Six days before Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, home of Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. 2 Lazarus and his sisters hosted a dinner for him. Martha served and Lazarus was among those who joined him at the table. 3 Then Mary took an extraordinary amount, almost three-quarters of a pound of very expensive perfume made of pure nard. She anointed Jesus’ feet with it, then wiped his feet dry with her hair. The house was filled with the aroma of the perfume. 4 Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), complained, 5 “This perfume was worth a year’s wages! Why wasn’t it sold and the money given to the poor?” (6 He said this not because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief. He carried the money bag and would take what was in it.)
7 Then Jesus said, “Leave her alone. This perfume was to be used in preparation for my burial, and this is how she has used it. 8 You will always have the poor among you, but you won’t always have me.” 9 Many 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. 10 The chief priests decided that they would kill Lazarus too. 11 It was because of Lazarus that many of the Jews had deserted them and come to believe in Jesus.(Common English Bible)
“Three Years in Three Weeks: Christ’s Ministry,
Our Calling,” Week Three
The
Church of the Holy Sepulchre rises up out of the stones and sand of the Old
City in Jerusalem, with its twin domes making it instantly recognizable from
the outside. Inside, it holds a shrine
that tradition says stands over the very spot where the hill we call Calvary or
Golgotha once stood: the hill where Scripture tells us Jesus was crucified, and
further down into the church building is the site where some hold that Jesus’s
tomb had been as well. It really is an amazing
place to be a pilgrim at.
Controlling
access to this holy site are, primarily, three different religious denominations:
the Greek Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, and the Roman
Catholic Church. And you would think,
considering the venerable and historical nature of the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre, they would be enthusiastic stewards of such a titanic piece of
Christendom. You would be wrong.
For
centuries, the three factions have squabbled over power, caretaking duties, and
stewardship of the church to the point that as recently as in 2008, fisticuffs
broke out between Greek and Armenian monks on the feast day of the Holy
Cross. Israeli police officers had to be
called in. To one of the holiest churches
in the world.
And when
you consider that one of the primary job duties of being a monk is to, well,
pray, it makes you wonder just how much easier we have made it for ourselves to
disagree with each other over Jesus rather than to pray to Him. And the answer is that, well, we have been
doing it ever since He was here, as far back as this story from John’s Gospel
as another Passover rolls around.
It feels
a little bit weird, doesn’t it? We just
wrapped up an 11-week sermon series three weeks ago, and here we are, wrapping
up another “new” sermon series today!
But this three week series was always meant to be just three weeks,
because it coincides with the start of year four of all y’all putting up with
me, and I have to say, looking back on our first three years together, there is
a lot for us to be proud of and to hang our proverbial hats on: we’ve seen the
marriages of half a dozen couples involved in the church, we’ve had 9 (10 next
week!) baptisms, and the amount of mission work that we’ve done in the
community, measuring in the tens of thousands of dollars in value, which, when
you consider our still small size, speaks volumes to this congregation’s
commitment to fulfilling Christ’s fundamental command to care for the
marginalized among us.
But there
is still so much for us to do, and I haven’t done an explicitly vision casting
sermon series for our community since the “Time to be Church” series way, way
back in the beginning of 2013, and a lot has changed for us since then. So, this series is meant to represent, in three
installments, what I am envisioning for our next three years together, and the
series’ structure comes from how John’s Gospel describes the beginning of each
of the three years of Jesus’ own ministry, and we began two weeks ago in Year
One with a famous story that the other three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke,
place towards the end of Jesus’ ministry, but one that John curiously puts at
the very beginning: the cleansing of the temple in Jerusalem. Last week, we get to Year Two, which is
marked by another well-known story that is in all four Gospels: the feeding of
the five thousand. This week, we arrive
at Year Three, the final Passover, the one what we call the Passion. Only we aren’t quite there yet…in fact, we
aren’t even in Jerusalem, we’re in Bethany with Mary and Martha and Lazarus
(yep, the very same dude whom Jesus resurrects from the dead just a chapter
earlier).
But
unlike John 11, the beginning of John 12 focuses not on Lazarus, but on one of
his sisters, Mary. She finds Jesus just
as He is taking a detour from His final journey towards Jerusalem to visit them
in their hometown of Bethany. She seeks
him out, kneels at his feet, and anoints Him as Judas Iscariot looks on and
scorns her. Despite this scorn, there is
a word for what Mary is exhibiting here: reverence. She has sought Jesus out in order to be
reverent and prayerful before Him.
And
especially from John’s perspective, it is right that she should do so, because
John has such a high view of Jesus’s divinity: Jesus as the divine Word, the
Logos, that came to earth and lived among us, Jesus as the Resurrection and the
Life, Jesus as the Bread of Life, and so on.
But in this passage, Jesus really is able to be human for a change—He is
finally able to allow someone else to minister to Him rather than the other way
around—and what an impact that singular reality has on Him, as He reminds Judas
in verse eight, “You do not always have me.”
This is a
lesson easily applicable to each of us as well: we do not always have one
another. As easy as it is to fall into the
rut of taking one another for granted (and, similarly, taking God for granted),
it is vital that we do not do so.
And John
hits us over the head with that message throughout this story: he is telling us
with as many blatantly obvious clues as possible whose perspective and actions
we are meant to value and emulate here.
John doesn’t just mention Judas by name; he also adds that this is the
guy who was to betray Jesus, that he was a thief, and that he stole from the
common purse of his fellow disciples.
One practically expects John to just keep going in this vein and say
that Judas is also the Sith Lord who destroyed the Republic in Star Wars and
who is, on Sundays, a 49ers fan.
It is
meant to be as clear as day to us that Judas is the antagonist here, and that
we are meant to contrast his bad guy example to the protagonist example of
being good, which Mary (who, as a woman, would have been of far less social
significance and importance than Judas in ancient Israel) exemplifies and
personifies. If Judas is the bosom buddy
of Sith Lords and Colin Kaepernick, well, Mary is simply the person who each of
us strives to be: someone who is not necessarily wealthy, or a major somebody,
but who is still capable of great goodness simply by taking the time to do so,
something that we don’t always take the time to do, no matter how simple it may
seem to us.
Because
in our lives, we are always trying to move closer to whatever our next goal or
accomplishment is…a new car, or a promotion, or moving into a new home. There’s always something on the horizon, and
that’s not necessarily a bad thing: it’s what keeps us moving forward, and I
talked a lot last week about us being grateful for the future rather than
fearful of it. But that also shouldn’t
come at the expense of the present. And
I definitely include myself in this, in terms of always moving on to the next
big thing before finishing what it is that I have already started.
Now, I realize
that there will be times when that is just not possible, where we just cannot
be as present and in tune with those around us in that moment as we would like
to be. We’re human. We’re inherently imperfect. Stuff happens, and we have to react to
it. And I say this because I believe
that sometimes, maybe not all the time, but definitely sometimes, it takes all
of the awfulness happening to us in all of those moments to make us realize how
little were paying attention to the fact that our attention is, in fact, a very
valuable commodity.
I’ll
repeat that: sometimes, it takes getting overwhelmed by all the insanity and
pain around us to recognize just how valuable a gift our attention and our
reverence can be, for both God and for each other. Because in that moment, mere days before the
Passion, her attention was the greatest gift that Mary could have given
Jesus. In that moment, her ministry was
the greatest possible thing Jesus could have received from her. And He recognizes it as such. It means that sometimes, the greatest gift we
can give is our attention, our care, or ability to be good to one another,
because it is such a profound and sacred way of saying, “I revere you.” And in this way, it is absolutely a type of
prayer.
Which
means we need to be busy building up our own prayer practices and disciplines
and exercises to be enough to include all of the people we know who do need our
prayer and our attentions. It means
building up our own spirituality so that we can then in turn build up one
another.
If that
sounds complicated, or a like a lot of work, that’s because it is both of those
things. Which is why we so often turn to
the simpler course of tearing one another down, or of digging into each other
like Judas does to Mary, and fighting each other like the monks of the Church
of the Holy Sepulchre do, or outright annihilating each other, which we have
done, well, throughout history.
Jesus,
though, in rebuking Judas likewise rebukes that tendency for us to break each
other rather than to strengthen each other.
Contrary to popular belief, His rebuke about the poor always being with
us has nothing to do with a disregard for the poor: read through Matthew, Mark,
and Luke, and you’ll see just how heavily an emphasis Jesus puts on standing
with and aiding the poor. No, Jesus is
in fact quoting an Old Testament verse, at least in part: Deuteronomy 15:11
says there will always be the poor and needy in the land, and thus God commands
us to be generous with them.
But as we’ve
seen, Judas isn’t generous with the poor, because the Apostles themselves are
poor and itinerant, and Judas steals from them.
Jesus is telling Judas that he will always have the poor with him
because when you steal from the poor, they will generally remain poor.
And
likewise, just as if you take from someone who is materially poor, they tend to
stay materially poor, so too if you harm a person who is already spiritually
poor, they will often remain spiritually poor.
It is a vicious cycle that we put one another in, even though we have
already been given the tools to break out of that cycle by this itinerant carpenter
from Galilee whom we call the Christ.
I have
heard from many of you—too many of you—of your own stories of having been torn
down by people claiming to believe in that same Christ. And I am so very, very sorry that you have
experienced such treatment from people who, despite their faith, have ended up
acting more like Judas in this passage than like Mary.
Being
prayerful means considering not only our own prayers to God, but the prayers of
those around us. It means praying in a
community. It means praying in the world
as it has been presented to us, not necessarily the world that we might hold
out indefinitely for. It means praying
for people we might never thought we’d pray for. It means praying with more than just
words. It means praying with your whole
selves. It means praying before the feet
of Jesus as Mary once did.
What an
amazing charge to be entrusted with as a church. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Eric
Atcheson
Longview, Washington
Longview, Washington
September 21, 2014
(original photo credit: ligonier.org)
(original photo credit: ligonier.org)
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