John
12:1-8
Passage:
“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.’”
Introduction:
As many of you know, I
live in a house in a neighborhood of West Philly with four other guys. Many of
you probably remember what it was like living with a lot of people of your own
gender. For some of you, it may have been in the service. For others, in
college. In any case, a good portion of you probably had roommates before you
got married and moved on to the ‘family–centered’ portion of your life.
If that’s the case, then
you probably remember a lot of the strange differences about your lifestyle
then. Perhaps you even had a group activity. When I was in college, many of the
girls’ dorms would have activities where all the girls on a hall would go do
stuff together. Well, my roommates and I have several group activities. When
political debates are on we gather around a computer monitor with our debate
bingo cards and as many jokes as we can muster. It’s been a good year for
political comedy! When it snows, we pull out the Monopoly board and play until
the game is over – you can stay up till 3:00am if you don’t have to work the
next day. And sometimes we all gather around to laugh and watch a YouTube
channel run by a guy called Jeremy Fragrance. He’s just about the strangest,
most eccentric, reviewer you can imagine. As you might expect, many young men
are interested in attracting women and sometimes that involves the sense of
smell. Jeremy Fragrance is a cologne reviewer who makes the whole process of
purchasing a smell quite entertaining. He’s confident, wild in his enthusiasm,
and practically bursting with energy.
But one of the most
interesting things about the weird subculture of perfume and cologne is how
overlooked it can be. Sure, many people buy it. But how often do you overlook
smell? We always talk and think about our sense of sight. So it’s rather novel
to see someone like Jeremy Fragrance take such a serious interest in something
that just makes you smell different.
But perhaps I’m wrong.
Maybe our conceptions of smell have as much to do with our conditioning as they
did in Jesus’ day. Perhaps ‘smell’ seems like something easy to overlook
because I’m a guy. It’s that thing we might do, but is it really all that
important?
This question got me a
little curious so I did a little digging and discovered that the most expensive
men’s cologne is Clive Christian’s No.1
Pure Perfume which sells for $2,350. Maybe that’s surprising. Maybe not.
But one thing is for sure. It doesn’t even compare to the market for women. The
most expensive perfume for women is also from the house of Clive Christian and
its entitled Imperial Majesty – it
sells for a whopping $215,000! So if we run with this analogy we can be pretty
certain of at least one thing – gender matters!
Smell might be something
we think that we overlook, but it’s actually kind of a crazy thing. It can make
us remember scenes from our childhoods, it can remind of a first date after
forty years of marriage, and it may even remind us of loved ones long past. So
perhaps there’s a reason to take it seriously. Or, even more importantly, to
many of the social things that come along with it seriously.
Body:
As many of you have
probably noticed by now, I entitled today’s sermon “Awkward Moments.” At first
glance, this scene from John seems both awkward and confusing. We might assume
that Mary is the lady of the night we read about in the other three Gospels –
most of Church History follows in this assumption. After all, we hear elsewhere
that a sinful woman who was ashamed of her deeds came to Christ in the middle
of supper and knelt down, washed, and anointed his feet with perfume. So when
we take the synoptic Gospels into account, it is only natural for us to assume
that this is Mary Magdalene – who we now know is the sister of Lazarus and
Martha.
Taken from this
assumption, things are certainly scandalous. Think about it. A pastor is in a
room, or at a party, and one of the local prostitutes shows up and bathes his
feet in $50,000 perfume. That’s the kind of cost we’re talking about here. This
perfume wasn’t cheap. It was worth a year’s wages. So when the treasurer shows
up and says, “Hey! You could have sold that and used the money to feed the
poor” we should be able to understand that. There’s a lot of money being thrown
away here. So it’s rather shocking that Jesus’ response is, “Leave her alone.
She bought it in case I might die [but decided to use it earlier]. The poor
will always be with you, but you will not always have me.”
Now maybe this is my
weirdness, but this answer strikes me as incredibly strange. It can almost
sound like he’s saying, “So what, one day I’ll die. It’s time to live it up!”
For some of you, the scene might recall an image of John Daly, JFK, or Kanye
West. It can certainly sound that way. Jesus’ closing words here have often
been used to dismiss the plight of the poor because after all, “they will
always be with you.” The first impression that this scene gives reminds me of a
student I’ve had in a couple of my classes. He always tries to dismiss
injustices and social ills by saying, “Well, isn’t that just human nature?”
So I chose the title
“awkward moments” for a very good reason. This passage matters and it matters a
lot. Like a mirror, it can force us to look at a reflection of ourselves that’s
all too disturbing – like a vision of Dorian Grey’s painting. So we need to
think carefully about this story and the awkward assumptions we might take to
it.
Moving
Beyond an Initial Assumption:
Maybe it’s just me, but I
think Jesus cares deeply for the poor. I don’t think that Jesus responds to the
suffering of others with the kinds of responses that some of species worst
might. So it is with that in mind that I am going to ask us to take John’s
account of Jesus’ perfume moment on its own footing. It’s certainly possible
that the Mary mentioned in the story is Mary Magdalene, but we don’t actually
know that. All we know is that she’s Mary of Bethany, sister to Lazarus and
Martha. We don’t know if she’s a prostitute or if she’s independently wealthy.
All we know is that she’s a woman – someone who’s very existence would have
been defined almost exclusively in sexual, and consequently in shameful, terms
– who lost her brother. So after Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead they hold
some sort of banquet for him.
You see, the way that a
Gospel writer tells a story matters. In John, Mary doesn’t anoint Jesus’ feet
because she is repentant, but because he raised her brother from the dead.
That’s what precedes this scene. So yes, there’s awkwardness. Having a woman wash
your feet with expensive perfume is unusual and sketchy territory in terms of
sexual purity with regard to the law. But this isn’t a moment of awkward
tension. This is a beautiful moment where a sister anoints the Messiah who
raised her brother from the dead. Seriously, how would you react to someone if
they raised your loved one from the dead? We’d all be in awkward moments I’m
sure. So John’s account of Mary of Bethany is actually a beautiful story – not
an awkward one!
Judas
The awkwardness comes
from Judas who asks, “Why was this perfume not sold for three
hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” Like many in today’s society,
there will always be those who will use the plight of the poor and the
suffering to their own gain. There will always be those who say that the needs
of the oppressed should be overlooked because we all get what we deserve. If
we’re well off, it’s because we deserved it. If we’re poor, it’s because we
deserved it. It’s a strange twist of smooth words that can make the beautiful
moments of life – like the scene Jesus here shares with Mary – and turn them
into excuses for perpetuating the very things that stand in contrast to the
ideals of the Kingdom Jesus so often talked about.
Jesus’
statement that the poor shall always be with us is not awkward at all! He’s not
justifying the status quo or anything like that. He’s accepting the beauty of a
heart that’s expressing gratitude for a truly marvelous act – resurrection!
Rather than using the perfume for his burial, Mary has instead chosen to use it
to celebrate his life – in contrast to death, because Jesus had already
conquered death in the raising of Lazarus.
Perhaps
even more profoundly, this scene of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet with perfume
leads us to one of the most important scenes in the Gospel of John. As you
probably noticed, we’re in 12:1-8. Well, in 13:1-20 Jesus comes back to this
scene of foot-washing. Jesus comes to and continues an act started by Mary!
Jesus takes this act of love and gratitude from Mary and then goes to his
disciples and washes their feet and in the process of doing that gives them the
most important commandment, “Love one another. Just as
I have loved you, you also should love one another” (13:34).
Mary’s anointing of Jesus
starts a series of radical acts of hospitality that come from Mary to Jesus,
then from Jesus to his disciples, and finally, in the commandment to love one
another, from his disciples back to the whole world. What a profound thing that
is!
Jesus wasn’t basking in
extravagance or providing an excuse to ignore the poor. Instead, he took an act
of gratitude – given as thanks for an act of love – and then turned that into
even more love. Jesus takes Mary’s radical hospitality, gives it to the
disciples and then instructs them to turn around and pass it on to the entire
world. There is no inconsistency here between Christ’s radical concern for the
poor, the oppressed, the disheartened, the downtrodden and the scene that we
heard about. Jesus is telling us that the poor will always be with us until his
Kingdom has fully come, but that we should see that as an opportunity to serve
and love others; and that we should not see that as an excuse to overlook the
most important task of all – to love!
Conclusion:
We love because we were
first loved by God. The Trinity wraps up all things in the love that Godself
participates in. In Christ, all of creation is wrapped up into the work of
recreation and renewal. We are invited to participate and grow in the only
thing that can last – the love that is in God’s nature. This is vision of a new
Kingdom – a kingdom where God reigns.
I suppose I’ll close with
a bit of a funny story. As a couple of you know – well maybe just Baker,
Janine, and Minjung – I’m a bit of a Kierkegaard fan. For those of you who
don’t know, he was a really eccentric Danish philosopher from the end of the
1800’s. He was a bit of a poet, a theologian, and something of a love struck
weirdo. But I like him anyway!
In any case, he once
wrote a really scathing review of a sermon the pastor who held the highest
office in Denmark. In other words, he wrote a really nasty sermon review that
went something like this:
“[That sermon was] not really preached for the comfort
of such suffering people. On the contrary, it is for the pleasant relief of the
fortunate, so that they may go home from church armed against the impression
caused by those suffering people.”[1]
To
put it another way, I think my friend Soren saw something similar to what many
of us have probably seen with today’s scripture passage. Some people are
Judas’. They have beautiful moments of love and desecrate them. Or, they claim
to represent the best interests of the poor only to cover for the pursuit of
their own gain.
May
we avoid this at all costs. When we talk of ministry and mission may we be
empowered to follow in the spirit of love that Mary demonstrated here. May we
follow in the Spirit of service that Christ then took on to his disciples. May
we be empowered to be obedient enough to say that we are ready to be involved
in the radical hospitality and love that Christ exemplified.
Let
us pray…
[1]
Soren Kierkegaard in Eliseo Pérez-Alvarez, A Vexing Gadfly: The Late Kierkegaard
on Economic Matters (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2009), 51.