John 12:1-8, from the Fifth Sunday in Lent
All four gospels include a story about a woman who shows up during a meal given in Jesus’ honor, pours ridiculously expensive perfume on him, catches heck for doing so, and gets defended by Jesus.
In Matthew (26:6-13) and Mark (14:3-9), the woman pours the perfume on Jesus’ head during a meal in Bethany, at the home of someone named “Simon the Leper.” Indignation arises among the disciples (in Matthew) or “some of those present” (in Mark) about why the woman had wasted the perfume in this way instead of selling it and donating the proceeds to the poor. But Jesus rebukes the woman’s critics, saying that, unlike the poor, he won’t be around much longer, and the woman’s beautiful act has anointed him, appropriately, for his upcoming death.
Luke (7:36-50) sets the story at the home of a Pharisee – who may or may not have been the aforementioned “Simon the Leper,” but likely wasn’t, because Pharisees generally didn’t hang out with lepers, even former ones. And the woman in Luke’s version is infamous for living “a sinful life.” The text gives no details about what sort of sin her life involved, but readers have assumed throughout the centuries that it must have had something to do with sex, a perception helped along, perhaps, by what happens next. Jesus is lying supine on the low couch that dinner guests used at the time, and the woman, standing behind him, is weeping so profusely that her tears are wetting Jesus’ feet. After a bit, she gets to the floor, starts kissing Jesus’ feet and wiping them with her hair, then pours the perfume on them. Pretty sexy stuff compared to dumping the perfume on Jesus’ head, eh? The Pharisee objects, but not about the “wasted” perfume. Rather, he opines that Jesus, if he were any sort of prophet at all, would perceive the woman’s sinfulness and tell her to get lost. Jesus replies with a jab at the Pharisee’s self-righteousness and assures the woman that her sins have been forgiven.
But this week’s Lectionary puts John’s version (12: 1-8) front and center. It includes the overtly sensual foot-perfuming (rather than head-perfuming) and hair-wiping (but not kissing) details from Luke’s account and the what-a-waste objections from Matthew’s and Mark’s accounts, this time attributed particularly to Judas Iscariot, who, John takes pains to remind us, is a conniving scumbag. But the woman in John’s version isn’t some nameless tramp who has made notoriously bad life choices. Rather, she is Mary, a sister of Lazarus, the man who, in John’s gospel, has just been raised from the dead by Jesus. Some time earlier, perhaps only days, Mary had fallen, grief-stricken and sobbing, at the feet of Jesus, who had arrived inexplicably late – too late, or so she had thought, to save her brother. She had wailed out what one can easily hear as an accusation: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:32). Now Lazarus, her brother, fully alive again, is among the dinner guests, and the event seems to be a celebration of the miracle.
What’s more, there as a proverbial elephant in the room, something everyone is thinking but nobody is saying: Everyone thinks Jesus is being an idiot. Like both Matthew and Mark, John places this story right before the fateful weekend of Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion. Jesus and everyone else knows that dangerous enemies await Jesus in Jerusalem. What nobody can figure out is why Jesus seems so dead set, literally, on going there anyway. He has been talking more and more openly about how he must go to Jerusalem and be killed. Those who have tried to talk him out of it include Peter, who, as a result, earned the famous rebuke, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns” (Matt. 16: 23). Thomas, perhaps seeing that Peter had gotten nowhere trying to deter Jesus, had simply shrugged and said, “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (John 11:16).
And that context, I think, might be a key to figuring out what Mary meant by the strange, audacious act of dousing Jesus’ feet with costly perfume and using her own hair as a wash rag. Defending her to her critics, Jesus points out that she has anointed him for his upcoming funeral – the funeral nobody wants to acknowledge, the funeral everybody hopes to talk him out of attending as the corpse of honor.
Everybody, it seems, except Mary.
Maybe she is stunned, like Peter. Maybe she is resigned, like Thomas. Or maybe she’s downright angry. “Gonna go to Jerusalem and throw away your life, eh?” I can hear her thinking. “Then I dare you to say one word about my throwing away all this nard so you won’t stink like the dead man you’re so determined to be.” But whatever her emotions, I think the hair wipe makes Mary different from everyone else who was there. Maybe she has absorbed the implications of seeing Jesus purposely arrive too late to cure a sick man but just in time to raise a dead one. Maybe she is saying, “This plan of yours might be the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard, Jesus. Stupider even than my pouring a year’s salary onto your dirty feet. But it’s your plan, so it must somehow be right. If you’re going to be a fool, I’d be foolish not to be a fool right along with you. So, just give me a sec get my hair undone …”
Jesus calls us down paths that make no earthly sense whatsoever. Love your enemies. Be last in everything. Surrender completely. Give it all. Die to live. It’s all utter foolishness, and anyone with any brains knows, like Judas, that practical hoarding is the way to go. In these two weeks before Easter Sunday, maybe each of us needs to examine whether, like Mary, we have the faith to become all-in fools for a Christ who looks like the biggest fool of all – right up until the first light of Easter Sunday shines into a tomb where his battered corpse should lie, but, inexplicably, no longer does.