Here Jesus comes and that woman, Mary, who I imagined hitting Jesus’s chest in anger and mourning, whose brother has been brought back from the dead, this Mary, takes a pound of ointment, which is brought in a giant vessel and she is going to wash Jesus’s feet and prepare him for his burial.
Mary and the Grace of Discipleship
Lent 5C | John 12:1-8
Dead
To truly appreciate this gospel story, we need to back up.
Jesus is teaching and bringing people along and giving some clue to what he’s up to. In this gospel we call John, we get a more spiritual and mystical Jesus, right? So he’s talking about himself as the good shepherd, protecting his sheep from the thief:
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.
He’s talking about himself and his work and this upsets the Jewish leadership who begin to plot against him. And those people hearing this story for the first time are feeling like this is the setup of a clash between the good guys and the bad guys.
It is then that Jesus hears from his close friends, first Martha, then Mary, that their brother, Lazarus, apparently Jesus’s BFF is sick and dying. They think Jesus can save his life and heal him. So they plead with him and he takes his time coming to Bethany, to their home in which the three of them are living, and when he gets into town, it is too late. Lazarus is long dead.
During this traveling, they couldn’t wait for Jesus. But you know they did. Even after the man has died, they waited. They waited and waited and the body has gone through its process of stiffening and you know they were still waiting for Jesus, even then. But then his body started to decay. The organs, the fluids, release; the smell. They couldn’t wait any more, so they wrapped him up and prepared him and put him in a tomb.
Four days later Jesus shows up and tells them that Lazarus isn’t dead: he’s sleeping. Oh c’mon, Jesus, they think, you weren’t here. You don’t know. You didn’t smell him.
And Mary and Martha are grieving and I can imagine Mary hitting Jesus’s chest as she collapses into his arms Where were you? You could’ve saved his life!
And here we take a moment to recognize that this whole thing is so upsetting to Jesus that he weeps. This is the only depiction of a truly distraught Jesus in the gospels. He’s upset about this, too.
He goes to the tomb anyway and they roll back the stone and he calls for Lazarus to come out and he does and Jesus tells them to unwrap him. The dead has been raised. The story turns so fast, so confusingly. Has this really happened? Has Jesus truly raised this man from the dead?
This moment seems to have divided the people who witnessed it because some came to believe Jesus is the Son of GOD, right? But some were freaked out and went to the Jewish leadership and that freaked them out and now Jesus’s life is in danger. It says he has to stay away to avoid arrest.
The narrative then returns to that house in Bethany where Mary and Martha and Lazarus live again. It is probably weeks later but it is only the next chapter. And Jesus and his disciples stay here with Jesus’s friends as they prepare to enter Jerusalem, for it is nearly Palm Sunday.
Here Jesus comes and that woman, Mary, who I imagined hitting Jesus’s chest in anger and mourning, whose brother has been brought back from the dead, this Mary, takes a pound of ointment, which is brought in a giant vessel and she is going to wash Jesus’s feet and prepare him for his burial.
We remember that these containers don’t have replaceable stoppers on them, so she has all of this expensive, ridiculously expensive oil which comes from hundreds of miles away, and she can’t just pour a little bit on his feet, she has to break the vessel and use it all.
So she pours it on his feet and it goes all over the floor and rubs the oil into the bottoms, his heels, into the calluses and the blisters and then she wipes his feet with her own hair.
This is a scene of such gratitude and thanksgiving. And somehow she knows, doesn’t she? She knows where Jesus is going and why she needs to do this. She somehow knows that this moment, this act is the quintessential act of love and devotion to him.
Discipleship
Of course, we learn shortly after this, when they gather for dinner for what we call the Last Supper, Jesus will leave his seat at the table and wash the disciples’ feet. He will give them the honor of cleaning and purifying and preparing them for what is to come.
And when he does this, what will he say?
You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.
The act of discipleship and service, the thing they are all to do, is to wash one another’s feet. This is the highest image for what it means to be a disciple.
Peter’s curious response proves they don’t quite get it, that they don’t see the moment’s power; they don’t remember Mary in Bethany a few days earlier, being the quintessential disciple when the institutions wouldn’t let her be, the conventions of the time would never admit, the powers-that-be would have crucified her if they had realized what Jesus has done.
She is more disciple than they are because she serves Jesus while the men are still worrying about their own skin.
Juxtaposed with Judas
Mary, then, is juxtaposed with Judas, the one who here is not really a disciple, not really one of them. He’s a thief, not contributor. He is stealing from them, not giving new life to them.
The author here uses the same Greek word for thief as in chapter 10:
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.
So Judas is doing precisely what a disciple of Jesus would never do, not only crossing a line he would never cross, but living out a way, a path Jesus is rejecting. A path of death and destruction, but Jesus’s way, the way of Mary, is about having life abundantly.
Big, generous, life.
Scott McDougall says that
This is the house where Lazarus was raised and…not so long ago the house was said to be filled with the odor of death and the stench of rot and now it’s filled, we’re told, with the costly perfume that’s overpowering, the scent of new life, the scent of love and devotion. If that’s not attaining to the resurrection of the dead, I don’t really know what is.
Mary replaces the scent of death and destruction with the redemptive smell of new life. This house is no longer the place where Lazarus was born and where he died, but also the place of his resurrected life: it is the home of a family restored, and the new abundant life of the living envelops it.
New Life
We receive this story in a moment of profound confusion; with a cocktail of hate and division served up nightly, not only in the evening news, but in our conversations. We can’t get away from what seems to me to be the path of destruction. That is the path of the thief: the liar, the extorter. That isn’t our path.
The path that Jesus offers is the path of life. Even as he makes his way to the cross, it is to embrace new life.
In Mary’s discipleship, we are reminded that Jesus’s path, our path of discipleship is not merely selling our stuff and giving the money to the poor, as Jesus tells the pious young man, but also in following him and serving him. And like the three parables of the lost: the lost sheep, coin, and sons, we are given a picture of extravagant thanksgiving – of generous rejoicing – for what was dead has come to life!
We are called to serve as Christ serves. Not with a grimace of pain, but with the joy of hope, the gratefulness of new life. To serve and to praise! To give of ourselves and give thanks, generously and joyfully. Even in Lent.
As we enter our final week before Palm Sunday, may we act with ridiculous generosity. May we be filled with the gratitude of new life. And may we see the work before us as the glorious way of Christ in service and new hope. Gratefully, thankfully, joyfully. Amen.
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