Preacher: Julia Baker

Scripture: John 12: 1-8

I keep thinking of Mary walking among the stalls of the marketplace, 

a year’s worth of wages tucked under her garments.

The weight of those coins. The weight of what she knows in the deepest place of her that she must do, her conviction with each step.

I imagine her smelling the pure nard at the vendors and saying, yes this is the one. 

A perfume of the Himalayas, for royalty, for kings, a fragrance that just when opened a bit in that market stalls begins to waft such that heads of those nearby turn.

A fragrance to lavish upon him. To fill the whole house with the clarity of who she is anointing – the One who holds all things together, God’s most beloved son.

A fragrance, a luxury, an abundance to say all that is brimming from her heart, all that can’t put into words or a bullet point list of how she knows what she knows.

I imagine her later that day at the meal. 

This is a celebratory meal. Lazarus, her brother, was raised from the dead

by Jesus just days before.

The emotions of grief and relief are still fresh in her body. In the collective.

Finding a lull in the conversation and a filling of her heart she takes the carved bottle of oil and goes to Jesus.

How she must have trembled — both with nervousness and clarity of cause, with love and sure conviction 

how at that point the body took over, 

the noise of the room stopped, time freezing in the precision of the moment

and she was just the act itself,

the pouring of the golden perfume, the fragrance nearly an assault

so overwhelming-ly good,

the lush, musty smell of both earth and heaven 

meeting on Jesus’s skin. On these feet that have walked through dusty streets.

These feet that would soon walk to death.

It didn’t make sense to wipe his feet then with a cloth, but her very body.

almost unthinking and also profoundly clear of thought, she unclipped her long hair,

letting loose from her headscarf and used her locks to wipe his feet.

“The whole fragrance filled the house.” 

—-

Can you imagine the stunned silence? The clattering of dishes and conversation brought to a halt as the room took in the incomprehensible of what was happening.

I imagine the disciples looking from Mary to Jesus to each other.

I like to imagine Jesus’s face only on Mary.

Receiving. 

He knows what is coming in the next days in Jerusalem…

The smell of death — Lazurus’s tomb, a body dead for 4 days — still lingers in close memory. 

This act of Mary anointing him before his own burial, before his own body will be wrapped and in a tomb…

I imagine Jesus feeling the cool oil on his feet. Feeling Mary’s hair. 

Smelling the intoxicating nard wafting and overtaking the house with the fragrance of this act of love, this act of worship, this act of seeing him —

seeing who he is as 

Messiah as King.

caregiver. 

teacher.

prophet and preacher.

justice worker.

human.

Divine.

Seeing that he is going to die soon. Seeing that Powers of those bound in Fear will kill him. Seeing his need to be honored in this way.

—-

And, of course, the energy in the room of those witnessing this act. I imagine the reactions were different among each, what we get recorded is Judas’s words His feigned critique of Mary’s extravagant action.

As we read…we know this was an explicitly self-interested indignation on the part of Judas.

I can see Judas in that place of tension. And not just from the outside as an observer to it, I don’t have to just imagine, but can feel into my own rutted judgmental ill-placed moments when I don’t know the whole story.

I think of learning that the church I go to has a very expensive (like in the millions) pipe organ. I felt judgement at the extravagance of that “all that could have been used for the poor!” and then learning the story of that money, saved slowly over years pennies here and there by a long-time church attender for whom the bellows of a organ was a direct line of communion with God. That person’s wish for their saved money when they died was when the time came for a new organ, they wanted to help with that. To continue that resounding music for generations….

My judgement was humbled.

What other times do we smell something that is actually ripe with lavish generosity and all we see is that it isn’t benefiting what we want it benefit?

—-

In response to Judas Jesus stands up for, empowers and blesses Mary’s action.

I imagine the relief Mary felt.

Through Jesus’s words of blessing he gives the message that this being bodies here is good, to experience and feel with our senses is deeply good. 

Jesus is blessing beauty and abundance (to help another feel loved and seen)

as important — especially in the hardest moments of life. 

Jesus affirms not only Mary’s action, but agrees with what it points to, honoring him as The Anointed One (which is what Christ means), The Chosen One. 

—-

I also imagine the confusion as the disciples heard Jesus’s words….

“you will always have the poor with you, you will not always .” 

Commentators point us back to Jesus’s referencing of Deut. 15:11 —

“There will always be the poor people in the land. Therefore I commend you to be open handed.”

I wonder if Jesus’s words, “you will always have the poor with you” isn’t an over and against comment. That may be Jesus is saying, look at this example of Mary as you give abundantly and lavishly to the poor, that will always be with you.

As my sister, Mennonite pastor Christie Dahlin says in a sermon of hers on this passage, “Maybe what Jesus is saying is “Mary is anointing me as I am present here and now, when you give abundantly to those in need you are caring for me” Mary is saying with her embodied actions, and abundant giving, I see you, I bless you, In this present moment.

—-

Mary’s action – her jaw dropping action — 

is not stand alone but part of a grand pattern part of Luke’s opening words to Theopolosi — 

“You need to understand some key things about how this happened…about who the people who were around Jesus saw him as…”

Part of a stream of people whose reactions to Jesus were the only “rational” thing that could be done after — I think of the crowds after the feeding of the 5000 who said “make him King!” as they carried the baskets of leftover food, These aren’t the responses of people who are moved by a moral teaching about sharing lunches or Mary simply a lesson on generous giving. 

I think of the disciples at that very table who dropped nets and lives just at Jesus’s words “Follow Me.” What did they see in Jesus as he spoke those words, what did they hear? How did he shine with the clarity of This is Who I have been Waiting For. 

I like to think of the thousands of courageous responses through the centuries, reactions that are outside the realm of sense making or anyone else agreeing or understanding. Those recorded moments and those not, those in our own lives, those grand and subtle like a breeze where we say with lavishness poured in a public act (I think of Martin Luther being asked to recant his faith or die and saying, “My conscience is captive on the Word of God. Thus I cannot recant because acting against one’s conscience is neither safe nor sound. Here I stand. I can do no other.” 

Those proclaimed words we know of and the many in a quiet heart knowings that have changed the course of history countless times over — 

“I was HERE Jesus happened and now I am over here.” 

—-

As we move into the close of Lent, into Palm Sunday next week — the clip-clop of the donkey is almost in ear shot —

I just learned, like this morning at the church service I attended, that the Greek Orthodox word for Lent is “Bright Sadness.” I love this.

That to me feels like what this being follower of Jesus is about in this world. To live in the quiet and sure hope that doesn’t ignore any emotion. Doesn’t ignore lament and death and says there is a Grand Story woven through it all — a bright story.

How are you invited to even more deeply sink into that bright story — the awe and truth of who Jesus is. To really receive the profound good news of it such that we also ready for our hearts to be stirred to embody whatever bold outpouring of that WOW we are each called to….so that the fragrance of Jesus – The Anointed One – fills this world. 

Amen. 

—-

Go deeply loved. Deeply seen exactly as and where you are by The Anointed One to out pour your gift in the world….