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.
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