Fifth Sunday in Lent (2007):" The Anointing at Bethany"

Fifth Sunday in Lent (2007): "The Anointing at Bethany"
Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3:4b-14; John 12:1-8
Preached by Jane Barter Moulaison on March 25th, 2007

I am very blessed this morning because I get to preach on one of my favourite texts in the entirety of the Bible--the anointing of Bethany.

I was trying to think of why it one of my favourite texts, and I was struck by three things that I would like to explore in some detail this morning: these are beauty, love and politics. Now these do not always go together all that well. The closest we get in our current climate is the ill-fated love of Belinda Stronach and Peter McKay, but I am speaking of a different kind of beauty; different kind of love, and supremely, a different kind of politics.

One is the role of beauty in the Church.

This passage is about beauty—it is about earthy sensuality. Jesus has come to the home of his friends, and his friends have prepared a great meal. He has come to the house of his sister, Mary, and she washes and anoints his feet, using the most precious and extravagant oils, and dries her feet with her own hair.

It is an act of generosity. It is an act of sensuality. It is an act of deep devotion and love. And if the love seems to be of an erotic kind, then this is no accident. Even Saint Augustine in his Homily on John, a saint who is generally and wrongly remembered as being anti-sex, sees a parallel running through this story with the lovers in the Song of Songs. Augustine links the perfume that fills the entire house with that great image in the Song of the Beloved’s longing declaration: “Thy name is as ointment poured forth.” Christ, to Mary, is also the ointment, the one who offers her healing and completion.

And this is why beauty is so important to the church, although we often forget this to be true. Beauty reminds us that the things of the world are intrinsically good. That God created the world and created us for his pure delight. Not so that we could learn a lesson; not so we could make the world better. But God created us for delight, for Beauty.

Surely Mary’s act of grace and beauty is in keeping with God’s own creative action.

Yet, there is something unsettling for us when we hear Jesus’ and Judas’ exchange over Mary’s gift. The oil, we are told, costs three hundred denarii, which would have been nearly a year’s wages for a labourer in Jesus’ time.

I must admit that when I was younger I used to find Jesus’ quip, “You always have the poor with you,” a bit offensive. Is Jesus commending complacency in fighting poverty? Surely not. There are two things worth noting in this passage. One is that Jesus is speaking to Judas, who cares not a whit about the poor, who keeps the common purse and hoards away money for himself. The second is the most important part of this passage, and that is “you will not always have me.” Everything in this passage must be read in the light of Jesus saying this. As he predicts his imminent death, Jesus reminds his disciples of the special urgency of this time. There is no more time for worrying about the costs of our discipleship and devotion--Christ’s time has come. There is no need for a calculating of costs and a strategizing over effective action—Christ is about to be put to death. This now becomes the centre of our attention and focus.

And I think this passage has something to teach us today about beauty and goodness. If our efforts to do the right thing with our resources do not praise God, if they are not characterized by Beauty, then they fail to be truly Good. It is only when we place Christ, the Beloved, at the Centre that we know what goodness and beauty are. Yet, we in the modern Church, have been afraid of beauty. We have measured the value of a thing only by its utility. And so, we become nervous about art and about adornment, because they do not serve a purpose. We pride ourselves on being practical. But sometimes our practicality can be a sign that we think it our responsibility to save the world. Beauty helps to remind us that the world as God created it is good and worthy of enjoyment for its own sake. Like Mary, our task is not to shape the world to our own will, but it is to respond generously to God’s action and God’s being. Our job, as Christians, is simply to rejoice in God! And such praise, as the musicians in this congregation will surely tell us, is the greatest source of beauty that the world has known.

A second thing to note about this passage has to do with the nature of love in discipleship.

In Jesus’ time, washing of the feet took place upon entering a house. Feet were usually dusty and dirty from desert travel, and the ointment would be a balm to help soothe tired feet. It was the task of the slave to offer hospitality to guests by washing feet. The work itself was considered too intimate, too base, for free people to undertake. Read in this light, Mary’s act is one of great humility, even humiliation.

Contrast this act with the words of Judas. Whereas Judas’ words are full of suspicion and self-protection, Mary’s act is a pure gift of vulnerable love, counting not the cost, either of the bottle of perfume, or of the act that she performs. Not calculating the kind of repercussions it will have, the only thing worth noting is that Jesus was here, and that he would not be for long. We do not know to what extent Mary knows what is about to happen to Jesus as goes to Jerusalem, but she does, in this act of discipleship, display that she knows who he is in a way that the male disciples do not. And, in so this act, which is clearly an act of love is, in fact, a confession of faith, such a confession is made not just by our tongues, but also by our bodies. Like Mary, we are called to display through our bodies a discipleship that is turned entirely to Christ, a discipleship that is placed at the feet of Christ.

How different this example of love is from our contemporary notions about the love between a man and a woman. The love that Mary displays is a love that can only be understood through her confession, through the commitment of her entire being to tangible practices of caring for Christ. It is a pledge that she will not turn away even in his weakness, incapacity and death.

I want to suggest that it is precisely such pledges we make when we share table fellowship. We commit ourselves to a life bent toward Christ, but also to his Church, to his people. We pledge ourselves in the breaking of bread to a kind of care of one another that rejects the calculation of cost and benefit to ourselves. We commit ourselves in our partaking in the Body of Christ to refuse to turn away from those we love in their vulnerability or in their dying. And thus we commit ourselves to a way of being that offers the world a political life, a common life, of a radically different kind:

And so, the third is the nature of the political life that we share in the Body of Christ.

The passage refers throughout to those outside the walls of Mary’s home. Here they are, assembled in a household just outside of Jerusalem, and the crowds are moving in on Jesus. He has recently raised Mary’s brother, Lazarus, from the dead, which has incited the terror and the hostility of the religious authorities; the Chief Priests and Pharisees are conspiring against him. The religious council, the Sanhedrin, has set a warrant for Christ’s arrest, asking that his whereabouts be revealed and that he be handed over. The whole drama of the event is reaching a feverish intensity as preparations for Passover are underway. And even within the sanctuary of the home, there is Judas who has now become a representative of those on the outside—cynical, full of fear, and read to hand Jesus over.

In the midst of this political and religious terror, the disciples are hopeful for a happy ending—a victory and a vindication. It is time for Jesus to step up to the plate as Messiah and turn the religious and political authorities on their heads. Yet Mary knows different. She breaks the bottle of nard to anoint her king, as all kings were anointed, but she anoints his feet, not his head. And Jesus states, against all expectation, that she has anointed him not for battle, not for victory, but for death.

There will be no political victory here; no glorious crusade into Jerusalem. There is, in the politics of Jesus, only renunciation, defeat, poverty, and death. This politics is inaugurated by Mary as she washes Jesus’ feet, a practice that the disciples are later commissioned to do. It is a sign of their humility, their servanthood to one another, and to the peaceful practices that Jesus will train them into.

The Church today.

Understood in this light, the actions of Mary, of beauty of love, and indeed of a kind of politics, are all the more profound.

For we see in her action, for a time, in midst of the ugliness and sinfulness of violent political and religious life, a display of great beauty.

For we see in her action, in spite of the dominant economy of measuring up costs and benefits, an act of abundance.

For we see in her act, in a world that fears vulnerability and denies death, a meeting of these face-on with depth, and servanthood and joy.

For we see in her action, for a time, how the forces of the world which crowded all around Jesus were kept at bay.

And this, I would venture, is the mark of true discipleship. Not just for 2000 years ago; not just for a moment in the disciples’ life where we are at the brink of Christ’s violent death, but here and now, too, when the forces of this world are closing in on us.

Where governments convene in the endless cycle of cause and effect, cost and benefit, we are called to display an extravagant life.

And where utility is prized above all other things, we are to be a place that remembers God’s delight in creation, in joyous praise and thanksgiving.

And where death and violence are met with fear and denial. We are called to be a community of the dying, knowing the limits of our lives together, and finding within these limits the language and the action of a beautiful response of praise and thanksgiving.

As we move toward Jesusalem, may we too incline our bodies toward Christ, not turning away from his suffering, nor counting the cost of his calling us.