Sermon (8 am Service)
The Alabaster Jar
How do you encounter Jesus? How do you experience his presence with you? Perhaps it's in nature, or in music, perhaps with other people, or in scripture, perhaps when you are alone, in quiet? Or as you trace your steps somewhere. What is Jesus like to you? What does he say, if anything? What do you say, if anything?
Step with me into the house of Simon the Leper, a low table in the centre of the room, you are welcomed to sit there next to Jesus. And as you watch the lady pouring oil over Jesus' hands and feet, wiping them with her hair, how do you feel? Are you uncomfortable? Are you filled with wonder? Do you wish you had beaten her to it!? Perhaps you want to make space for her at the table? Perhaps you want to send her away… What can you see, what can you smell, what can you hear, what can you taste?
The woman anoints Jesus' head with oil, as a sign of blessing that marks both celebration and relationship. She is deeply generous, letting it flow over him and drip down onto the floor. Psalm 133 suggests quite a lavish amount of oil might be used, though a whole bottle of oil takes even that lavishness to extremes. The detail that the woman smashed the jar before pouring it on Jesus' head, may have been a means of getting it all out, but is also a sign that she intended from the start to use it all.
And as we read these stories from throughout holy week, the last week of Jesus' life on earth, we become even more aware of how much Jesus undermined the expectations of those who had waited so long for the king-like figure, the new David, to arrive. They thought they knew what they wanted. They thought they knew what they needed. But so often is the case with God, that what God offered them was not what they had expected.
It is easy for us to dismiss those teachers of the law, the authorities. Why could they not see Jesus for who he really was? Were they so blind that they couldn't accept the gift that he did bring rather than rejecting him entirely? But they had too much to lose. They wanted to maintain a fine balance between their faithful Judaism, heritage and beliefs while not antagonising an oppressive Roman empire who did not understand them.
How much are we like those Jewish authorities, curating a fine balance between culture and acceptability, and the transforming and radical life of Christ which calls us to surrender all to him. Is our devotion to Jesus like that of the woman, free flowing, unrestricted, even reckless?
Are we held back by what others may say or think of us? Or by our ego, or pride? Or perhaps fear of where our devotion may lead…
Christ can be simply an honoured guest whom we enjoy the company of, or he can be the one for whom we spend all our devotion. Flowing over his head, and down his beard, over his feet and onto the floor. Jesus said, she has done for me, a beautiful thing.
12 Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. 2 Here a dinner was given in Jesus’ honor. Martha served, while Lazarus was among those reclining at the table with him. 3 Then Mary took about a pint[a] of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.
4 But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, 5 “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.[b]” 6 He did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it.
7 “Leave her alone,” Jesus replied. “It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial. 8 You will always have the poor among you,[c] but you will not always have me.”
Sermon (10.30 am Service)
Mary’s interruption to a meal: a lovely reading for this fifth Sunday in Lent: Passion Sunday. I am reminded of other interruptions….
In 1797, on an afternoon when the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was high as a kite on one of the designer drugs of his day - laudenum, I believe – he sat down in his cottage at Nether Stowey in Somerset to write an amazing epic poem: Kubla Khan. He was well into it when a man from Porlock knocked at the door about some minor domestic business, and when Coleridge went back to work his epic ideas had been interrupted and the poem we’re left with is apparently a shadow of what it might have been. All because of that wretched and nameless man from Porlock. Coleridge, of course, is famous for his poem about an ancient mariner, so I’m reminded of another interruption.
Some years ago, at a small private service of worship in Oxford to mark a milestone for a Christian charity I was involved with, a drunken former naval rating lumbered into the church.
He was unbelievably disruptive and made loud bellowing noises when he wasn’t immediately welcomed with open arms. He sent chairs crashing as he staggered round in an effort to hug various women he didn’t know, and he wept loudly and lavishly over one of the hymns which just happened to share its tune with ‘Eternal Father strong to Save’. During the hymn he sort of hiccupped and burped out snatches of the wrong words until we were able to gently lead him out and try to care for him. The service never really recovered!
The man from Porlock and my ancient mariner… both were rather negative interruptions. But here, in John’s Gospel, we have an interrupter called Mary who does something extraordinary – it’s both expensive and very fragrant, and it nevertheless irritates one of those there: one of Jesus’s own disciples… Judas - 5 “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.” ...
7 “Leave her alone,” Jesus replied. “It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial. 8 You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.”
The passage speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Jesus is on his way up to Jerusalem and he knows, although the disciples don’t, that he will die there at the hands of the religious authorities who see him as an outrageous threat.
But Jesus sees Mary’s interruption as a prophetic act. This story of the anointing of Jesus by a woman stands on its own but you may remember that there is another one in another gospel, in Luke 7 where a woman with a colourful reputation anoints Jesus’s feet while he eats in the home of a religious leader, Simon the Pharisee.
The two stories have different emphases. They’re both about deeply loving devotion but the one in front of us today has that ‘prophetic’ edge. It looks towards what will happen on Good Friday - how the death of Jesus will be something both tragic and horrifying, it will also have a fragrance of beauty to it because it is the precursor of new life to believers and unlike every other death in human experience, this one will not be the end…
Mary’s prophetic action carries a fragrance of hope and assurance, because having saved the perfume for the day of Jesus’s burial, she’s using it now, because something has triggered in her mind to indicate that his burial will not be the last word about Jesus...
So there’s that prophetic side to this – and then there’s Jesus’s comment: 8 You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.” That, I’m afraid, is simply a truism: something that can’t be denied for any age and yet what Jesus did was done to include everyone, however poor...
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Mary interests me. We see her in the Gospels, lapping up his every word and we know that at least once she irritated her sister Martha, busy doing the catering. But Mary seems to have been a woman with prophetic insight.
The disciples may not have known what was about to happen to Jesus, but Jesus himself, in this passage we’ve read, indicates that Mary had an inkling, she seemed to know – and hence her lavish offering of this costly perfume from the ancient Middle Eastern world.
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Every generation has had to find its own language for describing WHO Jesus was and is, and HOW what he did has an effect on them WHERE THEY ARE. That process has a name: it’s called ‘apologetics’ – and Christian apologetics for every generation will be slightly different although the end result will be the same.
We use the word ‘apology’ in the sense of saying ‘Sorry’, but what I’m talking about is quite different. In the academic worlds of theology and philosophy an ‘apologetic’ is the word used to describe an explanation of why something is done and what it means.
So a carefully-thought-through Christian apologetic is an explanation of just who Jesus was and what the road to the cross was all about and why being a Christian NOW, 2000 years down the road, is important still. A Christian apologetic is an explanation of the who, the what and the why of our faith.
It distresses me that a lot of my fellow believers are rather woolly about that! It’s important that we know what we stand for because understanding why Jesus came is certainly important for me – and I suspect for you too - or none of us would be bothering to be here today!
Also, our world needs to know!
Mary seems to have been a woman of unusual insight and we don’t know why. I have met, down the years, people – more often than not, women - who seemed to me to be brimming with unusual insight into life and spirituality, but this woman is in a league of her own.
I would like to have heard Jesus explain in his own words WHY he had to go to Jerusalem and WHY he would have to suffer, die and rise again. But that doesn’t happen, instead, this lovely lady interrupts an evening meal with her prophetic gesture – filling the house with the fragrance of hope and beauty.
And imagining that amazing fragrance might evoke something in us to help us get our minds around the idea that Jesus, in some way, is about to do something extraordinary which defies human thinking and human models to explain!
The word ‘Grace’ is embedded in her action, and by ‘Grace’ – I mean that something is about to be done in the death of Jesus which we don’t deserve in any way, which we haven’t worked for and which will be done for us by the God of love - whose face we’ve never seen and whose purposes defy our understanding.
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I started by talking about interruptions:
- You see, I can often be that hapless man from Porlock I mentioned when I began – and possibly so can you. Walking in and destroying something amazing, all unawares…
- I’m also, occasionally, eminently capable of being just a little bit like the wretchedly insensitive ancient mariner of Oxford – barging in on something without a thought… Most of us are, I’m afraid!
- But this woman, Mary, interrupts in a way that provides fragrance and grace, her action evokes a rather beautiful prophetic picture that lands us, somewhere between the horror and inevitability of Calvary’s cross and the delight of the Resurrection at Easter.
I find it quite hard to talk about Jesus on the cross, and as a bear of very little brain I find it hard to understand the mechanics of the cross - what’s happening there - and the resurrection. I’d have problems even if I were a bear with a big brain! But I do know it was - and is - for me, just as it was for you too.
I also know that what Christ did in His passion can be echoed and modelled in human life by modest day-to-day acts of Grace: the unexpected kind word; the unexpected encouragement, the letting drop of petty irritations or even maybe the putting behind us of things we perceive as major hurts.
I don’t know if anyone here is a regular watcher of TV soaps? I’ve always been aware that every single story line is about situations in which there is no Grace of this kind. And without Grace, I’m afraid society tears itself apart. We’re also seeing starkly writ large on the world stage at present in America, the Middle East, and on the borders of Ukraine.
We are now very close to Easter. I urge you to join me in reflecting on what Jesus is about to do.
I would encourage you to reflect on the cost of that passion to him.
I’d urge us to listen for Christ over the next two weeks and let his story wash over us and embrace us so that we’re ready to take hold of the wonder of the resurrection when it happens at Easter.
And I’d want us to ready ourselves, and to run with it into whatever future our loving and gracious God has planned for us: to pick up, to remember the fragrance of Mary’s interruption and to savour it, because what happened to Jesus was actually on our behalf. It was for you and me.
MER March 25
