No Holding Back
Lent 5C-25
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago
Artist Lauren Wright Pittman created the image printed on the back of your worship folder entitled, “Anointed.” The original work, painted with arcylic on canvas, was inspired by today’s gospel, John 12:1-8. Pittman wrote, “When I was little, I would run around my grandparents’ yard barefoot, playing tag, basketball, or intense battles of tetherball. All of the residue from my adventures would stick to the bottoms of my feet until they almost became one with the ground. I would come inside, and my grandmother would quickly call me to the bathroom so she could wipe my feet off with a warm washrag. I loved the feeling of the warm water against my feet, the texture of the washrag scratching away the grime of the day, and the hands of my grandmother lovingly squeezing my feet.”
“When I was preparing to paint this image,” she writes, “I propped my phone up against a wall, started recording, and knelt down on the ground pretending I was washing Jesus’ feet. My face was close to the ground with all the dust and dog hair that clings to my rug and I began to run my fingers through my hair, washing an imaginary foot. My dog Rumi came over, plopped herself down in front of me, and I began to pretend wash her paws. I giggled to myself and called to my husband, asking if he’d lend his feet to the scene. I quickly said to him, “But please don’t take your shoes off.” I didn’t want to experience his feet that close to my face; after all it was winter and feet tend to be a little more ripe after a long day in wooly socks. I began to rub my hair over his booted feet and I felt this profound sense of vulnerability and discomfort. The image of me kneeling as my husband sat in a comfortable chair was a difficult one for me to see reflected back at me on my phone. I wasn’t even willing to fake wash my husband’s bare feet. The amount of love it took to do this act willingly seems astronomical to me. I then asked my husband to take his shoes off. As I rubbed my hair on his feet I felt like crying. This is the posture that Jesus calls all of us into; a profoundly uncomfortable, shockingly reverent position; coming face to face, intimately engaging with the residue of Christ’s footsteps to smell and almost taste the journey of Christ.” (Lauren Wright Pittman © A Sanctified Art LLC | Sanctifiedart.org)
What does love smell like? What does hope look like? What does resurrection feel like? On this fifth Sunday of Lent, as we draw closer to Jesus’s final week, we prepare to contemplate his suffering, and the invitation to follow the way of his cross which transfigures death into hope. Today we take the measure of the gospel from deep within our own body and by deploying all our senses. Here is the Christian gospel enacted in fragrance. Here, is love as demonstrated in tender human touch. Here is courage and consequence unfolding within the bonds of intimate friendship.
All four Gospels tell this story — the story of a woman who kneels at Jesus’s feet, breaks an alabaster jar filled with precious perfume, and dares to love Jesus in the flesh. Hands to feet. Hair to skin. Soaked fingers to soaked toes. Each writer frames the event differently, to suit their own thematic and theological concerns, but the story at its core remains one of the most sensual, tender, and provocative in the New Testament.
In John’s version, the woman is Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and the newly resurrected Lazarus. The two sisters host a dinner party for Jesus, and it’s during the festivities that Mary breaks open her jar, anoints Jesus with spikenard (a scented oil worth an entire year’s wages) and wipes his feet with her hair. As the musky fragrance of the oil fills the house, Judas — the disciple who “keeps the common purse,” rebukes Mary for her scandalous generosity: “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” But Jesus silences him: “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” (Debi Thomas, Beauty and Breaking, Journey with Jesus, 3/27/22)
We should pause here to comment on Jesus’ response to Judas’ criticism of Mary’s loving act: “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me” (John 12:8). Perhaps no verse has been quoted more often to shirk our Christian duty towards those who are poor. What was Jesus saying? That poverty is unfixable or somehow part of a divinely orchestrated plan?” No. Commentators suggest that Jesus’s reference was to Deuteronomy 15:11: “There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore, I command you to be openhanded.” In other words, the call to care for the poor is constant. It never ceases. In fact, if we are called to love Jesus, love the poor, love ourselves, and one another all in the same way—without limit or calculation.
Mary leaned into embodiment. Mary’s example shows us that our discipleship is not what we do only with our thoughts and prayers, but ultimately, about what we do with our hands, our feet, our bodies. Love of the stranger, care of a friend, compassion for those who are suffering. Simple actions offer their own reward. Our hearts and minds become open to God. This is how we become one human family again. This is how we now see. Just be like Mary. She knows the way.
Mary’s example teaches us “The work of God is revealed in the person of Jesus—precisely in what he said, did, endured, and continues to say, do, endure, and transform through the spirit.” (Tripp Fuller, Divine Self-Investment, p. 155). Just as Jesus later washes his disciples’ feet to demonstrate what radical love looks like, Mary expresses her love with her hands and her hair. Just as Jesus later offers up his broken body for the healing of all, Mary offers up a costly breaking to demonstrate her love for her Lord.
Rather than shunning Mary’s intimate gesture, Jesus receives her gift into his own body with gratitude, tenderness, pleasure, and blessing. The holy sacraments here are skin, salt, sweat, and tears. The instruments of worship are perfumed feet and unbound hair. This is not an abstract piety of the mind; this is deeply embodied gratitude and worship. (Thomas)
Mary anoints not Jesus’ head (as in Matthew 26:7 and Mark 14:3) but his feet. Next Sunday, Jesus will enter Jerusalem as the Anointed One, but anointed not on his head, as was expected for a king, but on his feet. He is anointed not by the high priest but by a woman. Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and his identity as Messiah did not fit neatly into any preconceived expectations. Jesus’ way unfolding now in these chaotic days is truth stranger than fiction.
As we set our faces towards Jerusalem the week after next, will we choose the measured risk or the extravagant gesture? Will we celebrate “useless” gifts as sacred to God, or will we hold our hearts back in judgment and cynicism? What will guide us as we contemplate the cross — the theological platitude, or the fragrance of Christ? That very important jar we’re hanging onto at all costs — when and for whom will we break it? (Thomas)
Mary recognizes the importance of meeting the world’s brokenness, cynicism, and pain with priceless, generous beauty. Even as death looms, she chooses to share what is heartbreakingly fragile and fleeting: a fragrance. A sensory gift. An experience of beauty. Her perfume is her protest. Her scented hands are her declaration. In anointing Jesus in beauty, she declares that the stench of death will not have the last word in our lives — the last word will belong to the sweet and sacred fragrance of love.” (Thomas) Amen.
