It was two days before Passover and the Festival of Unleavened Bread. The chief priests and legal experts through cunning tricks were searching for a way to arrest Jesus and kill him. 2 But they agreed that it shouldn’t happen during the festival; otherwise, there would be an uproar among the people. 3 Jesus was at Bethany visiting the house of Simon, who had a skin disease. During dinner, a woman came in with a vase made of alabaster and containing very expensive perfume of pure nard. She broke open the vase and poured the perfume on his head. 4 Some grew angry. They said to each other, “Why waste the perfume? 5 This perfume could have been sold for almost a year’s pay[a] and the money given to the poor.” And they scolded her. 6 Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why do you make trouble for her? She has done a good thing for me. 7 You always have the poor with you; and whenever you want, you can do something good for them. But you won’t always have me. 8 She has done what she could. She has anointed my body ahead of time for burial. 9 I tell you the truth that, wherever in the whole world the good news is announced, what she’s done will also be told in memory of her.” (Common English Bible)
“The Last
Week: Mark’s Retelling of the Passion,” Week Three
The words made headlines in newspapers and news
sites across the world upon his death: Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.
With those words, Steve Jobs left the world of
the living. And he was by no means the
first to react to the moment of death in such a profound way. On his deathbed in West Orange, New Jersey,
in the year 1931 and at the age of 84, Thomas Edison emerged briefly from a
coma to utter out, “It is very beautiful over there” before dying only hours
later.
There is a fear I think we culturally have in
death…I mean, for *bleep*’s sake, look at cottage industry of second-rate
horror movies designed and produced for the express and exclusive purpose of
scaring the pants off of us. While that
may be great for the pants industry, because we are continually having to buy
new pants to replace the ones that were scared off of us, it isn’t so great for
us being able to have a real conversation together about life and death.
And yet, that reality was just as true for the
Apostles way back in Biblical Israel, before our era of newfangled things like
talking pictures and Technicolor, as it is for us today. The first person to recognize the impending
reality of Jesus’s death is not one of the twelve, but this woman who emerges
here today to anoint Jesus and, in so doing, prepare Him for His burial. And so she, then, becomes our ideal to which
we must aspire, even though (at least in Mark’s account) we do not even know
her name.
Now that Lent, that 40-day fast in the wilderness
alongside Jesus as He is tempted by the devil, has not just begun but can
officially be considered to be in full swing, so too does a new sermon series
really begin digging in for us as well.
And we’ll continue stretching out Holy Week—that seven-day span of time
from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday—by talking about each day in turn, starting
with Monday (that way we can discuss Palm Sunday on, you know, Palm Sunday)
before wrapping up with Easter Sunday itself on April 5. For this sermon series, I am using as a
template the book “The Last Week,” a commentary on the Gospel of Mark’s telling
of Holy Week, co-written by Bible scholars John Dominic Crossan and Marcus
Borg. Professor Borg just passed away a
few weeks ago, plus this book is one of a precious few on my list of “it truly
changed my life” books, so this series has a lot of added meaning for me as
well as, I hope, eventually for you too.
After beginning this series by first reading
through Mark’s accounts of Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week, we arrive at
Wednesday, and this story of the anointing of Jesus. This story is repeated in John’s Gospel with
Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, playing the role of the anonymous woman
here who anoints Jesus, but today, we remain in Mark’s account. Here is part of what Borg and Crossan have to
say about this vignette:
The
significance of her action becomes clear.
“She has done what she cold,” says Jesus, she has “anointed my body
beforehand for its burial.” (14:8) She
alone, of all those who heard Jesus’s three prophecies of his death and
resurrection, believed him and drew the obvious conclusion. Since (not
if) you are going to die and rise, I must anoint you now beforehand,
because I will never have a chance to do it afterward. She is, for Mark, the first
believer. She is, for us, the first
Christian. And she believed from the
word of Jesus before any discovery of an empty tomb.
Furthermore,
her action was a graphic demonstration of the paradoxical leadership cited by
Jesus for Himself and for all His followers on the model of child, servant, and
slave…The
unnamed woman is not only the first believer; she is also the model leader…Jesus has been telling the Twelve what
leadership entails from Caesarea Philippi to Jerusalem and has gotten nowhere
with them. But this unnamed woman
believed Him…For Mark, that unnamed woman is, in our terms, the first
Christian, and she believed, again in our terms, even before the first Easter.
Firsts in anything often are met with scorn in
the present, even if they are revered in the days, years, and centuries that
follow. Rare is a trailblazer like Neil
Armstrong who placed humanity’s first footprint on the Moon to worldwide
acclaim; far more common is for someone ahead of the pack to be demonized by
the pack, to be cast out and punished for their different (albeit correct) way
of looking at things: Galileo, Copernicus, and others were persecuted by the
church for daring to argue that the world was round and that it revolved around
the sun, rather than the other way around.
Martin Luther King, Jr. has a national holiday named after him today,
but in his time, many people (including, shamefully, many Christians and
Christian clergy) rushed to discredit him as a Communist or an unpatriotic
race-baiter.
And this anonymous woman—whether she be Mary of
Bethany or someone else entirely—is someone whom Mark proffers to us as an
ideal some thirty-ish years after the event, when he finally gets around to
writing his Gospel, but in the moment, she is met only with scorn by the
closest of Jesus’s male followers, the Twelve.
And perhaps we might well be among them; after
all, the guy in me who buys his shower gel at Safeway would think it utter
folly to even own a jar of perfume that cost a year’s wages, but that isn’t
what this is all about. I don’t plan on
being anointed with Old Spice when I go, because that isn’t a burial custom
here. It was, however, a burial custom
in Biblical Israel (and, indeed, in many ancient Near Eastern civilizations) to
anoint the body with lots of aloes, myrrh, spices, and other such perfumes in
preparing it for burial; it had the practical purpose of mitigating the stench
of decay, but it also expressed a person’s reverence, honor, and care for the
person they were burying.
Which is precisely what is happening here—a woman
appears to express her reverence, honor, and care for Jesus, knowing that if He
is to be executed, it would likely be by crucifixion, a method of execution
that would often leave no remains that could be buried: it was not uncommon for
feral dogs and scavenger birds to pick at a crucified body to such an extent
that there was nothing left for a family or friend to anoint and bury. And since the proverbial noose is growing tighter
and tighter (as Mark clearly points out when he begins this chapter and story)
this woman likely knows the inning and the score and decides that if she is to
prepare Jesus’s body for the inevitable funeral, it must be now. Who knows when she will be able to tomorrow,
or the day after that?
In the midst of that uncertainty, she knew this
much: this man, this god, this person nobody else could ever hope to be, was on
His way out, and rather than try to deny that reality or bury it deep down
where she wouldn’t have to confront it, she accepted it head-on and did what
any one of us might do, or want to do but are sometimes too afraid of what it
might mean: say goodbye.
That’s why I honestly wonder if this complaint
about the expense of the perfume isn’t sort of misdirected anger and denial,
anger at this woman for acknowledging what they, the disciples, won’t: that
their Lord is about to endure the unendurable, and that they will be there for
exactly zero of it.
But this woman will be, because she did not let
that fear paralyze her; it did not keep her from honoring the one person in our
collective history most worthy of our honor.
She may or may not have been physically present for the crucifixion—the Gospels
say that, in contrast to Jesus’s male followers (who have all gone into
hiding), several of His female followers did observe the crucifixion. This woman may well have not only prepared
Jesus’s earthen vessel for what it was about to go through, she could have also
been there for the final hours of that earthen vessel’s life.
All because she was willing, ready, able, and
brave enough to have that honest moment about something that horrifies us, even
as we anticipate the heaven that comes afterwards: dying to this world.
And it means that we, as we struggle and strive to
shift our perspectives from those of the Apostles to that of this lone woman,
we too might end up present at the foot of the cross, maybe no longer
physically, but certainly spiritually, emotionally, and religiously. We can still be present to what our Lord is
about to suffer at our hands, and then, rather than wash those hands as Pilate
will two days from now, let us use those hands, beaten and bloodied though they
may be, to one day embrace the resurrected Christ who shall one day walk
amongst us, just as His former self once did two thousand years ago in Galilee.
May it be so.
Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
Longview, Washington
March 8, 2015
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