John
12:1-11
It
must have been a strange household there in Bethany. Jesus had been friends with Lazarus and his
sisters for a long while and he felt at home with them. He stayed with them at their house just
outside Jerusalem and in fact it would be from their house that he would set
out when he entered the city in procession on Palm Sunday.
There seem to have been three in the
family. There were the two sisters, Mary
and Martha, with their contrasting personalities – Martha the practical one,
always at work in the kitchen, and Mary the mystical one, sitting at Jesus’
feet and learning from him (as Luke describes her) or (as John tells us)
sitting at Jesus’ feet so that she could dump perfume on them and wipe up the
excess with her hair. Oh, and this
incident took place not long after Jesus raised their brother from the
dead. Lazarus was right there at the
table. John says that when Mary went and
did this, they were giving a dinner for Jesus, so maybe this was a thank-you
and a celebration. We don’t know.
We
don’t know, either, what Mary had in mind with her odd gesture. We do know where the perfume came from,
because Jesus mentions it, and that might give us a clue. He said,
“She bought it so that she might keep it for the day
of my burial.” [John 12:7]
I would suggest that her use of it the week
before Jesus would leave their house to ride into Jerusalem and be killed can
be taken two ways, and maybe they both apply.
On
the one hand, she might have been saying that Jesus was already as good as
dead. Mary did, after all, sit and
listen to him intently and Jesus made no secret of his expectation of a violent
death. He had spoken openly to his
followers, saying,
“See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son
of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will
condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will
mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days
he will rise again.” [Mark
10:33-34]
The danger that Jesus faced involved not only
himself, but her family as well.
“When the great crowd of the Jews learned that
he was there, they came not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom
he had raised from the dead. So
the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, since it was on account of him that
many of the Jews were deserting and were believing in Jesus.” [John 12:9-11]
To have Jesus as a guest brought Lazarus back
from the grave but now it put them all of them at risk. With that in mind, maybe,
she had gone so far as to buy perfume to anoint his body for burial.
If the Romans killed him, though – if they
crucified him – there would be no burial, because the bodies of such people
were left on the crosses where they died to rot or to be eaten by birds. In Jesus’ case, one of the ruling council, a
man named Nicodemus, went to Pilate and pulled some strings to get special
permission to bury him. Mary wouldn’t
have expected that exception, and so she might just as well use the perfume on
Jesus in advance.
On
the other hand, maybe Mary had been paying close attention to what Jesus had
been teaching, after all. Maybe she had
heard not only the part about Jesus being killed but also that prediction at
the end saying,
“after three days he will rise again.” [Mark
10:34]
If that were the case, maybe she was going
ahead and using the perfume here and now because she knew he would not need it
later. After all, he had brought her
brother back to life, and he had told her sister,
“I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they
die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” [John 11:25-26]
How could the grave hold somebody like that? Why not use the perfume as part of this
elaborate expression of thanks and as part of the celebration of life?
I
can see both possibilities. That’s my
dilemma.
It
reflects what we all face, too. Do we
see the inevitability of death or do we see the possibility of life? Or maybe both? Jesus’ rising came after his death. Both dying and being raised to life were part
of what he went through, and both together are what we need for our own
salvation.
He had to die because of this whole mess of
sinful trouble that makes up the world.
Put a sinless person into the chaos of power politics and he will be
ground up. Put a person devoted to
justice into an unjust and merciless world and he will be killed because his
mere being is an affront to it. Just by
being himself, Jesus called into question and put to shame the normal ways that
all of us go about doing things, and when those with power are called to
accountability, they will wipe the account books clear by wiping out the
questioner.
He
had to rise, because of who he is. He is
the one who did not deserve the least bit of what the world did to him. He is the one who, out of all humanity in all
time, did not having it coming to him.
He was in no way part of the system that grinds anyone down or looks
down on anybody or treats anyone as in any way less than a child of God. He knew that there would always be those who
subjugate or take advantage of others. That’s
why he said to Judas,
“You always have the poor with you, but you do
not always have me.” [John
12:8]
Because he was not part of that game, he did
not have to abide by its rules. Pride? He had nothing to prove, nothing to be
insecure about. Greed? Who can claim anything, when it already
belongs to God? Hatred? Not worth it.
And because of all that, death?
Not the end.
He
invites us, too, to step outside the boundaries that the world sets when it
tells us that its ways are all that there is.
He invites us to go with him, sometimes to the cross, but always into a
way not of death but a way of life. That’s
the sort of life where people can make the weird yet beautiful gestures
sometimes, like Mary did with her perfume.
That’s the sort of life where people as unlike one another as Mary and
Martha live as family, and where people like Lazarus leave their own graves of
hopelessness and helplessness because they have heard Jesus calling them by
name, too. He turns things around in so
many ways that the world itself changes for them. They look out of their doors and what they
see is not the Jerusalem that so often killed the prophets and turned away its
helpers, but instead, as one of them describes it,
“I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, come
down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne
saying,
‘See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them as their God;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.’” [Revelation 21:2-4]
That new world is what he invites us all to be
a part of. Mary of Bethany, perhaps, was
even close enough to smell it.
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