Isaiah 43:26-21
Psalm 126
Philippians 3:4b-14
John 12:1-8
You all know by now that I love to send e-cards. I can wait until the last minute to send an e-card and it gets there on time. I like that. One year I sent one to our former bishop, Larry Maze on his birthday. It was the best birthday e-card ever! The background music was from the old 1968 movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The first screen said, “Forget the past. You can’t change it.” The next one said, “Forget the future. It isn’t here yet.” And the last one said, “Forget the present. I didn’t get you one.”
The past, the present, and the future all make up the huge arena where life is lived. In this snippet of John’s Gospel there is an interesting interplay between the past, the present, and the future. Each character in the story has his or her attention focused on the past, the present, or the future in the life of Jesus.
We start off at a dinner party in Bethany. There is cause for a big celebration. In the recent past, Lazarus was dead. His sisters buried him in a tomb. They grieved for him for four days. Then Jesus arrived and raised Lazarus from death to life. He was dead and now he is alive. That calls for a celebration! The celebration takes place six days before Passover. (Evidently John the storyteller wants us to keep that future date in mind as the present story unfolds.) Jesus and his disciples show up on the sixth day before Passover at the home of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary.
It was customary, as a sign of welcome, to bring water and wash the dust off the feet of your guests. Sometimes even offer them a dab of perfumed oil to anoint their feet, but Mary goes over and above that. The nard she uses to anoint Jesus’ feet came from a plant that grows in India. When it is mature the plant is about three feet tall, spindly, with small pink flowers at the top. It has a long root spike sort of like a very thin carrot. The oil is inside the root. It would take a lot of plant roots to get enough oil for a pound of nard. It makes sense that it would be very expensive. Nard has a strong musk-like scent. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would use a whole pound to improve the smell of one pair of tired feet. It’s no wonder the whole house was filled with the smell of the perfume. Mary was exercising good hospitality as was the custom of her people, but she was extravagantly generous about it.
I believe from other stories about Mary in John’s Gospel that her attention was very much focused on the present moment. She may have known in her soul that Jesus’ time on earth was coming to an end, but mostly her actions show us that Jesus was very special to her. Far more than the customary sign of welcome, Mary treats Jesus like royalty. She receives him into her home with extraordinary hospitality as though he is a king.
Jesus has at least one eye on the future. He is on the way to Jerusalem for the last Passover of his life. His attention is focused on what he knows will happen there so he interprets Mary’s actions differently. One of the other uses of nard is in palliative care to the dying. It is common to anoint loved ones with the expensive nard hoping its fragrance would comfort them and make dying easier. That’s what Jesus said Mary did for him.
And what about Judas? Well, John obviously doesn’t think too highly of him. He assigns an impure motive to Judas for questioning why the expensive nard was poured out on Jesus’ feet. John calls Judas a thief. (But John knows the rest of the story. He has one eye on the future too.) I believe Judas has his attention focused in the past, on Mosaic Law that says always open your hand to the poor for they will always be with you. God commanded the Israelites not to withhold anything from the poor, but to give generously to the poor as God had been generous to them when they were slaves in Egypt. That’s also what Jesus taught about caring for the poor and why Jesus said to Judas, “You [do] always have the poor with you. But you do not always have me.” In other words, it is okay to be generous to me while you still can as Mary has done because in the future you will not have that opportunity.
In last week’s Gospel, the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son represents God the Father. He shows incredible generosity toward his wayward son, both in forgiveness and in the extravagance of the celebration in his honor. The father received his son back into his home like royalty. The way Mary receives Jesus into hers. If the father in the parable represents God’s unfettered love and generosity toward humankind, then in today’s story Mary represents humankind’s natural response to God’s love and generosity towards us.
The huge arena of life: past, present, and future is where our response to God’s love and generosity is lived out. The image that comes to mind of the arena of life is a three ring circus. In the three rings are past, present, and future. The center ring is the present where things are happening before our eyes. In the ring of the past we can see what happened yesterday and all the yesterdays before that. The future ring is still covered with a thinly walled tent. We can almost see through it but not clearly.
Today, through the prophet Isaiah, God says forget about the past. Keep your eyes on the center ring. Look at the place where it touches the future. I’m about to do a new thing.
Today Paul says, I’m done looking in the past. My eyes are on the center ring and I’m straining toward my future with Christ.
In the arena of Jesus’ life, we see all three rings at once. We already know the future. We have seen what is under the tent for Jesus. But for our own good, let’s pretend we haven’t seen it. Let’s focus our attention on the center ring and let the story unfold for us again in the present so we can experience again the most powerful act of love and generosity God has in store for us: the gift of life on the other side of death. And then, when we know how much we have been given and forgiven by God, we will be ready to live out our responses to God’s love and generosity in the arenas of our own lives. (Between now and Easter, keep your eyes focused on the center ring.)
Copyright. 2010. The Reverend Pamela S. Morgan
