Are we accustomed to how God works?

This is one of those stories which appears in all four of the gospels, all in slightly different forms. In John’s gospel, the woman who anoints Jesus has a name, Mary, and we’ve met her before – she’s the Mary from Luke’s gospel who sat at his feet listening to Jesus while her sister Martha got grumpy with her because she felt like she was doing all the work. She’s the same Mary who fell at Jesus’ feet after her brother Lazarus died in John 11, crying “Lord, if you had been here, he would have lived.” And he indeed did live, thanks to Jesus.

To understand this passage well, it’s a good idea to have a sense of what it was like to be at a dinner party in Roman-occupied 1st century Palestine. Firstly, that everyone would have been lying down to eat. It was thought to be the best way to digest your food. You propped yourself up with your left arm, and ate with your right hand. Everything was about hierarchy and honour. The host family sat on the left, the guest of honour in the middle, and other guests on the right. The closer you were to the guest of honour, the more honour you had, and to be on their right hand side was the bees knees. You even reclined on them. Here’s a detail from a 3rd century Roman mosaic which gives you a bit of an idea of how things might have been [pic].

We hear that this particular party takes place at home, but we shouldn’t think of it like our own, private homes. A party like this, held with a guest of honour, was a public spectacle. We hear in verse 9 that a ‘great crowd of Jews’ were present. And why wouldn’t they be. Jesus has raised Lazarus from the dead, for goodness’ sake. This is worth a party.

There’s a large proportion of society missing from this picture though: women. Women and men did not eat together when guests were present. We hear that Martha is serving, but she’s not joining in. There were cultural taboos around women touching men at all. They certainly didn’t let their hair down in front of anyone who wasn’t a close family member.

So for Mary to take a jar of perfume, made from a plant which grows only in the foothills of the Himalayas and is worth a year’s wages (today, our average wage is around $58,800), and use it all - no wonder Judas accuses her of wasteful extravagance. And Mary pours this fragrant ointment not on Jesus’ head, where people wore perfume at dinner parties and kings were anointed at their coronations, but on his feet, where the preparation of a corpse for burial would start.[1] Jesus notices this and draws attention to the link to his impending death. He’s been talking about this for a while and the disciples have been trying to brush this off. Mary, even if it’s just instinctively, deals with it, literally head on.

We see in the gospels that whenever someone does something which is outside the social norm, it tends to get mentioned. Those shocking moments stick in your memory. This is why Mary’s actions reach us today.

Imagine yourself standing at the edge of the room, looking on. In the centre of this scene are Mary and Jesus. What do you think you would have thought about Mary’s actions? Around our church walls I’ve put up some of the words that came to mind when I was thinking about what people might have thought. A few positive, some ambiguous, plenty negative.

Insane. Extravagant. Wasteful. Nonsensical. Awkward. Melodramatic. Histrionic. Inappropriate. Embarrassing. Unpalatable. Confrontational. Liberated. Generous. Uninhibited. Insightful. Prophetic. Weird. Symbolic. Beautiful. Grateful. Overwhelming. Intense. Intimate.

Get up, have a look around, and have a chat with those around you about what one resonates the most with how you feel when you imagine yourself in the scene.

The one that resonates the most with me is ‘awkward’. I’d feel really awkward either doing what Mary did, or even witnessing it. For the theologian Paula Gooder, her keyword is ‘insane’. She writes that Mary is ‘driven to an act of insane generosity in response to her encounter with the insane generosity of God.’ Another way of thinking of her actions is ‘liberated’: Jesus has brought her brother back from the dead. Mary understands who Jesus is and responds in a moment of deep, deep intimacy in a way that seems instinctive and uniquely her. She doesn’t care enough about the others around her, about all the eyes watching her.

Our current cultural context we might applaud her for her ‘no one has the right to tell me who I am and what to do’ attitude. Well done Mary for “finding yourself.” But Mary isn’t grasping for her own identity. She just loves Jesus. She is just grateful to Jesus. She knows she is loved and forgiven and responds to Jesus’ insane act of generosity in her own, insanely generous, extravagant way.

I’m going to pivot now to a story told by my friend and colleague Scottie Reeve. I hope it’s going to give us a sense of how Judas might have been thinking. Some of you have heard me share this story at Lent group recently. He shares this story on his podcast and I’m going to play a bit of this now so you can hear it in his own words. Some background: Scottie has had had a text from a friend – a lucid, straight down the line friend – telling him that there is gold dust raining down in her room. He and some others drive over to take a look:

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What a story. For God to show up, with no other purpose but to say ‘I love her. I love her. I love her.’ The line that really stuck out for me in Scottie’s words was: “I’d been accustomed to this particular way of how God worked.” I wonder if that lies behind some of what Judas was feeling when he responded to Jesus and Mary with the line ‘this money could have been given to the poor’? That he had in his mind a particular way of thinking about how God works, and Jesus kept blowing this out of the water. Judas is not wrong for advocating for the needs of the most vulnerable members of our communities. He is wrong for creating a competition between acts of justice and compassion, born from a love of Jesus Christ, with other forms of devotion and discipleship.[2]

Paula Gooder writes of how ‘A real encounter with Jesus should leave us feeling profoundly uncomfortable.’ Scottie goes on to talk about how he was challenged by how he felt about what had happened when gold rained down from his friend’s ceiling. I’ll read this out:

“I felt a fight in my heart between what I had unmistakably seen and my current picture of God. My muddy, bloody, dusty Jesus didn’t have time for gold and random acts of kindness…my problem wasn’t just with the wasteful extravagance of God’s showering gold, it was with the wasteful extravagance of his love. What happened through Jesus’ death on the cross was profoundly anti-empire and counter-cultural. He takes the endless cycle of systemic violence and defeats it through redemptive suffering. He takes the coronation ceremony of a Caesar and makes a mockery of it. He shows the corrupt power of men to be powerless. All of these things shout a powerful message of God’s heart to liberate all people from evil, from each other and from ourselves. Yet, this most precious Son of God and his most precious blood, more precious than gold, was spilt out in an eternal statement of his love for each of us. How do we respond to this ludicrous and wasteful extravagance?”

I think that’s the question that I want to leave us with today: how do we respond to this ludicrous and wasteful extravagance? What does it do to our self-worth to see ourselves as God sees us, already redeemed and already restored, through Jesus’ ludicrous and wastefully extravagant death, and to respond as Mary did with every fibre of our being?

[1]Richard A. Burridge, “Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year C,” in The Lectionary Commentary: Theological Exegesis for Sunday’s Texts, Volume Three, ed. Roger E. Van Harn (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 539. [2]Nancy A. Mikoski, “Pastoral Perspective on John 12:1–11,” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year A, ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, vol. 2 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 204.