She Was Right
Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson
First Congregational UCC of Bellevue
Men’s Retreat
April
7, 2019
Scripture: John
12:1-8
Let us pray: May
the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in
your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
There’s an odd
thing about many of the stories about Jesus in the Gospels. It’s true of many
of his parables too. So often when we hear these stories and parables we think
the point Jesus is making is wrong. Take the Parable of the Prodigal Son for
example. You know the story. A man’s younger son gets his father to give him
his inheritance in advance, goes away, squanders the money, falls on hard
times, and returns home. His father welcomes him with joy and throws him a big party.
The elder son gets mad. Why are you celebrating this wastrel when you’ve never
done anything like that for me? And we think: Yeah. Right. I’m on the elder
son’s side. Problem is, Jesus isn’t on the elder son’s side but on the fathers.
So many of us identify with the wrong character in this parable. Or take the
parable of the workers in the vineyard. A landowner hires some laborers at the
dawn of the day who got out into his fields and work for him all day. All
through the day he keeps hiring other workers who also go to work for him, but
they don’t work as long as the people who were hired first. Some of them hired
late in the day work for only an hour or two. Then at the end of the day the
landowner gives them all the same amount of pay. Someone objects: Hey! Wait a
minute! I worked all day in the hot sun. That guy worked for two hours, and
you’re paying him as much as you’re paying me? That’s just not right! And most
of us say Yeah. Right. That objecting worker is right. He should get paid a lot
more than the guy who only worked for two hours. Problem is, Jesus thinks the
landowner was right to pay all the workers the same amount and that those who
worked all day have no grounds for complaint. Once again most of us take the
wrong side in the parable.
So it is with
the story called the Anointing at Bethany. Some version of that story appears
in all four Gospels. We just heard John’s version. Jesus is having dinner at
the home of Lazarus, whom Jesus has raised from the dead, and his sisters Mary
and Martha. Mary takes a container of pure nard, nard being a very costly and
fragrant ointment. She pours the nard on Jesus feet and wipes if off with her
hair. Judas objects. He says “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given
to the poor?” John says he didn’t really care about the poor and wanted to
steal the money, but never mind. In both Mark and Matthew someone not
identified as Judas makes the same objection. And a lot of us say yeah. Right.
Why is she wasting this valuable stuff by pouring it on Jesus’ feet rather than
using it to help those in need? Surely that would have been a better use of
this expensive stuff. And once again we’ve chosen the wrong side, and we don’t
much like Jesus’ response to Judas either. He says leave her alone. She has
anointed me beforehand for my burial. “The poor you always have with you,” he
says, but you won’t always have me. And we think he’s dismissing concern for
the poor. Oh, they’re always there. Don’t worry about them. And we don’t get
it. We think Jesus is just wrong and Judas is right.
Well, Judas
isn’t right and Jesus isn’t wrong, and here’s why. To understand why Judas
isn’t right and Jesus isn’t wrong we have to understand just what Mary has done
when she pours the nard on Jesus’ feet and wipes with her hair. What she has
done is anoint him. In the Jewish culture of the time dead bodies were anointed
in a way, but anointing had a long and very different history for the Jews. The
ancient Hebrew kings were not crowned king when they came to the throne, they
were anointed king. That means they had oil poured on their heads. To be
anointed was to have oil somehow applied to your body. For the ancient kings it
was supposedly a sign that God had chosen them as king. They were called by a
Hebrew word that meant “the anointed one.” That word was meshiach, and meshiach is
the root of our word messiah. Messiah means the anointed one. There’s a Greek
word that means the same thing, the anointed one. That word is Christos,
obviously the root of our word Christ. When the first Christians called Jesus
the Christ they meant that he was God’s anointed one, God’s chosen one.
In our story
this morning Mary anoints Jesus. He says she’s preparing his body for burial,
but surely there is more to it than that. Think of what Mary has done this way.
She has anointed him, and in so doing she has performed an act of faith. She
has demonstrated her conviction that Jesus is indeed the Christ, the Messiah,
God’s chosen one. Her act in using the costly nard was an act of deep faith,
faith in Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah, as the Christ of God.
That’s why Jesus
can say that what she did was proper though the nard could indeed have been
sold for nearly a year’s wages for a laborer and the money used to provide
relief to the poor. When Jesus approves of what she has done he is saying to
his friends and companions and to us: Faith comes first. Of course Jesus wants
us to care for the poor and other people in need, but the point of this story
is that our work of caring must be grounded in our Christian faith. Mary was
right to anoint Jesus. In doing so she expressed through an action rather than
words her faith in him as God’s anointed one and through him her faith in God.
She was right.
We’ve talked
some this weekend about how hard the work of peace and justice an be. Last
night Chris talked to us about how we always need to be aware of obstacles in
our path, about opposition we will face, when we try to do God’s work in the
world. I said something about it too yesterday morning. Those of us who have
been involved in the work of peace and justice for any amount of time, and
those of us who have done little but observe others doing that work, know how
difficult and frustrating that work can be. Burn out is always a risk, and all of
us will burn out on the work if we don’t have a solid anchor. If we don’t have
a source of restored strength. If we don’t have a safe spiritual haven in which
we can rest and be renewed. Our faith is that safe haven. It is always there
for us if we will indeed put it first. God is always there for us, and putting
our faith first the way Mary did in our story can keep us connected with God
and the spiritual gifts God offers us.
So. Do the work
of peace and justice. God and Jesus Christ call us to that work. About that
there is no doubt. But put your faith first. Ground your work in your Christian
faith. Hold onto the hand God always offers you to lift you up when you’re down
and to nudge you back into action when you’re ready. If we will understand that
Mary was right, if we will always put our faith first, we can do the work to
which God calls us. If we won’t, before us lies only disillusionment and
despair. Mary was right. Let’s really understand that truth, shall we? Amen.
