Fragrance
John 12:1-8
March 21, 2010
Time is on our side, yes, it is. The Gospel begins this episode noting that today is the sixth day before Passover. From this point on we are in time with the Gospel, we are synchronized with the Passion story that climaxes on Easter morning.
This may seem trivial and irrelevant 2000 years later, but the Christian and Jewish faith has always been built upon the reality that God acts in the midst of history. It is, in fact, what separates us quantitatively and qualitatively from those who are “spiritual, but not religious” in our midst. Spirituality can become a suspension of time, no time at all, in which one tries to catch on to one of the eternal cycles of the universe. Christians are convinced that ordinary time occasionally become sacred time, that the actions of God and our participation in those actions does not happen in an ethereal by and by, but precisely on the sixth day before Passover. It’s why the Bible is so full of dates and ages and the reckoning of years, because God is in the moment with us. That is both encouraging and terrifying beyond belief. God is with us in our difficult world, and then again, God is here right now!
But back to the sixth day before Passover. John’s Gospel is the un-synoptic gospel; he does not walk on the same roads as Matthew, Mark and Luke, nor at the same time. There are a number of common events in the life of Jesus in all four Gospels, but John has Jesus preaching a lot more, yet telling no parables. We know that John’s Gospel was written last, and it’s as if he were telling stories around the campfire and everybody already knew the stories, where they were going and how they would end.
At the beginning of Chapter 11 in which the resurrection of Lazarus is narrated, John introduces Lazarus’ two sisters, Martha and Mary, making the point of telling the reader that Mary is the one who anointed Jesus’ feet with ointment and wiped them with her hair. That would have made no sense to any of the readers or listeners because it doesn’t happen until Chapter 12. This is a different kind of story-telling in which John is not afraid to give you his opinion. Now on the sixth day before Passover, he is back at Mary and Martha’s home in Bethany with brother Lazarus sitting there with them - and don’t you remember that Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead? The story is about Mary and Martha again, but Lazarus’ name keeps popping up. The story concludes, beyond our Lectionary portion, with the resolution of the chief priests to put Lazarus to death, because on account of him many of the Jews were believing in Jesus.
John tells us no more, but in the novel, The Last Temptation of Christ, the author Nikos Kazantsakis spends a good deal of time with the resurrected Lazarus until he is indeed assassinated by a knife wound in the heart by one of the chief priests’ thugs. Beware of being resurrected, it can get you killed.
There is seemingly no Gospel story without food, so when Jesus visits, the first thing mentioned is that they made him supper. Martha served, nothing has changed from Luke’s memory of the bustling about Martha, and Lazarus was one of those at table with him, apparently not the only guest. Mary was not serving food.
What Mary was about to do was a traditional gesture of a host towards a guest in that part of the world, though usually performed before the story begins. There were no paved roads then, just dirt at best and shoes were sandals, if not barefoot, so a visitor usually had dusty, dirty and sore feet. The gracious move was to have a servant wash and dry off the guest’s feet. Remember how Jesus washed the disciples’ feet, a role reserved for a slave? Some churches still perform a foot washing liturgy, although there are often complaints today about not wanting to actually wash someone else’s disgustingly dirty and smelly feet.
This is what Mary is up to, although she is no servant, certainly never wanted to do the housework. She brings a pound of very expensive nard, a perfumed ointment, and massages Jesus’ feet with it, wiping his feet with her hair. The whole house was filled with its fragrance. Amazing grace, how sweet the smell? Jesus comments that such perfumes were used to anoint the dead. We already know where the story is going. You have to die before you can be resurrected.
You also don’t get away with using expensive perfume without raising some complaints. It is Judas Iscariot who raises an ironic cry of protest, complaining about wasting this expensive stuff which could have been sold to give to the poor. In the same breath John is identifying Judas as the betrayer of Jesus. Now the irony is in that Jesus’ opponents have typically been labeled Pharisees, a real group of relatively liberal Jewish intellectuals at that time. As presented in the Gospels, they are people who have high standards for everyone else but themselves, so to be a “pharisee” even today hints at a hypocritical condescendence towards others.
Judas here is the example of a Pharisee. He didn’t care a fig for the poor - John says he was dipping his hand in the collection box. Unfortunately, when Jesus says, “the poor you will always have with you,” that has been used to justify not bothering with the poor. Jesus was a man of the poor to the discomfort of many, but his statement and the complaint of Judas push us about just what that sweet smelling ointment means.
All of this smells. John keeps linking Lazarus and his sisters throughout these several chapters by smell. When Jesus arrives late in Bethany after Lazarus has died, he orders that the stone be taken away. Who else but Martha thinks of the practical (I prefer the KJV), “By this time, Lord, he stinketh, for he has been dead four days.” What does such a stink mean? It means death, the end of possibilities, the abolition of all generosity. “The dead man came out” and nobody mentions his smell. The smell of death is gone.
Now it’s Mary’s turn and she saturates the house with a sweet fragrance that the pharisees quickly call wasteful and unethical. What does such a sweet aroma indicate, but extravagance? A love so strong it loses all boundaries and limits, a sweetness beyond pleasure and delight, a divine extravagance. Look at how this extravagance is demonstrated, by a woman, a human being, somehow mirroring the extravagance she has sensed in the person of Jesus. Sure, she may be anointing him for death, but she has seen resurrection.
Have we lost the gift of extravagance, of giving more love than needed? Do we sit and count the beans, figuring out like Judas how much we should be responsibly spending on each project? Does the love of God and the love of our neighbour make us stingier or more extravagant in giving away all that we have? We are continually being given the grace of God, for which there is no price tag, and even in the shadow of death when we extravagantly give away this grace, grace abounds, death shrinks, resurrection is on the rise. Can you smell it?
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan