Extravagant Holiness

In the midst of my sermon preparation I remembered a story I heard in seminary about a preacher who had been asked to preach this very Gospel lesson. He was a visiting professor of theology, and not known to the congregation. A week or so before, the administrator at the church asked for his title. Thinking it was the sermon title they were after, he submitted one. It was only when he arrived at the church that he realized he might have misunderstood what they meant by “title.” For as he sat there in his pew, robed and ready to preach, his eyes beheld his introduction in the bulletin. It said:  “This morning we welcome to our pulpit our guest preacher, His Extravagant Holiness, The Rev. Dr. Gregory Smith.“

I think “Extravagant Holiness” is a pretty good title for this sermon – even if it doesn’t describe me very well at all.

The anointing at Bethany is where the story of Jesus pivots from his earthly ministry to his journey to the cross. Things are starting to unravel at this point in the story and nobody but God is in control: not Judas, or Peter; not the high priests, or Pontius Pilate. We are looking in on an intimate scene in a story that has begun to take a brutal turn. A moment where extravagant holiness breaks in.

John has made Mary of Bethany the principal actor in this scene, and as he paints it, she is the one who gets it right. She breaks open an alabaster jar filled with expensive perfume. She pours it over Jesus’ feet, and wipes it with her hair.  Perhaps she hadn’t planned this. But she got it right. Just as in the earlier story, when she sat at Jesus’s feet while Martha fussed about the work she was stuck with, Mary has chosen the better part. It was in this act of adoration, love, and worship that she wordlessly points to the One among them who will soon ascend to the Cross for our sake. She sees where this is going. She sees the new thing that Jesus is ushering in, and that the only way to respond to it is with love and gratitude.

Painting:  Donald Krause, Jesus Anointed at Bethany

It’s something Judas just can’t see. For after this story he leaves the dinner to go and betray Jesus. We have learned that the chief priests not only want Jesus’ death; now they decide they must kill Lazarus. His resurrection by Jesus, which is being celebrated at this quiet dinner, makes him a dangerous witness to Jesus’ power. In this darkening plot, death and deception are thickly present. Fear and distrust are beginning to take root even among Jesus’ followers.  In the midst of all of this, a sweet fragrance fills the room, and the outpouring of Mary’s love shines with truth.  

This is one of a very few stories that appears in all four Gospels. The Mark and Matthew versions happen at the house of Simon the Leper. In Luke, it is at the home of a Pharisee. In Mark and Matthew, the woman is unnamed. In Luke, she is described merely as a sinner. In Mark and Matthew, she anoints Jesus’ head. In Luke she bathes his feet with ointment and tears and wipes them dry with her hair. John’s account is like Luke’s in this way, minus the tears. In all four accounts, somebody objects to her actions--in John alone, it is Judas, and we have this sentence disputing his sincerity. Finally, John alone sets his scene six days before Passover.

Now John’s Gospel is sometimes called the Book of Signs and there’s often symbolism packed into his stories, as in this one.

Setting the story six days before Passover may have been to coincide with the day a lamb is customarily chosen for the Passover sacrifice. It is inspected several times over the following days to determine that it is unblemished, truly worthy to give to God, and it’s anointed when it passes each inspection. The first anointing, at six days, is of the feet.  Passover commemorates the time in Jewish history when the blood of the lamb spared the people and enabled them to be reborn as free people in Israel.  So this anointing points to the sacrifice of Christ, the paschal lamb, and John assigns it to Mary, a woman, who is not one of the 12, but here shows her discipleship above all the others. And this is the only instance in the Gospels where the Christ, the Messiah, both of which mean “the anointed one,” is in fact anointed.

Mary anoints his feet with nard, an expensive, perfumed oil she had purchased, perhaps originally for the burial of Lazarus. Rather than anointing Jesus for burial, although we understand that she knows it to be imminent, this anointing is more bittersweet. It is as if the smell of imminent death is mingled with the nard, and the sweet fragrance which overtakes the room transforms our thinking about Christ’s death into a recognition of Jesus’s self-giving love, which can only be met with devotion, gratitude, and extravagant love in return. Perhaps that’s why, unlike in Luke’s telling of this story, Mary does not weep.

This is why Mary did not count the cost, and why Jesus rebukes Judas, who does. We know what John thinks of Judas: he reminds me of a campaign manager. He thinks he knows Jesus’ agenda better than Jesus, and he’s trying to keep him on message. The optics of the scene—all this extravagance—a woman in this intimate act--don’t look good. He doesn’t see what’s going on, because he does not know Jesus. And this will be fatal for him.

Yet despite his rebuke, Jesus has not said we should not worry about the poor.  He’s not saying the poor don’t matter, and that we aren’t to care for them. He’s saying that Judas represents the world’s way. Jesus wants us to move away from the idea that the work of God is transactional. That it is only about good works. That it is fueled primarily by money. No. We are to participate in a virtuous cycle of giving and receiving, to give ourselves wholly, sometimes even extravagantly, without counting the cost, and thereby, we will receive the gift of participating in God’s own life in return.   

Mary sees this. She has fallen in love with Christ as the lover of souls, whose own suffering allows him to look with compassion and mercy upon all who turn to him for help. Like other disciples and saints – like you and me, Mary has come to know the “surpassing value of knowing Christ who has made me his own,” as Paul says in the letter to the Philippians.  Mary’s is a story of extravagant love, of extravagant hospitality, the kind that engenders other extravagant acts of hospitality. Jesus wants more of THAT.

And so this is really about understanding how God’s economics differ from our own. For if we count costs only the way they are counted in the world, we make money, not love, the principle currency. We reduce the work we do for and with God into transactions. We value what can be measured—yet God’s love cannot be measured. You see, God doesn’t particularly care about efficiency. For what was efficient about sending God’s son?

So I have been thinking about inefficient and extravagant acts of love.

In the parable we heard last week, of the prodigal son, whose father was so overjoyed he gave him his ring, and killed a fatted calf, all in celebration of the love that had been restored to his family. “Inefficient use of livestock,” said his elder son complained, like Judas. “Maybe chicken-worthy. Definitely not calf-worthy.”     

I thought of the time a friend drove through rush hour traffic from Seattle – what ended up a 9-hour roundtrip-- to come to my ordination, which lasted a little over an hour, and I barely had time to talk to her with all the people around me. “What a waste of gas,” someone might have said. “What an inefficient use of her time.” But for me, what a gift of extravagant love.

I thought of the beautiful music our choir lovingly prepares for us, spending weeks practicing an anthem we hear for only a few minutes. “Jessica, have you thought about how it would be more efficient to stream an iTunes recording of someone else doing that anthem?“ I don’t think so.

Such extravagant gifts of love are an antidote to the pettiness and reductionism in the world driven by saving time, saving money, and avoiding inconvenience. When these gifts they are given in the love of Christ and to the glory of God, they are made holy.

Looking ahead to Palm Sunday and the Holy Week that follows, the story gets more brutal, and sad, and senseless. We know that the journey to the cross is also the journey to resurrection, but we also know that death and poverty and disease will still be in the world after Easter. We know that death will find tiny cracks to penetrate and invade our assurances that resurrection is possible. That is why we must remember Mary’s act as a defiant one. It asserts life even in the imminence of death. We can place our own gifts of love in the context of Jesus resurrection, where the doors are open in the most extravagant act of hospitality we can imagine. It is a gift, like Mary’s, multiplied beyond measure.

And so here we are on this side of the resurrection, called to again live into this lesson, which is to recognize the Christ in our midst, as Mary did, to keep our hearts open and to reach out in love, even through fear or sadness, to dignify those who need our healing touch, and to be a part of God’s work in the world, with the very best of what we have to offer. Let us go forth and make this broken world fragrant with our offerings of extravagant and holy love.

Preached April 7, 2019 at St Gabriel Episcopal Church, Portland, OR 

Lectionary readings (Lent 5C): Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3:4b-14; John 12:1-8