“Keep It for the Day of My Burial”
John 12:1-8
Lent 5
Psalm 126
1 When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. 2 Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then it was said among the nations, “The Lord has done great things for them.” 3 The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced. 4 Restore our fortunes, O Lord , like the watercourses in the Negeb. 5 May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy. 6 Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.
Isaiah 43:16-21
16 Thus says the Lord , who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, 17 who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick: 18 Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. 19 I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. 20 The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches; for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, 21 the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise.
John 12:1-8
1 Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. 2 There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. 3 Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. 4 But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, 5 “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” 6 (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) 7 Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. 8 You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
The Sermon
They were sitting around the dinner table, eating and talking and laughing, and that strange hush fell across the room, the lull that happens during dinner conversation. Some say it happens every 18 minutes; some say it happens at 20 minutes after the hour, 20 minutes before, and on the hour.
But everyone at this table knew that what had happened recently was too big to be talked over with happy small talk, but was also perhaps too big for any words at all.
It already seemed so long ago, but it had only been a few days.
Jesus had received word that his good friend Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, was deathly ill. And when he arrived in Bethany, Lazarus had already been dead for four days.
And Jesus, though he already knew what had happened, had cried like a baby.
He told them to move the stone away from the tomb. And there isn’t really a good way to put this, but in the words of the King James Version, “Martha saith unto him, Lord, by this time, he stinketh.”
Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
Many who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him. But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what he had done. So the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the council—they were so Presbyterian, they formed a committee—and they said, “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” And so they gave orders that anyone who knew where Jesus was should let them know, so they could go arrest him.
But safe for the time being from those who would arrest him, Jesus was sitting, for dinner, six days before the Passover, in the home of his dear friends.
There was Martha, serving as always. Whenever and wherever there was work to be one, Martha would be involved. God bless Martha.
There was Mary. Mary seemed to have an instinct for knowing when to listen, and when Jesus spoke, she listened. God bless Mary.
There were the disciples—Thomas, with that dry sense of humor, the one who didn’t have any time for airy talk about ambiguities. There was Judas, who kept the purse strings, and who, here lately, had a certain look about him like there was something he wasn’t saying. There was Peter, all enthusiasm and loyalty and toughness. Jesus loved these guys.
And there was Lazarus. Lazarus had been to a place that could not be described in the words of any language, or known by any science on earth. We don’t often see Jesus cry, but for Lazarus, and for the grieving people who mourned him, Jesus wept. And having given new life to thousands of people in thousands of ways—feeding the hungry, curing the sick, calming storms and eradicating demons—Jesus had demanded that a dead man have life. And the man had walked out of his own tomb.
And now they all sat at this humble but festive banquet table together.
And I guess it had been 18 minutes since the last one, or it was 20 till the hour, or whatever; and now, the conversation quieted.
And Mary got up from the table, and she brought out a pound of costly perfume, made from very expensive and pure imported ingredients. And she came to Jesus, and she knelt down in front of him.
And like a priest administers the ashes to the forehead on Ash Wednesday, or a pastor administers the anointing with oil at a Service for Wholeness, or a minister makes the sign of a cross on the forehead of one being baptized when she says, “Child of the covenant, you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever,”
Mary anointed Jesus’ feet with that incredibly expensive perfume, and then in a gesture of utmost humility, as if being down there on her knees, at his feet, were not enough, she wiped them with her hair.
The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. It filled everyone’s nostrils with that rich, almost transporting scent; it was like walking into a great European cathedral the morning after Easter, when the incense lingers in the air; it was like the smell that those ancient patriarchs had sent heavenward with their burnt sacrifices wafting up to God; it was like the smell that lingers in the closet of a loved one who is no longer here; it was like the aroma of the first perfume, the first cologne that your life partner was wearing on your first date; it was like the smell of Thanksgiving dinner when you’ve been out in the cold and you get closer to the house just as the sun is going down, and inside is a favorite relative you’ve been waiting months and months to see.
And just as everyone in the room began to lose themselves in the reveries that this perfume had stirred up in them, someone in the corner harrumphed: “Hmmmpff!!”
And they all looked over—
And Judas Iscariot, the disciple who was about to betray Jesus, said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?”
See, how are you going to argue with that?
The poet says, we need people to show us the truth with images that point beyond themselves.
The social worker says, “Really? I thought we needed food for hungry people.”
The career diplomat says, “What we need for any of that to matter is peace among nations.”
The civic engineer says, peace means nothing if the population can’t function.
Who is going to say to any one of them, “You’re wrong”? Because they’re not wrong.
And now the keeper of the purse of the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth puts the question: what’s with the rubbing oil on the feet? That was a waste of 300 bucks’ worth of perfume, and with 300 bucks, we could have fed a lot of poor people. There is no answer for that is there. You just dumped it out in this little ceremony of yours, this wasteful, unproductive, time-wasting ceremony that from a utilitarian standpoint doesn’t do anybody any good at all.
And Jesus said, “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.”
You will have your ministry to the poor, and you will spend countless hours and untold energy working on getting a law passed, or setting up a homeless shelter, or starting a food collection ministry; and the temptation will be laid right in your lap to think, “If we can just get past this hurdle, we’ll finally have this problem solved.”
But you will resist that temptation. You must keep working, keep thinking, keep networking, keep voting, keep serving in the soup kitchen, keep praying for the dead and fighting like heck for the living, because, disciples you will always have that ministry before you, and you will always have God’s commandment to love one another just as God has loved you.
But you will not always, Judas Iscariot, have the chance to honor these feet, which for one all too short time walked on this earth—the feet of the Son of God, who created every galaxy at the far edge of the universe and every atom in the molecules of your fingertips, and created every bit of it in love.
He is about to trade places with Lazarus. Soon, he will go into the tomb, into the darkness, into the lonely depths, so that you and I will never—will never—have to know what it is to exit into empty silence. There will always be light at the end of the tunnel, and you will never walk alone.
The one who has bought this for you is the same one whom Mary honors with her finest, costliest possession—Mary, whose dedication to the light of God is given testimony by her own dirty hands and matted hair.
They laid him in the tomb
And he never said a mumbalin’ word
Not a word
Not a word
Not a word
Keith Grogg
Carolina Beach Presbyterian Church
Carolina Beach, NC
March 25, 2007
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