She Was Right

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.