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)
“Contextual Chaos: How to
Stop Taking the Bible Out of Context,” Week Two
How much money would you be willing to give back
to the police to find its rightful owner if you found it just sitting on the
street, waiting for you? Would you give back all of it, or help yourself to
some of it (whilst calling it a "finders fee" to help you sleep at night), or just not bother turning it in at all?
I’m asking you these questions as you sit here,
in decent clothes and under a sturdy roof, worshiping God at a million-dollar
church campus. I realize many of us are poor, but none of us are as poor as a
homeless man in Canada who was faced with that very question when he happenedupon $2,000 (I mean, it’s in Canadian currency, so it’s basically monopoly
money, but it is legal tender) in the street.
So now, ask yourself that question again, but
this time, imagine that you are homeless. Do you still keep all the money? Do
you keep some for yourself? Do you keep all of it for yourself?
The homeless man—who is, to my knowledge,
anonymous—returned it all. In gratitude, the community in turn raised $5,000
for him to give him a real home to live in. Families donated together, kids put
on lemonade stands, dozens of different households pitched in to raise the
cash.
He turned that money down too, asking for it to
instead be donated to a local charity that provides food.
That’s $7,000 in total—the equivalent of four
months’ wages at the American federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour. So, not quite
as much as the three hundred denarii that Mary sacrifices to honor Jesus. But
it is in that exact same spirit of utter selflessness from the least of those
among us.
This is a new sermon series for a new season—summer
is at long last giving way to autumn, and after an entire summer devoted to a
verse-by-verse series (our exploration of the life and reign of Solomon), we
will be returning to three thematic sermon series, one after the other, to get
us from here to—believe it or not—Christmas! And the first of these thematic
sermon series concerns a habit that I often see, whether in everyday
conversation, or on social media, or even by other pastors that I see in the
papers or on the telly: taking verses of Scripture out of context.
(The best—and funniest instance—of this I’ve seen
is a cartoon of a fellow trying to remove the lid of a pickle jar and in
between grunts of effort, recites Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things
through Christ who strengthens me,” to which his wife says, “Twist the lid,
Tom, not Scripture.”)
It is a mightily tempting vice to engage in—after
all, you’re citing Scripture, what could be wrong about that? Well, first of
all, Satan cited Scripture to Jesus in the wilderness, so it is possible to use
Scripture for ill just as surely as we use it for good. But by taking chapter
and verse out of the remaining chapter—or chapters—that surround it, we treat
the Bible less like a book (or a collection of books, really) and more like a
collection of fortune cookie wisdom: eat a cookie, or a communion wafer for
that matter, get a verse.
And that is simply never how Scripture was
intended to be used. The original manuscripts of the New Testament do not come
with chapter and verse annotated into them—all of that came from later
compilers. So let us, if we are to remain true to the original spirit of the
authors of our sacred texts, try so far as we are able to set aside the taking
of a single verse and instead look at some of the most famous verses from
Scripture and (a) actually see from whence they came, and (b) understand how we
can move away from taking such verses out of context and start taking such verses
to heart!
We began this series last week with one of the
most famous pronouncements of the prophet Jeremiah: that God knows the plans
that God has for you, and they are plans for peace, not disaster, and of a
future filled with hope. This week, we move onto an equally famous
pronouncement of Jesus found in John 12: the poor you will always have with
you.
It is a rebuke that Jesus makes to Judas
Iscariot, and that is the very first salient detail of this particular teaching.
Judas ostensibly object to the spikenard ointment that Mary used to anoint
Jesus because of its expense—it cost three hundred denarii, and a denarius was
a coin worth one day’s pay for an unskilled manual laborer. In modern terms, it
would be worth the equivalent of 8 hours pay at the federal minimum wage.
Mary uses three-quarters of a pound of the nard—if
you can imagine being anointed with twelve ounces of perfume, it’s an obscenely
lavish amount, but it is meant to be lavish. Not only is it, as Jesus said, an
honor done to Him in anticipation of His upcoming crucifixion, death, and
burial (and John reports that at that burial, Jesus will be covered in *one
hundred* pounds of aloes and spices), it is, I have to imagine, an act of
sincere and profound gratitude as well.
Why? Because Mary is not just the sister of
Martha, she is also the sister of Lazarus, the man whom Jesus has just raised
from the dead one chapter prior. So this monetarily expensive act of devotion
by Mary is also likely an act of gratitude as well. So Judas is not just
sneering at Mary’s way of expressing her devotion to Jesus, but at her way of
expressing her deep thanksgiving that her brother is once more among the
living. That is the first crucial part of context that we forget here.
But let’s circle back to Judas. John tells us
that Judas’s real motive wasn’t about a concern for the poor, but because those
three hundred denarii—or at least some of that sum—might have seen their way
into the disciples’ common purse, which Judas both kept and embezzled from. And
Jesus says to him, “The poor you will always have with you.”
Well, obviously. If you steal from the poor—and make
no mistake, the Twelve, aside from probably Matthew, who, as a tax collector,
was likely rather well-off, were all dirt poor—to enrich yourself, then the
poor you will indeed always have with you because they are going to remain
poor. This statement is not a reflection of Jesus’s obliviousness to the plight
of the poor (a cursory reading of Matthew, Mark, or Luke would tell you quite
the opposite: Jesus uplifted the poor and the outcast at every turn, sometimes
at the direct expense of the wealthy).
Rather, this statement from Jesus is a reflection on how Judas is treating the poor among him—his fellow apostles. Judas will always have the poor, because Judas’s thievery keeps them poor.
There is a dimension of spiritual poverty to this
as well—for as long as we sneer at the sacrificial acts of devotion by our
fellow believers, we will have the spiritual poor with us because we will have
become that spiritual poor. Mary’s anointing of Jesus cost the equivalent of
ten months’ wages—this isn’t her posting one of those inane “Click and Share if
You Love Jesus” images on Facebook (because everyone knows that memes are what
our faith is measured by), this is her making a tremendous sacrifice to show
her love for, and gratitude to, her Messiah.
Quite simply, as New Testament scholar Gail R. O’Day
puts it, “Mary acts extravagantly towards Jesus in love and devotion, while
Judas acts out of greed.” They are total counterexamples of each other. And Judas,
in turn, is a counterexample to our anonymous homeless man who turned down
first the two thousand dollars he found lying in the street, and then the five
thousand dollars that his community raised for him out of gratitude.
You do not need to have the means and wealth of
Mary, who can afford a jar of spikenard that costs three hundred days’ wages,
to show that extravagant love, devotion, and selfless sacrifice to the other. This
anonymous man teaches us that quite plainly.
But before he ever came along, before we ever
came along, before Christianity ever came along, we would do quite well to
remember not only the devotion of a woman in Bethany named Mary, but that her
devotion provoked a teaching from that object of her devotion that is not even
remotely an excuse for us to remain complacent in the face of poverty.
The poor that you have, and I have, with us is,
like with Judas the poor of our own making. Jesus’s teaching is indeed not an
excuse.
It is a condemnation.
Let us treat it, then, with the gravity and
seriousness that it, like all His teachings, deserves, rather than dismissing
it as a trite commentary on the sad state of the world in which He, and we,
live. Let us not allow ourselves to be beaten into submission by a world that,
like Judas, will always have the poor because of how it treats the poor. We as
Christians do not get to submit to such greed and such sin.
Let us live out of the richness of devotion,
rather than the bankruptcy of our own selfishness.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
September 18, 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment