John 12:1-8
Christ’s extravagant grace befits an extravagant response
Introduction
I wonder if you’ve ever been at a dinner table. Maybe with family, friends, or colleagues, and everyone’s having a great time.
The wine is superb, the food is sublime. The conversation is stimulating. There’s no other place you’d rather be in that moment.
But then, something out of place happens. It only takes a second for the atmosphere to change. Someone says or does something that breaks a social taboo.
There are so many different examples we’ve probably experienced of something that someone has said or done that shifts the atmosphere in the room.
All of a sudden, where things were relaxed, there is now tension.
Tension as everyone waits to see how the situation is going to be resolved.
It’s a little bit like the dinner party in our Gospel reading this morning.
It’s important to note that we may accidentally import ideas from other similar versions of this story from the other Gospels. All four gospels have a story of a woman anointing Jesus with expensive perfume, but sometimes overlapping details. In two gospels, she is unnamed, and in a third, it is inferred that she is a ‘sinful woman’. It’s possible there were several instances Jesus was anointed, or that different writers drew out details or adapted the story for their purpose. But John’s gospel gives our lady a name and a face in Mary, sister of Martha and brother of Lazarus. In the other stories where there is anonymity, here, this is deep friendship and connection. John’s author doesn’t entertain any notion of wrongdoing. Mary’s act of anointing, as they tell it, is about a deep and faithful response to the gift of abundant life.
Mary’s extravagant gift of gratitude
The important backstory to this party in Jesus’ honour is the story of the raising of Lazarus. A few weeks ago, Josh introduced us to Martha and Mary. These two women had a brother named Lazarus who had died. They were good friends of Jesus and hoped that Jesus would intervene and cure Lazarus of his illness. But Jesus didn’t make it in time.
The two sisters were left, seemingly alone, without the care of their brother. Which, in the first century, placed them in a vulnerable position. It was a time not just of grief, but of great uncertainty and anxiety. They could very soon find themselves alongside others who needed charity from Judas’s money bag.
Finally, Jesus arrives on the scene, weeping in grief at Lazarus’ death. But then Jesus does the unthinkable, and before they can really understand what has happened, they find themselves holding their living, breathing brother Lazarus again.
In some very real way, Jesus’ resurrection of Lazarus is also a story of figurative resurrection for Martha and Mary, who have their lives, their relationship with Lazarus, and its accompanying social position, gifted back to them.
So Martha and Mary pour out their gratitude to Jesus in a way they know well. A feast in his honour.
Our previous story indicated that gifts of hospitality spoke loudly for Martha, but I wonder if Mary felt she needed something else to express the depth of her feelings.
Have you ever been in a situation when you felt you wanted to express your gratitude but weren’t sure if it was appropriate, or how it would be received? You may have been torn between not wanting to make a scene and also a strong sense of needing to express feelings of thanks.
I think that was Mary. Imagine her wrestling with this in her mind. Should I, shouldn’t I, oh that would be too much, but no it wouldn’t, not if you really think about it. But what would they say? What if Jesus misunderstands what I mean?
No, it’s the right thing to do.
So Mary goes to the private place in her house and carefully brings out a small jar she has carefully hidden away and kept safe. Some scholars think it would be the most valuable thing she owns. Just days before, it was her insurance policy. It at least could have been sold and could have provided a year’s living for her and Martha in Lazarus’ absence. In some sense, it’s security represents her ability to continue to live. But now she has Lazarus back.
So she pours it out on Jesus’ feet. All of it, so much it’s running everywhere. The perfume is too expensive to mop up with a mere cloth. So things get even more risque, and she lets down her hair from its braids and wipes it up, using it as a sponge to rub the perfume into Jesus’ skin.
I think Lars Jusinen’s painting captures the feeling of the room well. At the same time, we can see the incredible tenderness, the intimacy of this interaction. But it’s also a bit uncomfortable to look at, and imagine yourself in the scene.
I am not the best at choosing presents. It’s hard to know what to get someone, something they don’t already have, appropriately priced, something that sums up what they mean to us.
We often say, What do you get the person who has everything?
But for Mary, the question was What do you give the person who has given you everything?
What do you give the one who has the power to cancel the sting of death and its sentence of grief and vulnerability?
Mary answers that question by pouring the perfume that represents the life that she would have lived and pours out at Jesus’ feet, in an act of service, outrageous, extravagant hospitality, and love.
Mary and Martha have both shown themselves to be model disciples. Verses later, Jesus will talk about following him by serving him and will give a practical lesson in service by washing the disciples’ feet. Before all this, Martha serves and Mary washes. Both in extravagance.
What can we give to the one who makes us new again and restores us to life with God? Our lives are lived in faith in Jesus with nothing held back.
Judas Prudence – Save it for later
And like that, the mood of the party has flipped. While everyone looks on, stunned at the scene unfolding, poised mid-mouthful, Judas breaks in.
Incredulous at the waste!
Judas’ thinking would be right at home in our modern world where we’re always trying to do more with less, driven by efficiency, trying to get the best from our limited resources. Having worked in the public service, I’ve heard and advocated for Judas’ logic many times. Chances are, what he says makes sense to many of us.
We don’t want to get too carried away.
Here the author of John’s gospel steps into the story as a narrator and alleges that Judas used to enjoy helping himself to the money bag. John’s Gospel is unflinching in villainising Judas. He has already called him a devil, now too a thief.
If everyone knew at the time that Judas was a thief they didn’t see any need to put a stop to it. It’s hard to know what motivated Judas to betray Jesus, whether he became disillusioned with the direction his ministry was going, if he was trying to force Jesus’ hand to use his power against Rome, or if it was simply money and self-interest.
The gospel author is trying to make their own sense of what drives someone to betray someone like Jesus.
Is he really motivated by social justice, does he regret losing the chance to take a slice of the proceeds for himself, or is Mary’s lavish love too disturbing to watch? We may never know.
Illustration City
But, as one author I read this week put it, “acts of true grace and love regularly get slandered as deviance.”
“Acts of true grace and love regularly get slandered as deviance.”
In Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, there is the famous scene where the priest gifts Jean Val Jean the silver tableware he had attempted to steal and the silver candlesticks he left behind. It’s a move that defies all our normal logic. It’s surprising and reckless.
And it’s an incredible pivot point in the story that changes the course of Val Jean’s existence.
It’s an outrageous act of lavish grace, in which we’re meant to see echoes of Christ’s lavish gift for us, the priest’s actions in some way buying back Val Jean’s Soul for God.
But also at face value, it’s the priest’s response to the lavish grace he has experienced in Jesus.
The world is not used to lavish grace.
But there are two pitfalls we want to avoid taking away from this story.
Firstly, throwing all caution to the wind and giving away everything is always better than being a good custodian of our resources.
Sticking with prudent levels of spending, being efficient, saving for a rainy day, and being good stewards are important to ensuring that there is enough to go around everyone in our world. It is an important expression of our faith in God.
Second, being a good custodian of our resources doesn’t exclude the possibility of throwing all caution to the wind.
Perhaps it’s like having an amazing set of china tableware. Maybe it was a special gift. As birthdays, anniversaries, dinner parties, and reunions with family and old friends roll by, it sits safely in the cabinet. Till one day… There are no more occasions to celebrate.
When we are entrusted with anything… We need to discern what it is for.
If we are safeguarding something for the future, we have to be able to recognise when the time has come for it to be used, maybe even poured out in an extravagant way as a faithful response to the lavish gift of Grace we have received.
The time is coming – What is Christ going to do?
So far the discomfort in the room has been down to Mary’s show of love and gratitude, and the tension of Judas’ judgment. But then the is the confusion of the strange words of Jesus, adding another layer of unease.
Jesus gives another layer of meaning to Mary’s actions. She is preparing him for burial.
Such a statement would not have been seen as a joke for Mary, who, only a short while ago, likely prepared her brother Lazarus’ body with spices and perfumes.
Jesus sees her action as foreshadowing his own burial preparations.
Some scholars think that the Nard perfume that Mary used would be been so strong that the scent of it would still be on his body a week later at his crucifixion.
I wonder if Judas caught a whiff of it as he leaned in for his kiss of betrayal in Gethsemane. Did the smell of it put Pilate off his guard as he questioned Jesus?
As Jesus endured the lashings, the beatings, the mocking, did its sweet scent strengthen him as he recalled that night in Bethany, with his friends, Martha, Lazarus, and Mary.
As the soldier pressed the nails against his feet, did the aroma filling his nostrils give him pause for thought, that this person he was executing was cherished, loved by someone, that maybe they were someone more?
Smells can do that for us, can’t they? The author Rudyard Kipling once wrote, “Smells are surer than sounds or sights / To make your heart-strings crack.”
Jesus’ words to Judas, while a challenge for us to know the value of things and when to use them for God, also foreshadow something. “The poor you will always have with you”.
Taken on its own, it’s almost a disempowering statement. We can read it as saying, ‘don’t bother, there is no point in trying to lift people out of poverty’s clutches. You’ll never solve the problem.
But Jesus wasn’t saying that. We should never use these words as a get-out-of-jail-free card from correcting the imbalance and lack of access to resources in our world. Jesus’ words need to stay connected to the time and place.
But what is interesting, is that Jesus, as he often does, is quoting from the Old Testament. From Deuteronomy 15, which is all about the year of cancelling debts.
This seems to be a common technique of Jesus and the Gospel writers. It’s a hyperlink if you like, to go back to the wider story of what God is doing in the world.
Under the Old Testament Teaching, every seven years, all debts between God’s people were to be cancelled. But more than a rule, it is encouraging God’s people to be ‘openhanded’ toward the poor and needy, and it cautions God’s people not to be tightfisted, just because the seventh year is approaching.
How do we put these things together?
Jesus knows that his imminent death will set in motion a chain of events that will cancel not monetary debts, but the debts of humanity’s rebellion and selfish choices forever. He is inaugurating a kingdom where there will be enough to go around.
Because of Christ, we can know the security that comes from knowing we are restored to the ever-loving and sustaining God.
As we recognise what God has done for us in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, our lives are made new through mercies that enable us to live as restored images of God.
What response is there to such a gift?
Closing
Perhaps the words of one of Isaac Watts’ Hymns can sum up Mary’s response to that question
Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small.
Love so amazing, so divine,
demands my soul, my life, my all.
Amen