The story of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet with perfume has no lovely start. The story opens under a cloud. Religious officials and the religious purists of his day seek to arrest Jesus. And by the end of the passage, they seek to kill Lazarus too.
In this atmosphere of danger, Jesus seeks refuge in a house in Bethany. He turns to Martha, Mary and Lazarus—people whom, the gospel repeatedly emphasizes, Jesus loved. With them, he finds a home.
This little chosen family defies ideals—both modern nuclear and ancient patriarchal family ideals. Two single sisters, their single brother, and a single, itinerant mystic/preacher/healer. Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, though bound by kinship, would have had better social and economic prospects had they been married.
Contemporary law and social systems, even in the church, organize life around couples or couples with children. Legal benefits follow marriage and kinship. Economic assumptions about poverty and wealth seem to always be calculated around families of four. We define a successful church as one with many young families with children. Even our obsession with same-sex marriage pretty much seeks to bring gay and lesbian relationships into traditional kinship models.
Yet in today’s Gospel lesson, a little, nontraditional family serves as a microcosm of the community that produced the Gospel of John. Its members were Jews, Samaritans, and Greeks estranged from their ethnic and spiritual families. The dominant religion of its day branded the community illegitimate. It gathered religious people from the margins. And those refugees from honor and respectability found family with one another—just as Jesus did with Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.
In that little household, bound together by love, John tells us that “Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair.”
In the ancient Middle East, women and men were not publicly intimate with each other. Yet in John, as in Matthew and Mark, we detect no embarrassment, no shame at Mary washing Jesus’ feet—with her hair. If you remember scandal, you remember Luke’s very different account, substituting a woman with a questionable reputation for Mary. Here, only Judas objects—that the money might have been better spent. (A true Mennonite soul.)
Even today, wiping an unrelated person’s feet with one’s hair seems overly familiar. But in this little family of love we detect no shame, no embarrassment.
Is this not what we long for? A spiritual family so deep that we may share ourselves most intimately. To know others and to be known in every aspect of our living.
Becoming such a family of love happens neither quickly nor easily. Martha, Mary, Lazarus, and Jesus went through death together. They experienced profound disappointment with each other. Look back to the previous chapter. When Lazarus fell ill, Jesus did not come until after Lazarus died. And both Martha and Mary let him have it. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” I suppose raising Lazarus made up for it a little—but “really, Jesus, have you any idea what you put us through?” To remain with each other through profound disappointment and betrayal can be daunting.
Yet the reward may be profound. Witness Mary’s ministry to Jesus in this transitional hour. With one wordless gesture, Mary captures the spiritual depth of the time. She anoints Jesus in a time of danger—a gesture of healing balm. By washing his feet, she models for him the blessing he will in turn bestow on his own disciples in the final hours of his ministry. She uses an ointment of burial, bringing to heightened consciousness the final steps he will take on his journey. And the perfume fills the house as holiness fills that moment.
In this gospel of the Word made flesh, Mary becomes Word made flesh for Jesus. She incarnates the divine.
When we choose to pursue, in all its risky dimensions, becoming a chosen family of love with others, we choose to become Word made flesh as well, to incarnate the divine for each other.
Who would each of us know deeply? Who would we be known by? Who will we touch intimately? Who will touch us? Who will be our chosen family of love? To whom will we become Word made flesh?
This was a sermon I preached for the Fifth Sunday of Lent at Germantown Mennonite Church, March 17, 2013 The gospel passage for that day was John 12:1-8.