John 12:1-11
It’s odd, even for the odd Gospel of John. Jesus is in Bethany entertained by his good friends Mary and Martha. (John 12:1-11.) John casually remarks that Lazarus, whom Jesus has just raised from the dead, is there at the table.
Lazarus whom he has just raised from the dead? Are you kidding?
Imagine being seated at that dinner table. “You know our rabbi, Jesus, don’t you? And seated next to him is our brother Lazarus, who died last week. Thanks to Jesus, he’s back among the living. No stench of death, even. Please make yourself comfortable between them.”
Settling uneasily in your seat, just being polite, you ask the table companion on your right, “Had a good week?”
Your fellow dinner guest replies, “Well, I was sick unto death, my sisters were frantic with worry, then I died, was entombed for three days, wrapped like a mummy. Jesus graciously stopped by the cemetery, shouted, ‘Lazarus come out!’ and raised me from the dead just in time for my sisters’ dinner party. How was your week?”
The guest to your right, the young rabbi, says, “Unfortunately, no sooner had I raised Lazarus, than my enemies vowed to kill me. I give myself no more than a week before they succeed.”
Where are we?
Welcome to the good news we preach. This is our Gospel.
And welcome to the truth about what God in Jesus Christ is up to in the world. God isn’t just good and great, God is on the move toward us. Jesus joins us at the table and, whenever Jesus shows up, get ready; corpses rise from the dead and we are shocked that God is more active than we imagined. The predictable, dull world is rendered strange, and even at a meal Jesus, though unarmed, is extremely dangerous.
But this story is just starting. We are just sitting at the table with Jesus and this family. And Mary pulls out a pound of very expensive perfume and begins anointing Jesus' feet, and drying them with her hair. And this story is radical for all kinds of reasons. This is a woman touching a man's feet in public, this is a woman letting down her hair and touching it to a man, this is a huge amount of costly perfume being wasted. This is a radical story.
This is a story we don't understand. This is one of those Bible stories that is a puzzle with either too many or two few pieces, and Bible scholars can't piece it together. All four Gospels tell the story of a woman anointing Jesus' feet. Luke tells of a woman who had been sinful all of her life, Mark and Luke have an unnamed woman at the home of Simon the Leper, John has the story of Mary the brother of Martha and Lazarus at Bethany, and history remember Mary Magdalene as the demon possessed prostitute who did the same.
So, we have a few options for interpretation.
1) Either this was an act that happened all the time. Like drinking tea, women just threw themselves at Jesus' feet non-stop. Different women, for different reasons.
2) This was all one event and one woman. Last names were blurred and applied at whim, so it wouldn't be unreasonable for this Mary to be Mary Magdalene (although this doesn't piece together well for a few reasons) who was the unnamed woman and the disciples just got a few details out of order because there were many details to remember.
3) John was righting the record. Although John was the last Gospel to be written, many believe it was written by the actual beloved apostle John. He was closest to Jesus, and perhaps he felt that a few important details had been missed and that the record should be corrected.
Or perhaps it is some combination of these three options.
It is interesting to think that this Mary could be the Mary who was "sinful all her life." In our first encounter with Mary and Martha, Mary is lifted up for her faith - and this wouldn't go against the idea of a bad girl. Jesus routinely looked into the eyes of people so sinful that they were discounted by the world and praised them for their faith.
A careful reader of the Gospels will see that we are apparently missing something about what it means to have faith. Because Jesus goes to the religious elite - those known by the world for being faithful - and he yells at them and drags them through the mud for their disgusting sin :: and then he goes to the despised and unreasonable people and comments on their great faith. Well, I'll just my opinion that we continue to miss the point about what it means to have faith.
But we see Mary, we see this woman who's life has been changed by Jesus sitting at the table with her sister who's life has been changed by Jesus and her brother who's literal life has been saved by Jesus and Mary is overwhelmed by emotion.
She does one of those crazy, impulsive praise things - and goes and gets a giant offering to give to Jesus.
And close your eyes, and you can just feel her emotion. She looks at her brother, whom she had mourned and cried and sobbed over - because he had been dead. And then she looks at her herself - and she realizes that she had been dead, too. Whether she was the sinful woman, assumed to be a prostitute, or just Mary the disorganized, scattered sister of Martha who played with her hair while talking to people - she had been dead inside before Jesus. He brought her soul to life.
And yes, we celebrate these tremendous miracles of Jesus bringing the physically dead back from the grave - or from the edge of death. But we have our own story to share, we hold our own miracle in our hearts. We remember how dead our souls were when Christ found us, or we remember how often we've been so close to spiritual death only to be brought back to life again by God's grace.
Mary felt in her own heart that she had been dead and that now she was alive. But, more than that - she felt that the things leading her to death had died themselves. There was only life left!
5:16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Paul's letter states that we no longer regard people from a human point of view. How do you think that Lazarus looked at the world after spending three days in the tomb? Do you think that he looked at everything in the same way after that?
I don't know if I've ever shared this story with you before. I told a friend this story a few days ago, and as I said it I felt that maybe I had never shared it with anyone before. A few months after my arrival in Ukraine, I was walking from the apartment to the student center and I slipped and fell on the ice and slid under a bus. I don't know how the bus stopped on the ice before crushing me. I slid away from the bus' tire and then I climbed out from under the bus. I checked all of myself. I was all still there.
I remember this feeling, as I continued walking to the student center - that everything was perfect. All the colors were brighter, all the smells stronger, all the sounds louder. Everything was sharp and clear because I was alive. For months and months, I walked around with this certainty that every day was a gift and I wasn't going to waste a second.
[Jonathan]
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