5th Sunday in Lent
April 7, 2019
1Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. 2There they gave a dinner for Jesus. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. 3Mary 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. 4But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, 5“Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” 6(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.) 7Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. 8You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” – John 12:1-8
Last week’s reading began with complaints about the people with whom Jesus was eating. If only they could see this dinner party! There are rules for how to behave at social functions, even small private dinners! Sit up at the table, say please and thank you, compliment the food, stay away from politics. And though I can’t ever remember hearing this explicitly expressed, I don’t think you’re supposed to break open expensive perfume and wash someone’s feet with it using your hair filling the house with the overwhelming odor. These rules, when followed, make everyone comfortable. They keep things moving along. They make sure you keep your place in your social circles.
But no one told Mary. Or… maybe it’s that Mary understood that this dinner party was taking place under an entirely different set of rules. You see, when death is in the room all the rules change. We are prone to impose our rules of decorum, order, and logic on this story and our own, but they simply do not work in the presence of death. And Mary, Martha, and Lazarus know death.
Lazarus himself is sitting at the table. He has just days earlier been dead himself. After four days in the tomb Jesus came along and called him forth again. One wonders if the sight and smell of the dead and dying lingers on his body. Does he bear the marks of death as Jesus’ resurrected body will just a week or so later? Does his sitting there make the others a bit uncomfortable, perhaps even Jesus’ own disciples? In last week’s reading Jesus was in trouble for eating with tax collectors and sinners. Now he is eating with the no-longer-dead. That is sureto raise some eyebrows.
And whether or not they have actually understood that this is going to happen, Jesus has been explaining to his inner circle about where hisstory is going – about the cross and about his own tragic and unjust death. At this point in the story it is clear to the reader if not all those dining at Lazarus’ house that Jesus’ death is a very real possibility. The rules are different at this gathering because death is close at hand.
We know this instinctively when we accompany those we love in their final days if we are given the opportunity to do so. The rules change – nothing else takes priority. The community makes space literally and figuratively. The space and time become holy with the movement from life to death. We may not pour out thousands of dollars of perfume in a single act of lavish love, but we do tenderly care for bodies that are in pain as they approach death. The rules of careful accounting for pennies and the careful use of long-saved gifts go out the window.
This isn’t to idealize that time, as there is no such thing as a “good death.” Nothing about death that makes it pretty. But the rules are different. The end of life calls us all to engage more deeply in the present and to treasure what we have in the moment. Mary seems to be the only one who gets it, or at least the only one who does anything in response. There is no logic to her action. I don’t know that she’s been consciously saving this for Jesus’ burial and somehow suddenly realized it was time. And in other times she might have considered Judas’s legitimate question, and whether she ought to have shared that money with the poor instead. And there might have been other times when she would have done just that. Other times she might have thought it through, but in this situation, with the usual rules suspended she followed the movement of the spirit within her to this act of extraordinary grace and abundance.
And it makes me uncomfortable. It makes me cringe, in fact, every time I read about her pouring out $20,000 of perfume. There is something that makes me feel as if we shouldn’t be watching such an intimate act of love and faith expressed. Because most of the time we’re operating under this other set of rules. Most of the time we’re trying to appear put together. The exception could be, perhaps, at church. Now don’t get me wrong most of the time in this and many other congregations we operate under all the usual rules of decorum. But week after week we hear in scripture, in bread and wine, and in Christian community a hint that the rules are different. And it’s partly because death is always at the table with us. We are a community that supports one another as individuals face death, but we are also faced every week with the central symbol of our faith which is itself a reminder of death. But it’s more than that, because the church operates not under the rules of death but under the rules of resurrection. By the resurrection which is already hanging in the air with the smell of perfume in Lazarus’s home, we are freed to live under different rules.
As a church we are freed for lavish acts of generosity which make no real sense to people who do not understand what is going on. We are freed to engage more deeply in the present, to treasure what we have in the moment. We are freed to host a meal to which anyone – literally anyone! – is invited. In fact we proclaim that like Jesus’s meal with the resurrected Lazarus, that our meal of bread and wine is a part of the feast of all the saints present and past. We are freed to give primary place and generous attention and support to Jesus who shows up not only in the economically poor, but also in the outcast, the sick, the grieving, and, yes, the dying. We are freed to give away food and money and clothing and shelter with Mary’s reckless abandon to all the ones Judas is supposedly worried about because it’s there in the always present ones in need that we meet Jesus and where we have the opportunity to enter into Mary’s lavish act of faith and love, even when it doesn’t make sense to anyone else. When it doesn’t even make logical sense to us.
The rules are just different when we’re dealing with the God of all life, the God who dies with us, the God who raises us to new life. It’s a different way of being together and a different way of going out to serve the world. Every Sunday calls us again to sit at the table, a table with the living and with the no-longer-dead whom we are still grieving, the ones we can still sense sitting at our tables. And the way in which that kind of banquet invites us into illogical generosity and lavish blessing may be a little on the uncomfortable side from time-to-time for those of us who are so accustomed to the world’s usual set of expectations, those of us who like things to follow the rules. But it makes for us a wonderfully rich banquet table, smelling of costly perfume, smelling faintly of death, smelling richly of resurrection. So come, join the feast.
-Pastor Steven Wilco
(adapted from a sermon preached March 2016).
Stewarding the Word 