She is not one of the more famous Marys. She is neither Mary of
Nazareth, the Galilean maiden who becomes Jesus’s mother, nor Mary of
Magdala, who hails from a fishing village along the shores of the Sea
of Galilee and, having been healed of mental illness by Jesus, becomes
one of his traveling companions.
No, she is Mary of Bethany, who lives with her sister Martha and
her brother Lazarus in a village to the south, a little east of
Jerusalem, on the verge of the Judean wilderness. It is she who on
this last Saturday night of Jesus’s life, at a dinner party being held
both to welcome him and to usher out the sabbath—it is Mary of Bethany
who anoints Jesus with the fragrance of her love.
Come the morrow—that is, Sunday—Jesus will set out from Bethany to
enact his great sign-drama of riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, as
throngs of Passover pilgrims wave palm branches and shout, “Hosanna!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—the King of
Israel!” (John 12:12–15)
But now it is the night prior to that, and at this meal, in the
home of such dear friends, it’s an altogether different kind of moment
that’s being observed—a time for Jesus, his closest disciples, and his
hosts to be sharing an evening of quiet repose, of deep friendship, of
warm affection, before the tumult to come.
This dinner scene, portrayed in our Second Lesson, is such a
sensuous one. It is so personal, so tender, so intimate, so charged
with feeling and emotion. Jesus is reclining on a couch. Mary, with
her hair loosened and hanging long, is touching him, rubbing aromatic
oil on his feet, causing the scent of perfume to fill the air……
But I’m a little ahead of myself, so let me back up just a bit.
As recounted in the Gospel of John, Jesus and his disciples are on
their way to Jerusalem, where they will be celebrating the festival of
Passover, and where, as Jesus knows, he will be put to death.
They, like all pilgrims to this festival, require lodgings. So
they’ve come to the village of Bethany, just a short walk from
Jerusalem, where they’ve arranged to stay in the home of Jesus’s close
friends—Martha and Mary and Lazarus.
It is Saturday night, time for the meal that ushers out the sabbath.
So Jesus, his closest disciples, and his friend and host Lazarus are
reclining on a circle of divans, for at special dinner parties in
first-century Roman Palestine it is the fashion to accommodate guests
on couches while they dine. Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus,
are—to render the Greek text literally—“deaconing” the meal. That is,
they’re circulating among the guests, caring for their needs and
serving them food and drink.
Now, the Martha-Mary-Lazarus household seems fairly well-to-do.
For it’s furnished with these fashionable couches and it’s commodious
enough to accommodate quite a large number of sleepover guests, not
only for this one night but also for the entire duration of the Passover
festival. Furthermore, their household is well enough financed that
Mary has been able to acquire such a “luxury item” as that pint of nard,
costing nearly a year’s wages. You see, nard is a fragrant oil derived
from the roots and hair stems of a plant native not to the hills of
Palestine but to that far-off region of the Himalayas. So nard has to
be imported by caravan all the way from north India and Nepal, half a
world away. And why bother? Well, because this exquisite perfume-like
oil can be so well used for such a wide variety of purposes—celebratory,
cosmetic, medicinal, even mortuary.
Yes, in this last-mentioned usage—mortuary—nard is applied liberally
to a corpse to cover the odor of decay. And what of the first-mentioned
usage—celebratory? Well, a fine illustration of this is portrayed in the
Old Testament book called Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon. Here the
woman singer describes her act of celebrating, honoring, and cherishing
her beloved lord. She says, “While the king was on his couch, my nard
gave forth its fragrance.” (1:12)
So in today’s lesson, when Mary sees Jesus reclining on his couch, she
may well be thinking of this scene from the Song of Songs and saying to
herself: “Here he is, my Lord! Right here with me, my beloved king and
Messiah!” And thinking this, she goes quickly to fetch her jar of nard.
Then, holding it in hand, she positions herself at the end of Jesus’s
divan, near his feet, prepared to let it release the fragrance of her
love.
Now, for Mary, as for the woman in the Song of Songs, offering nard
to her king is a deed of pure joy and affection. Indeed, when Mary
bathes Jesus’s feet with oil, her exuberant love leads her to ignore one
of the strict proprieties of that time. For she loosens her hair, right
there in this public setting where all the guests can see, letting it
hang long, in flowing tresses. And then, in an act of tender intimacy,
she proceeds to use her hair to wipe Jesus’s feet. And as she does this,
the fragrance of her nard, the fragrance of her love, fills the whole
house.
When Jesus experiences Mary’s loving act of anointing, he fully
understands the joy and affection that’s being conveyed. Yet he points
out to her a deeper symbolism that’s also being conveyed, something she
and the others do not yet comprehend. For in Mary’s act, Jesus also
perceives a portent of his imminent death and of the soon-coming need for
friends of his to use nard-like aromatics to help prepare his corpse for
burial. “Leave her alone,” Jesus says to the complaining Judas. “She
bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.” (12:7)
For Jesus, and for the Gospel of John, there’s rich symbolism to
Mary’s nard. It has connotations that are both celebratory and
also mortuary. For the full symbolism of Mary’s nard already
anticipates the superscription that later in the week will be affixed to
Jesus’s cross, the death notice that will read, in three languages,
“Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” (John 20:19–20)
So it turns out that Mary of Bethany, who is lovingly anointing Jesus’s
feet in order to honor and cherish him as her king and Messiah—it turns
out that she is also, through the symbolism of her act, preparing him for
his burial six days later.
Now, the author of the Gospel of John describes this loving deed of
Mary’s in such detail because for him her act stands as a prime example
of what it means to be a disciple of Christ. You see, what Mary does for
Jesus exemplifies: first, serving one another; and second, loving one
another; and third, standing somehow in solidarity with the event of
Christ’s Passion. For together, these various components of Mary’s
loving act foreshadow one, two, yes three upcoming, all-important
scenes that are to take place in the final week of Jesus’s life, as John
describes it.
First, five days hence, at the beginning of Jesus’s last meal
with his disciples, Jesus himself will take the role of a servant,
sitting at their feet and bathing their feet (John 13:12–16)—a scene we
here at Rutgers re-enact each Maundy Thursday at our foot-washing ritual.
Mary’s service of bathing Jesus’s feet with oil on that preceding Saturday
night prefigures Jesus’s service of bathing his disciples’ feet with water
at the Last Supper.
Second, later in Jesus’s final meal with his disciples, he will
proclaim to them his great commandment, or to use the Latin word, his
great mandatum. Now, “mandatum” is the word that underlies
the name we Protestants give to the day in Holy Week on which we observe
this meal, the day we call “Maundy” Thursday.
So at the Last Supper, some five days after the Saturday night meal
at Mary’s home, Jesus will say to his disciples (John 13:34): “I give
you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved
you, you also should love one another.” Well, on this Saturday night
prior, Mary anticipates Jesus’s commandment before ever he gives
it and so becomes a primary model for one who lives out Jesus’s
commandment to love one another. You see, Mary’s act of love is not
one that is in any way deferred, or qualified, or calculated. No, it
is an act of love that is immediate and spontaneous, offered to him at
the very moment the opportunity presents itself. In her love, Mary
gives boldly of herself to Jesus as his hour of death draws near, just
as, in his love, Jesus gives boldly of himself right through the hour
of his death. Thus, the author of John identifies this woman as one
who embodies the fullness and the immediacy of the kind of love Jesus
commands of all his followers.
So, one and two. First of all, Mary’s deed foreshadows Jesus’s act
of washing the disciples’ feet and thus models for us the humble service
all followers of Christ are to perform. And second of all, Mary’s deed
foreshadows Jesus’s act of giving his disciples the commandment to love
one another and thus models for us the ideal of what spontaneous,
whole-hearted acts of love look like.
One, two—and three. There’s also a third scene from Holy Week that
Mary’s deed on that Saturday night in Bethany foreshadows, and that’s
the Good Friday scene in which Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus
remove Jesus’s corpse from the cross and prepare it for burial in the
tomb by anointing it with aromatic spices (John 19:38–42). You see,
in Jesus’s day one would not normally anoint the feet of a living
person, as Mary does for Jesus. Rather, one would anoint the feet of
a corpse, as a part of preparing it ritually for burial. Thus, through
the full symbolism of Mary’s deed, she is shown offering to Jesus her
loving solidarity with him through the final hours of his life, as he
suffers, dies, and is buried.
So one, two, and three. Mary’s anointing of Jesus models what it
means for followers of Christ (1) to serve one another, (2) to love
one another, and (3) to somehow stand in solidarity with the event of
Christ’s Passion.
But then there’s Judas, who, as one of the Twelve, is reclining
near Jesus when Mary anoints Jesus’s feet. Judas quickly protests
the extravagance of this act. Judas speaks as if love is a scarce
resource, as if the offering of love is a matter of “either/or else”:
either you love Jesus and one another, or else you
love the poor.
But you know, love is something that can be so abundant that the
offering of it really can become a matter of “both/and also”:
both you love Jesus and one another, and also you love
the poor. So Jesus defends the beauty and the integrity of Mary’s
deed.
Yet, in the face of the world’s poverty and suffering, people ever
since the fragrance of Mary’s love was first released have been saying
that it is pointless and extravagant to express our love for Christ,
for God, and for one another in such ways as restoring an organ at so
considerable an expense and as maintaining this costly house of
worship where we gather to proclaim and glorify God.
Well, there are many, many times when this congregation addresses
poverty and suffering—when we shelter the homeless, when we open our
doors to the children of this community, when we defend the aged and
the poor, when we cry out for justice. God knows that we work daily
at the Rutgers Church and beyond the Rutgers Church to
bind up the brokenhearted and to lift the lowly.
Yet at times like this morning it is our privilege and joy to fill
this house with the fragrance of our love for Jesus. We focus on God,
and touch each other, and anticipate in song and prayer the good news
of Easter.
And it may be, that when we leave this place and go back out into
the streets, when we read of war and violence and the tragedies that
lead us to hold close our children, our family, our friends, and when
the dreariness of human sinfulness threatens to overwhelm our
spirits—yes, it may be that what will then lift us is the love
and beauty we’ve shared and experienced here today. Perhaps in our
moments of despair and depression we’ll hear again the music of a
hymn or an anthem sung in this place, or we’ll remember the words of
a prayer or scripture lesson recited here, or we’ll re-experience our
sharing of Christ’s peace.
And maybe out there in that big, bad world beyond these doors,
we’ll even be caught off guard by a certain whiff of sweetness in the
air. “What’s that?” we’ll ask. “Ah yes, that reminds me of the
fragrance of an extravagant love, which, like Mary’s, can fill not
only a whole house but even our whole world”—an extravagant love like
Mary’s for Jesus, an extravagant love like God’s for us, the kind of
extravagant love that can overcome all anxiety, and fear, and loss.
Yes, the fragrance of Mary’s love, released on that Saturday night
long ago, can remind us that all our wants and all our fears can be
overcome. We just need to join in offering both to Christ
and also to the rest of humankind—we just need to join in
offering the gift of our extravagant love.
Let us pray:
O God, may the fragrance of our love, like Mary’s, fill the world.
In the name of Christ, we pray. Amen.