.  Of course, “witness” has that meaning today too, a witness in court testifies about something they have seen.  And the thing is, when someone is a witness to an event, when she testifies in court, it becomes a kind of truth, at least as far as the court is concerned. I swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me who?  So help me God.

So the noun witness—marturos—and it’s corresponding verb to witness or testify to has a very important role in the New Testament.  It implies truth,veracity, and the thing that caught my eye is that in this passage from Revelation reverses the natural order of things.  We usually think of ourselvesas witnesses to the Gospel, but here it’s Jesus who is the witness.  And this must have been a striking thing to the folks at the time this was written, close to the beginning of the second century C.E. Because the persecution of Christian witnesses, Christian martyrswas just hitting its bloody stride at about that time, and in fact that’s when the association of the word with sacrificial death began.

So the the hearers of this verse—the New Testament was written to be heard—would likely know very well the double meaning, and it would comfort them thinking that Jesus—like folks they knew, like perhaps even they themselves—had suffered for his faith.  But one thing that’s hard to figure out is just what it is that Christ is a witness to.  To what truth does he testify?  He is a faithfulwitness, we’re told, and Christ faithfully told the truth, faithfully testifiedby his actions . . . Christ himself is a witness, in himself a testimonyto that truth.   And to what truth does he testify?  He is firstborn of the dead, and ruler over all the kings of the earth . . . and so it is this that he witnesses to: the twin foundations of the kingdom of God.

And as Paul points out over in first Corinthians, the gospel to which he witnesses is captured in paradoxes.  He captures it perfectly when he says the wisdom of God is foolishness to the world; the world’s weakness is the strength of the Lord.  Here, John of Patmos captures it equally succinctly: he is firstborn of the dead . . . how can the dead be born?  Well, the firstJohn—the gospel-writing John—said we must be born from above.

The gospel is  that Christ has conquered death, he is the first-born of the dead, the first of the dead to be born from above, to be resurrected by God, and whether the powers and principalities know it or not—and they generally don’t—this first-born is the ruler of all other rulers. It is no longer they that rule the world, no longer the minions of death, but Jesus Christ, the first-born, or as Paul put it, the first fruitsof the resurrection, is ruler over all.  See?  The grave has lost its victory, and death has lost its sting!

The testimony of Jesus Christ, embedded in his life, death and resurrection—is that there is a new creation, and the rule of death is fading away, whether it looks like it or not, whether it feels like it or not.  And that kingdom of God, that just rule over all, is created in love, bought by Jesus’ martyrdom, and embodied in us. We have been made a kingdom, a protectorate, a state, because we are ruled over by God through God’s son Jesus Christ.  Further, we are priests to the God of Christ, or as John puts it “to his God and Father.”

This kingdom consists in part of our being priests to God . . . sounds Roman Catholic, doesn’t it? Or at leastEpiscopalian . . . but Paul again puts it in a more familiar way: we are the body of Christ, Christ embodied upon the earth.  And just as we are priests to god, stand-ins forGod, we are the embodiment of God’s son.

And in our secondpassage, the one from the gospel-writingJohn, we get a glimpse of how that is to work.  The disciples are fearful, huddled together in the upper room, in the candle-lit dark . . . they should have been jubilant,joyfulfor they have been told that Christ lives . . . that first witness, Mary Magdalene has seen the risen Christ and testified to them.  But they have not believed her testimony—there’s that word martyr again—and Jesus greets them as he has promised: peace I give to you, my peace I bring to you . . . not as the world gives, not as the powers and principalities, which give death, and war and destruction, but peace . . . his witness, his message, his testimony is a testimony of peace.

Peace be with you, he says.  As the Father has sent me, so I send you.  Christ is the faithful witness, the firstwitness, first-born of the dead, who was in the beginning with God. Christ is the eternal witness, and he bestows upon us through that witness the role of witness ourselves. As God has sent me, he says, so I send you.  The faithful witness, through his life and death and resurrection, through his faithfulness, has made us witnesses, made us martyrsto the truth as well.

But note well: it isn’t solely upon we as individuals that this is bestowed . . . Christ sends the group, the whole of them trembling in the upper room. Although there is only a second-person pronoun in English—you—for both a plural and singular, in Greek that is not the case.  And here, in the original Greek, he bestows witness-hood not upon individual disciples but upon the lot of them . . . in that upper room cowered the first church, and that’s whom he sends.

That’s one example—there are others!—of the superiority of the Southern version of English.  In the South we have a second-person plural, and that’s what Christ passes on his witness-hood to.  As the father sent me, he says, so I send y’all, as a group.  If y’all—if you the church—forgives the sins of any, they are forgiven them.  If y’all retain the sins of any, they are retained. We, the body of Christ, the church are his faithful witness on earth.  Just as Jesus was the faithful witness to God, the church—this body in this room, this body of all Christians in Cincinnati, in Ohio, in the world,is that witness as well.  Because the human named Jesus is no longer on earth—though he has left us the holy spirit, the advocate, the Spirit of truth, breathed into the mouths of the church there in the upper room—but because the physicalJesus is no longer on this earth, the Church is now the witness, we are now the kingdom of God on earth.

Sermons for me are often difficult to end, without a resorting to a pious platitude or two . . . sometimes I do that anyway, when I can’t come up with anything better.  And in this case, the standard thing would be to end by saying something like Brothers and Sisters, how good a witness is Greenhills Community Church, Presbyterian?  How faithful isit to the call of that firstfaithful witness, Jesus of Nazareth, who in this Easter season has been crucified, died and resurrected as the Christ?  If somebody from the outside were to look in on us, what kind of witness would they see?  Would they see a typical U.S. congregation, accommodated to our acquisitive lifestyle and nature, a reflection of the world’s values with a thin overlay of Jesus? Or would see committed witnesses, in both senses of the original Greek?  Would they see a congregation committed to Jesus’ ministry of sacrifice and service, and, in a word, peace?

What kind of witness is this congregation?  If this were a typical sermon on witness, I’d end by asking that, but in our case, in the case of Greenhills Community Church, Presbyterian, I don’t have to.  Because I think all of us know the answer.  Amen.

Dawn (Luke 24:1-12)

Dawn was still a ways off when the women set out . . . Luke doesn’t tell us who they are, until the end . . . In Matthew, it’s Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James, in Mark it’s Mary and Mary and Salome, and over in John, it’s Mary Magdalene alone. Here in Luke, it’s Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and “the other women with them,” women who had been witnesses to the crucifixion, who’d stayed with Jesus and seen the tomb and how his body had been laid. Note the conspicuous lack of male disciples in the mix . . .

After the women had seen and done all that, after they’d faithfully follow Jesus to the end, they’d gone out and bought and prepared the spices required to anoint the dead. It’s not something they wanted to do, they were still grieving the loss of their beloved, and wanted nothing more than to hole up with their sorrow. In addition, the whole purpose was to disguise the stench of decay, but by Sunday morning—they couldn’t do it on the Sabbath, which began at sundown—by Sunday morning, that ship would have sailed, so it wouldn’t be a pleasant thing to do. And because it was Mary Magdalene, among others, who did the job, it helped fuel centuries of speculation about the relationship of Jesus and Mary Magdalen because, you see, normally it was the task of the wife to anoint the dead.

Be that as it may, sometime before dawn on the first day of the week, the women creep through the Jerusalem streets . . . they’d left as soon as they could see to walk, as soon as they could make out shapes in the gloom. Occasionally, they pass houses flickering with light and movement, as shopkeepers and artisans prepare for their day’s work . . . dogs yip out their morning greetings and warnings as they pass, cocks crow in anticipation of the sun, and a fine mist swirls around their feet. It isn’t far to Joseph of Arimathea’s garden tomb, where they’d laid him, but the women take it slowly, gliding through town, in no hurry to do their distasteful deed.

And as they go, they wonder how they’re going to move the huge stone disk away from the tomb’s mouth. Will there be grave-tenders about this early, or would they be forced to wait till later in the day to attend to their task? The dawn is breaking as they reach the tomb, the sun’s already beginning to heat up the air. Imagine the relief when they see the stone already rolled away, relief and confusion that this should be so, confusion that only increases when they see that the tomb is empty . . . And they stand around worrying . . . did bandits carry off the body of their beloved? Worse, had it been it a pack of the feral dogsthat haunt the countryside? Not once do they consider a third explanation, that he’d been risen from the dead . . . as good Jewish women, the thought doesn’t even cross their minds.

Tears spring up in their eyes, and they turn to go, when behold! Two young men in dazzling white are there before them, and the women throw themselves trembling on the floor of the tomb . . . and are these the same guys who would appear at Jesus’ ascension? When he returns to the side of God? Hard to know for sure, but they dosay something similar: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” And they remind them of what they already should know: that he’d told them he must be arrested, crucified and raised again.

But the way it’s phrased is more than a reminder. For one thing, it’s not a question,it’s not “Remember what he said to you?” It’s “Rememberwhat he saidto you.” In other words, they’re toldto remember, commandedto do it. And another thing and the Greek word we translate here as “remember” implies more than just the retrieval of a memory. It implies bringing past actions to bear on the present, resulting in new power and insight. The same word appears in Mary’s Magnificat with reference to God helping Israel “in remembrance of God’s mercy,” and in the crucified thief’s plea, “Jesus, remember me.” It’s a tangible, consequential form of remembrance, a kind of remembering that is also a kind of action. The women at the tomb are told to bring to recollection what Jesus had told them, and then let that combineor interactwith what they are witnessing. It carries the force of both an epiphany anda commission: they remember his words, they take stock of them and, in light of what they experience at the tomb, they return from there and tell all this to the eleven and to the rest. The past recollection colors what they experience, and together they form what they do in the future.

That’skindof how it’s supposed to work for everyone, isn’t it? What we’ve been told in the past impingesupon the present, it informsour view of what’s going on, and then interactswith our present experience to determine a course of action. Like the women, we’re to remember what we’ve been told, especially with regards to how we are supposed to live as children of God. And what we’ve been toldcomes from a variety of sources, doesn’t it? It comes from Scripture, from the combined wisdom of fellow believers who were on the ground floor, so to speak, who were thereor close tothe seminal events of our faith. And there are other sources . . . there are the accumulated teaching of the church. The written wisdom of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. The livedwisdom of ordinary Christians, distilled and passed down in written and oral form. All of this is what Christians have been told.

But as the Greek word implies, there is anothercrucial ingredient: our own, lived experience. We can’t take any of these sources in isolation, including scripture, despite Luther’s famous dictum sola scriptura.Even thatwas a remembrance, in this passage’s sense: Luther took what he’d been told, the holy scripture, and let it inform what he’d experienced as excesses of the church, and voilá:ninety-five theses, nailed to a church door. We Presbyterians have even codified the command as “Reformed and always being reformed by the Word of God.” In practice, this has meant that the church is always to be reformed by what it has been told—aka the Word of God in all its forms. Including, of course, the Word as expressed in science, history, the arts . . . all influenced by the church’s present experience, what it sees and feels in the world.

Well. The women remember Christ’s words to them, there on that first Easter morn, they experiencethe empty tomb, and they are driven to action: they return from the tomb and tell the eleven—cowering somewhere in fear of the authorities—about what they had experienced. And they scoffed and laughed at them, and refused to believe them, because were they not women? And were not women subject to hysteria, to anxious thoughts and deed? And besides, even though all of them had heardJesus’ words—that he’d be handed over to be crucified, and on the third day rise again—none of them had experiencedthem. None of them had seen the empty tomb, none of them had talk to the shining men.

But now Peter—who embodies both the best and the worst in the apostles, both you-are-the-Messiah faith and deny-three-times doubt—Peter gets up and runs—runs!—to the tomb, sees the grave-clothes by themselves, and goes home amazed. And does he also believe? I think so. I think that like the women earlier, he has remembered what Jesus had said: he’s recalled the words and experienced the reality of the empty tomb, and it has sent him flying home in amazement.

Brothers and sisters, we are Peter . . . Peter who expresses doubt and who also expresses great faith. And like Peter, we do not really believe, do we not really knowuntil we’ve experienced the empty tomb. I know, I know . . . despite what the song says, we were notthere at the empty tomb, any more than we were physicallythere when they crucified my Lord. And yet, just as we crucify him by our doubt, by our stubborn refusal to give our lives as totally as he gave his, we experience the empty tomb, we experience the resurrection, every day of our lives? Is it not there in the Spring, as life arises anew after the barrenness of winter? Is it not there as despair is turned into fragile, unlooked for hope? Is it not there as sorrow is resurrected into joy?

Friends, resurrection is all around us, in the overwhelming good that’s in our world, in the life that is everyday snatched from death’s bony grip. That’s what the resurrection represents, isn’t it? It’s what we, like the women at the tomb, are commanded to remember. The ultimate banishment of darkness, the ultimate realization of Pau’s cry: Death, where is thy sting, grave where is thy victory. And it’s all summed up by one phrase: He is risen; he is risen indeed. Amen.

I Love a Parade (Palm Sunday; Luke 19:24-40)

Pontius Pilate, governor of Judea, staggered out of his tent into the cold dawn. It was the Sunday before Passover, and the second day in a row that he’d been up with the sun, and he didn’t like it one little bit. It made him irritable—more than usual, anyway—and he snapped at the attendant who was trying to hold his horse still so he could mount. It was a big brute, 16 hands tall, and pure white—a fitting mount for such a powerful man. Of course, he would have preferred to ride in a cart, or a palanquin carried by slaves, sheltered from the fierce sun, but one must keep up appearances, one must put on a show of power for the peasants along the way.

Pilate had left his villa at the shiny new city on the Mediterranean a couple of days before, and that didn’t help his mood any. Caesarea Maritima—Caesarea by the Sea—was all carved, Corinthian marble; his villa was lavishly appointed and almost obscenely comfortable, as befitted the biggest fish in that small Palestinian pond. And Pilate hated to leave it behind, especially since his destination was that poxy, backwater town called Jerusalem, home of a people so backwards they only worshiped one god. But it had to be done, Pilate had to go to that pestilent place, because it was Passover week, and the locals—always unfriendly—could get downright belligerentat festival time. Many was the time anti-government violence had sprung up during those times, and Passover—the celebration of Jewish delivery from an earlierset of oppressors—could be one of the roughest.

So it was the custom of the Romans to beef up their presence in Jerusalem at Passover, to make an imperial show—one reason for the column of imperial cavalry and soldiers that rode along—and that meant that the governor himself needed to be there, along with all his assorted courtiers and toadies, and didn’t they make a grand sight, livery jangling, pennants snapping in the sun, impassive faces of the troops . . . it said to all they passed: “You can’t stand in the face of the glorious might of the Roman Empire.”

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of town, the east side, another procession was getting underway. The star of thatparade was an itinerant Jewish teacher named Jesus, who was a powerful preacher and a compassionate crusader for social justice and—in the eyes of the Jewish religious establishment, at least—a dangerous subversive. He’d been running around Palestine, preaching about the kingdom of God which, to hear him tell it, was a place where all were welcome, nobody was hungry, and, best of all, nobody oppressed anybody. A place where the first were last and the last first, where God's good gifts were not amassed by a minority of wealthy landowners in their cities and palaces and villas. A place, in short, the exact opposite of the Roman Empire, and—critically—the exact opposite of the scribes and priests of the Temple hierarchy who, through creative interpretation of Hebrew law, were able to become wealthy landowners themselves.

So it’s appropriate that this secondprocession came from exactly the oppositeside of town as Pilate’s. It’s staging area was the Mount of Olives, across the Kidron Valley from the city, and Jesus—born in the nothing town of Nazareth and definitely notof the ruling class—gathered his followers and laid out the plan: “Go into that village over there, and you’ll find a colt—a young donkey, to be exact—tied there that’s never been ridden.” And how did he know it would be there? I have no idea. Maybe he sent somebody ahead and planted it, maybe he “saw” it with that otherworldly insight he seemed to possess. However it happened, it’s clear that Jesus planned it, and what’s more, he planned it with prophecy in mind: listen to this passage from the Old Testament prophet Zechariah: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” It’s clear from all the stage-management that he wants both his disciples and Jerusalem onlookers to see the fulfillment of that prophecy.

And if he isthe symbol of that prophecy, if he is indeedthe humble king riding on a donkey, what kind of monarch would he be? The rest of the Zechariah passage tellsus: “He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations.” This king, riding on a donkey, will banish war from the land—no more chariots, war-horses, or bows. He will be command peace to the nations; in fact, he will be a kingof peace. Not exactly the play-book of the Roman Emperor. 

And did Jesus plan hisentry into the city to coincide with that of Pilate? Biblical scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan think so—in their book The Last Week,they write that it was a “prearranged ‘counter-procession,’” designed in deliberate contrast to the one on the other side of town. Whatever the case, it certainly did the trick: Jesus’s procession proclaimed the kingdom of God; Pilate’s proclaimed the power of empire. The two processions embodied the central conflict of the week that led to Jesus’s crucifixion.

You often hear this dichotomy referred to as the “ways of the world” versus the “ways of the kingdom,” but I think that’s didactic and over-simplified. It’s dualistic, and displays one of the major problems with that kind of thinking: it encourages us in the impression that the world is “evil” and the kingdom “good.” Paul’s habit of referring to it as the “ways of the flesh” versus the “ways of the Spirit” doesn’t help—a lot of folks read “flesh” as “sex,” and it gets conflated with the human body, once again encourages us to think that the body is inferior and sinful as opposed to some spirit that is pure and separate from the flesh. Dualism at its finest, pf course: God made the world and all that is in it and how can it be bad? As the old saying goes, “God don’t make no trash,” and I believe that to be true.

What Pilate’s procession symbolized—and what Jesus’ countered—was not “the world” or humanity or even Pilate himself. It was what social scientists call a “domination system” and Paul—who knew all about such things—called the “powers and principalities.” Borg and Crossan write that a domination system is the most common form of social system and is marked by three major features: first, political oppression, where the many are ruled by the few, the powerful and wealthy elites. The second characteristic is economic exploitation, where a high percentage of the society’s wealth goes into the coffers of the wealthy and powerful. The third characteristic is religious legitimation—the systems are justified with religious language. The rulers are there by divine right, because God ordains it, and the social system or order is the will of God.

In Jerusalem, you actually got two domination systems in one: the local one, legitimized by the religious establishment and ruled by wealthy landowners—some of whom were the religious authorities themselves—and the Roman one, with the emperor—Tiberius, at the moment—as the divinely-ordained ruler. And Tiberius was sodivinely ordained that he was called Son of God—God, of course, being his predecessor, Caesar Augustus.

And so that’s what Jesus and Pilate rode into on that fine spring day, one in a procession that was the embodimentof the domination system, and one in a procession that was almost a parodyof it. I mean, pictureit in your mind: here’s Jesus, on an untrained donkey—though the word colt can mean either a young horse or a young donkey, Mark makes it clear it was a donkey—here he is on an untrained donkey, probably shying away from the onlookers . . . cloaks being thrown in front of it would have sent it over the edge—here he is, on an young animal that was all over the road, his feet practically dragging the ground, and his disciples—notice that Luke doesn’tsay the crowds—his disciples,were hollering and carrying on: “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!”

And so the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, so often portrayed as a triumphal entry, can be viewed in an entirely different way: his followers shouting “Blessed is the king” and that kingon a runaway donkey, feet dragging the ground, looking about as much like an earthly monarch as Ido. Which, as y’all know, is not very much. And Jesus’ appearanceis contrapuntal to the message of his followers—and could that have been the point?—and especiallyso to what was happening on the other side of town, where the very kingly Pilate was riding in on a very kingly horse.

And so you can see that it was a very political scene on that first Palm Sunday, it couldn’t helpbut be that. But one of the marvelous things about 

Scripture is that it works on so many levels. And of course, one of those levels theological one, and it’s the same point PauI would make twenty-some-odd years later: the wisdom of God is foolishnessto the powers that be. What Jesus was s doingthat day was demonstrating that principle in graphic, no-uncertain-terms, that the last will be first and the first last, and he was playing the last and you-know-who across town was playing the first.

And at the start of Holy Week, the time we observe the passion of Christ—his trial, degradation and crucifixion—it’s good to remember that this is only the beginning of Jesus’ demonstration of that theological fact. On Maundy Thursday, at the last Supper, he washes the disciples’ feet like slave, like the servant that he was, and on Friday, which Christians call “good” he is nailed to a tree in the ultimate demonstration, the ultimate statement of God’s true nature. Amen.

Farewell, My Beloved (John 12:1-8; Lent 5C)

It was the magic hour . . . the light had that lambent, red-gold cast that photographers cherish, light that washes everything in a soft, numinous radiance. Gathered in the courtyard for supper, the family—Mary, Martha and Lazarus—and extended family—Jesus and some of his disciples—felt bathed in a warm glow as they celebrated the return of their patriarch. For his part, Lazarus was bemused, even a bit befuddled, if you want to know the truth; it wasn’t every day that one returned from the dead. Talk about your near-death experience . . . Lazarus’ went on for four days,not just a few minutes on some doctor’s operating table. That kind of thing will take the wind out of your sales, let me tell you.What was it likefor the resurrected man? Where did he gofor those four days? Or was he just . . . dead? Absent? Nowhere?

As for Jesus, he was with the ones he loves . . . Mary and Martha and Lazarus were like family to him . . . maybe more than his biologicalone; after all, wasn’t it them he refused to see? Wasn’t it about them that he said “my familyare thos4 who do the will of God?” Like a lot of his hometown friends, his biological kin hadn’t known exactly what to do with him when he visited Nazareth. They weren’t sure who he was anymore, he’d seemedlike their son and brother Jesus, but at the same time . . . different. But here, with this family, he could let down his hair, be who he was, which even the Son of Man needed now and again.

And in the luminous evening, perhaps after a glass or two of wine, they began to remember the past, to reminisce about Jesus’ remarkable ministry, of which Martha and Mary and Lazarus had shared such a big part. They chuckled over Martha’s fussiness, her indignation when Mary had sat before the master ad learned while she did all the work. They shared songs of thanksgiving as they recalled Jesus’ resurrection of Lazarus, and poked gentle fun at the resurrect-ee as he looked benignly on.

Only Mary felt the shadow that hung over them. Perhaps it was a premonition of things to come, a fore-shadowing of anothersupper, just days from then, that would be called his last. Or maybe the report that the Sanhedrin had ordered his arrest had filtered out to Bethany, just a couple of miles east of the city. Suddenly, she brought out a pound of perfume, made of pure nard, and weeping openly, poured it over her friend’s feet, and then wiped it his feet with her long, dark hair. And this is a shockingly intimate act, even more so than it would be today, and there was a stunned silence, and it felt like all the air had been sucked from the room, only to come rushing back as Mary shook out her hair and the house was filled with the fragrance of perfume.

And I’m not sure if the onlookers—Martha and Lazarus and the disciples present—were more shocked at the intimacy or the fact that she anointed his feet.His head, they could’ve understood. After all, that was where you anointed kings, conquerers, those who—like Jesus—were in the royal Davidic line. But thefeet?Who anointed feet,at least those of the living . . .And I don’t know about Martha and Lazarus, but the disciples had all heard Jesus tell them—three times,already—that he was going to be arrested and killed. But only Mary seemed to know it what it all meant, whether she was aware of it or not, heractions at thissupper foreshadowed Jesusactions at that finalsupper, when hewould wash the disciples feet, thus pointing to how to the Christian life.

And notice that she doesn’t say a thing: her actions speak louder than words. She’s demonstratingthe gospel, there’s no needfor words. But not so Judas . . . besides Jesus himself, he’s the only one who speaks in this episode. And what he says seems, on the surface at least, to make a lot of sense: “Why,” he says, “was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” And three hundred denarii is an humongousamount, a full year’s wages, and you could peach a whole sermonon this one line, and many have . . . it symbolizes a balance that modern churches are always trying to strike: how much of God’s resources do you expend doing work in the world—arguably the main reason we’re here—as opposed to gussying up the building, making glorious worship, and saving for a rainy day? The question is often framed as looking outward, into the needs of the community, and what we can do to fulfill them, versus looking inward, into our own survival, into taking care of our ownneeds. And pastors like me spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make inward-looking congregations look outward, but in realty, it’s a balance, ‘cause if a congregation doesn’t exist, how can it do any good?

Of course, in our passage, John the Gospel-writer stacks the deck by claiming that Judas was a thief, and that if the common purse was fatter, there would be more for him to steal. And of course, this is more foreshadowing of Judas’ more dastardly deed, which in six more days would lurch into motion. But Jesus himself seems to come down on the side of worship, delivering a punch line that has befuddled interpreters for a long time: “Leave her alone. She bought tins that she might keep it for the day of my burial.” And we’re so used to that line-or maybe it’s been so overshadowed by the nextone—that we often overlook the strangeness of this statement . . . if she kept it for the day of his burial, why did she use it then?He surely wasn’t being buried at that moment . . . there he was right in front of them, alive and kicking. Was it a fault in the transmission of the story? After all, John wrote this down at least a half-century after the fact, and who knows what happened to it in all that time . . . anybody who’s played the popular party game where something is whispered in an ear, and then around a circle, knows how oral transmission can change what was originally said.

A more intriguing possibility is that Jesus perceived time in a fundamentally different manner from us. Or to be more accurate, he perceives time as it really is, aka an illusioncreated by our finite consciousness. In a recent interview for Krista Tippet’s “On Being” radio program, Rabbi Lawrence Kushner claimed that God experiences time as all of a piece: everything at once, past, presence and future. Indeed, when Christian and Eastern mystics come to enlightenment, they experience much the same thing, and of course, in his work on relativity, Albert Einstein showed that linear time isan illusion, that everything that ever happened and ever will happen is happening right “now.”

And so Jesus, seeing “naked” reality, reality not filtered through un-enlightened consciousness, recognizes what is really going on with Mary: she has perceived reality just a little bit, she has become enlightened, converted, she has come to a higher perception, if only of a limited nature. She realizes, if only on a subconscious level, what the others do not: Jesus’ death is bound up in the present moment, it is there in the workings and mechanisms of the powers that be, that his death was present for them in that moment, just as it is in every moment.

And what set her apart, what made this higher knowledge, this intuition, as we might call it, possible? Well, I believe it was one thing: her overwhelming love for and acceptance of Jesus Christ. Love. Relationship.The connective tissue of the universe. Love . . . the very identity of God’s own self, of which Jesus himself was the image, wrought in human form. Jesus’ death and burial is the eternaldeath and burial, the death and burial of us all, for is not Christ inus all?

Well. That kind of metaphysical gymnastics makes Jesus’ final statement almost easy: “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” And incredibly, some people, even given Jesus’ whole lifeof feeding and healing the poor, some nevertheless use this one line, taken out of context to justify nothelping the poor. Jesus said there’ll always be poor, and if Jesus said it, it must be true, so there’s really no reason to bust our britches helping them, is there? Besides, if we convert ‘em they’ll go to heaven anyway,so better to do thatthan feed them . . .

But some scholars think that Jesus was quoting Deuteronomy 15:11, which commands Israel to “open your hand to the poor,” because “there will never cease to be some in need.” Which, of course, is the exact opposite from that most cynical of readings. Then again, I notice that unlike Deuteronomy, Jesus uses the present tense. Instead of “you willalways have the poor” he says “you always have the poor.” Is it more of that cosmic timelessness that seems be/to have been/will be about the Christ?

One thing is certain: there is always inequity, there is always sin, there are always systems that oppress the many for the benefit of the few, but we do not always have Jesus’ physical presence. We do not have his example showing us what to do, how to live, how to love . . . and that’s what Mary understood, and what she demonstrated in that one, selfless act of devotion. You can do all the left-brain acrobatics you want, all the analysis of the Greek and clever interpretation you want, but in the end it come down to relationship, in comes down to love.

John doesn’t tell us what went down that night after the anointing, after Jesus’ rebuke of Judas. He doessay that people came to see Lazarus because he’d been resurrected, and so the authorities planned to kill himtoo, busy beavers that they were. For John, the point of the story were Mary’s actions, Judas’ response, and Jesus’ response to that. But I imagine that Jesus folds a weeping Mary into his arms, kisses the top of her head, and the dinner party continues on into the deepening evening, with Judas perhaps chastened, perhaps convinced more than ever to bring the whole thing down.

And there’s a lot of theology to say about what was done and said, a lot hasbeen said over the millennia, but to me what’s important is the scene, the symbols, the tableau. A community—a family, really—gathered around the table, a safe space in the ever-growing darkness. And holding it all together, making it all possible, is the presence of the Christ which, though no longer in bodily form, is still with us, he in us and we in him. Amen.