And Now for Something Completely Different
Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3:4b-14; John 12:1-8
”Thus says the Lord,” said the prophet Isaiah,” I who make a path in the sea, I who make a way where there is no way, I am about to do something completely new, do you not perceive it?”
On the Sabbath before the Passover, “Jesus came to Bethany, to the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him.”
The strange dialogue between Judas and Jesus at the end of today’s gospel story is only one of the many unusual things in this short passage from John’s gospel. Just last Sunday we read the parable of the Prodigal Son, in which Jesus tries to explain why he shares a table with tax collectors and sinners. In this story Jesus takes it a step further – he eats the final post-Sabbath meal of his life, on the Saturday night before Palm Sunday, with someone who has died.
There are all kinds of boundaries being crossed in this story – Mary’s apparently reckless pouring out an expensive bottle of perfume, her intimate gesture of letting down her hair – something a first-century woman would never do in mixed company – to wipe the feet of Jesus, right at the table in the middle of a dinner party – awkward! But even the most final, the most absolute boundary of all – the boundary between life and death – has already been crossed with Lazarus, and Jesus is about to cross it again. Mary’s silent but powerful gesture points to the strangeness of this whole evening, the strangeness of the week that has just transpired and the week that is about to begin.
Five hundred years before Jesus, as the people of Israel were returning from exile, the prophet said: Once God made a way through the Red Sea when the people couldn’t see the way forward. Once God made a path through the wilderness and brought us to the Promised Land. God has made a way when we thought there was no way before, and we see no way forward now – but just wait, God will do something new again. Something really new. Something that will blow your mind. This is our first reading today: the promise that God will do something really new, something completely unexpected, something that will amaze and astound you.
Just days before the story in our gospel text today, Jesus came to Bethany to learn that Lazarus was dead and had been in the tomb for four days. Perhaps you remember the story. Jesus comes to console Mary the sister of Lazarus with the promise that God will one day do something new. “Your brother will rise again,” Jesus says to Mary.
“I know he will rise again,” Mary says, “in the resurrection on the last day.” Like many Jewish people of that time, Mary expects the resurrection of the dead – that God will act and do a new thing, that God will make all things new, that God’s life will someday change everything and that even the faithful dead, like her brother Lazarus, will somehow share in that promise. “I know that resurrection will come eventually,” Mary says, “on the last day God’s life will win out over death.” Mary is confident that God will be faithful to the promise, eventually. But for now, she is bereaved, resentful, afraid. She does not see the way forward yet.
And then Jesus says to Mary, “I am the resurrection and the life.” I am resurrection life, standing here in front of you right now. Whoever puts their trust in me will experience resurrection life right now, whoever follows me in the way of love, whoever trusts me enough to lay down their lives for others, whoever lets the seed fall into the ground and die and trusts that new life will grow from it, whoever puts their trust in me will have resurrection life that not even death can take away from them. Do you trust me, Mary? Do you trust that I am bringing resurrection life right now? If you do, then roll away the stone.
And then Lazarus comes out of the tomb. And then Lazarus is released from the bands of death and set free. And then Mary and Martha and Lazarus welcome Jesus into their home. And as the Sabbath ends, they sit down to dinner together. Lazarus alive again. Martha serving again. And then Mary expresses her gratitude, her amazement, her love, her trust in Jesus, with a wordless gesture of deep significance.
She takes a bottle of ridiculously expensive perfume often used to anoint the dead – perhaps it was left over from Lazarus’s funeral – and pours it out on the feet of Jesus. She wipes his feet, not with a towel, but with her own hair. The fragrance of the perfume fills the room. And when Judas complains, Jesus defends Mary.
Of course Judas complains. We know what he will do in just a few days for 30 pieces of silver; seeing something worth 300 pieces of silver go to waste must have blown him away. And at one level, Judas has a point. Didn’t Jesus himself say that whatever we do for the least of these, we do for him? Wouldn’t Jesus prefer that such a large sum of money be put to good use helping many of the least of these? Isn’t that a more practical, more useful, way to show devotion to Jesus than this extravagance? But Jesus says to Judas: Leave Mary alone. She gets it.
When Martin Luther first proposed that the test of faithful Christian belief is “justification by grace through faith apart from works,” some of his friends asked him, “Well, surely you admit that God rewards us for our good works, don’t you?” Luther surprised a lot of people by saying no. Good deeds done for the wrong reason, Luther said, even the best deeds done because of the impact we expect our good deeds to have on God and the world, are worse than useless – they’re a betrayal of Jesus. Because God is not looking for good people to reward; God is looking for dead people to raise. Until we know the God of the cross who is doing something completely new, completely unexpected, completely out of our control, we delude ourselves.
And Paul says the same thing in our second reading today. Before I knew Christ, Paul says, there was nobody better than me at devotion to God’s law, there was nobody better than me at criticizing and punishing people who didn’t keep the rules. But now I have come to see all that as rubbish – now what I want to excel at is following the way of Christ’s cross, so that I can share in resurrection life. Resurrection life is not something in our power to attain by working hard at it – it’s a gift that is given to us freely by God, it’s a new thing that’s completely unexpected and undeserved, and our first response is not work but gratitude, extravagant joy to match the extravagance of God’s gift.
I think Jesus, and Paul, and Luther, were all trying to say the same thing: Those of us who, like Judas, are convinced that the welfare of the world depends on the precious gifts that we have to offer – we usually end up causing more problems than we solve, doing more harm than good. Because we think the problems are out there, in the world, and what matters is what we do to fix other people and not ourselves.
But as soon as we recognize that, like Mary, we don’t have the answers, we don’t have the power to bring life out of death – but God does, and by being irresponsible and wasteful enough to draw close to Jesus and be transformed into his likeness, be willing to be broken as he was so that we can live as he does – we are set free to approach the problems of the world from a whole different place.
And I can assure you that when the poor and needy are on the receiving end of our efforts to help them, they can very easily tell the difference between those who see the face of Christ in them and pour out their gifts accordingly, and those who think the world should be grateful to have the benefit of their privileged gifts.*
May we, like Mary, forget ourselves long enough to perceive the new thing God is doing in Christ. May we trust Jesus enough to be remade into the likeness of his death so that we can share in his resurrection life. For it is only then that we will really be of any actual help to our neighbors, it is only then that we will know the life Jesus came to bring.
* – The last three paragraphs were inspired by Rev. Nathan Nettleton’s 2001 sermon, “Renouncing Gifts and Wasting Resources,” http://southyarrabaptist.church/sermons/renouncing-gifts-and-wasting-resources/.