How are you preparing for Easter this year? Have you bought the colourful candy eggs for the children in your life – sons and daughters, or grandchildren, or nieces and nephews, or young friends? When I was growing up, my mother would hard-boil eggs and then we would use dye to colour them ourselves. Have some of you thought about how you are going to stage your annual Easter egg hunt this year? That was something we often did in our house. First thing Sunday morning, our children would search the house to find the hidden eggs and sometimes little gifts. Have you bought any yummy chocolate bunnies or chocolate eggs yet? It used to be that women would buy a new Easter bonnet and the family would all be decked out in new Easter clothes. And extended families would get together for Easter dinner. How are you all preparing to celebrate Easter this year? How extravagant will you be?
Our story about Jesus in today’s Gospel of John is about preparing for Easter too. There are some similarities in Jesus’ story to the way many in our culture prepare for Easter but there are also major differences. There was a fine dinner prepared by a meticulous host. There were invited guests with a guest of honour. The guest of honour: Jesus himself! Some time before this dinner, Jesus had restored Lazarus to life. He had been dead for four days but Jesus brought him back to life again (John 11:1-44). So his sisters, Mary and Martha, would obviously be overjoyed, exuberant, ecstatic, over the moon – you pick the words – about Lazarus being with them again. So Martha honoured Jesus her way with good food she lovingly prepared and served. And Mary honoured Jesus her way by pouring very expensive perfume all over Jesus’ feet.
Martha’s way was sensible. (Every one of us here can appreciates Martha.) Mary’s way, however, was provocative, exaggerated, reckless, excessive and extravagant. For Judas the keeper of the purse in Jesus’ band of disciples, what Mary did was a total waste of money. You see, Mary should have used water to wash Jesus’ feet. And she should have dried his feet with a towel of course. She could have used the best towels they had if she wanted to show her respect and appreciation for Jesus – but not her long hair untied, let down like a woman of the street. What Mary did was lovingly intimate in this story. And Jesus accepted her gift of love willingly because he accepted her devotion. He also knew the deeper meaning her actions would have in about a week. (But I don’t think it is much easier for us today to appreciate Mary’s way than it was for those in Jesus’ day!)
Judas was also part of the story. He looked at Mary and saw an excessive waste of good money-making perfume. Oh certainly not for himself but for those who were poor, he said. Judas knew that everyone present, especially Jesus, would understand that. Can’t you imagine Judas looking at the other disciples, at Jesus himself and pointing his finger at Mary and asking: “What’s wrong with this picture?” They all knew the perfume cost a year’s wages for the average worker in their culture. Mary’s action could rightly be called extravagant and even wasteful in light of the biblical priority of caring for those who are poor. We can appreciate Judas’s surface concern for the poor so we wonder what Jesus meant when he said: “You will always have poor people with you, but you will not always have me.”)
What do we do with Mary’s “pouring out” extravagance?
Mary seemed to take the dinner party by surprise. She came into the room with a jar of very expensive perfume or aromatic oils. She poured it all out (like an anointing) on Jesus’ feet. She did not calculate or analyze or scrutinize what she did or else, I wonder, if she had would she have acted that way? But out of her full heart of love and gratitude to Jesus, she forgot herself, poured the perfume on Jesus’ feet and then dried his feet with her hair.
Do you feel an awkwardness with Mary’s action? I do. I think one reason we may feel this way is that her response to Jesus was so very personal. Another reason may be that we are encouraged to work hard and save our money and calculate carefully before we spend. A former Bank of Canada governor was in the news this week encouraging Canadians -- starting at the age of 30 -- to save 10 to 20 per cent of their before-tax earnings for their retirement. One Internet bank’s popular slogan is “Save your money!” We may also feel a discomfort with such extravagance because many of us were either raised by parents who went through the Depression or we are post-war parents ourselves. We were taught money was to be saved for a rainy day or for level-headed purposes. We have been encouraged to play it safe. So I suspect more than a few of us might wonder what Mary’s extravagance could mean for us today.
I am captured by two thoughts here. One is that Mary poured out her gift of love for Jesus because her family had been helped by Jesus. Their brother who had died was now alive again! That incredible gift was reason enough for her to express her love to the One who had given Lazarus back his life and had given Lazarus back to his family. So ponder with me: is it not the case that only when we have experienced God or been helped by God in some deeply personal way that we begin to understand how to live extravagantly in honouring Jesus? Here is an illustration that I believe is appropriate.
Larry Stewart was a successful businessman in Missouri. For 26 years (from 1980 through 2006) Stewart had been anonymously giving out $100 bills to anyone in need at Christmas. Then it was discovered who he was and why he began doing this.
In the winter of 1971, Stewart was working as a door-to-door salesman. When the company he was working for went out of business, he quickly ran out of money. Stewart hadn’t eaten in two days when he went to the Dixie Diner and ordered a breakfast he eventually admitted he couldn’t pay for. Ted Horn, the restaurant owner, sympathized with Stewart. He acted as though he found a $20 bill on the floor underneath of Stewart’s chair. “Son, you must have dropped this,” Horn said.
“It was like a fortune to me,” Stewart reflected. “I said, ‘Thank you, Lord.’ Right then, I made a promise. I said, ‘Lord, if you ever put me in a position to help other people, I will do it.’”
Over the years, Stewart has given away about $1.3 million. He says he has been amply rewarded in return. “I see the smiles and looks of hopelessness turn to looks of hope in an instant,” he says. “After all, isn’t that what we’re put here on Earth for -- to help one another?” [Nanci Hellmich, “Santa Shares His Secret,” USA Today (12-22-06)]
Another story:
A recovering alcoholic described his journey of following Christ. For him, it was not an intellectual or social pursuit. “Oh no,” he says. “I had to find something that would give me a reason not to commit suicide at the end of every day.” That is how he knew he had been helped by God. When Jesus becomes the reason for our very existence, we have a different response to him than someone who has yet to be captured by [God’s] grace and love.
It is intriguing that the name “Lazarus” is the Greek version of the Hebrew name “Eleazar,” which means “God is my help” and “Bethany” in Greek means “house of affliction.” In Jesus, God came to help this household when they were experiencing great suffering over Lazarus’s fatal illness. And Mary and Martha discovered then that nothing was too much to offer in praise of God after Jesus had restored their brother and their lives to them. So I wonder, after we read in John’s Gospel about Martha and Mary’s ways of honouring Jesus, does that cause us to reflect on what we do to honour Jesus? And do we have hearts full of love and go all out in our own ways to honour Jesus as Martha and Mary did?
The second thought that captures me is found in Jesus’ words to Judas and the others who were bothered by Mary’s extravagance. We heard verse 8 read in the Good News Bible: “Leave her alone! Let her keep what she has [done] for the day of my burial.” The Message Bible gets at the meaning more helpfully for our understanding this way: “Let her alone. She is anticipating and honoring the day of my burial.” Mary began pouring this fragrant ointment not on Jesus’ head -- where people then wore perfume at dinner parties and kings in those days were anointed at their coronations -- but she poured it on his feet where the preparation of a body for burial would start. Jesus knew – even if Mary didn’t -- that this pouring out was a foreshadowing of his coming death that would happen in a matter of days. That is why Jesus told Judas and the others to leave Mary alone. We are not told if Mary or Judas or any of the others fully understood what Jesus meant at the time. However Jesus clearly understood what was to come.
It’s important to see the context of this story. It is bookended by death -- Jesus’ approaching crucifixion and a plot to kill Lazarus. Just before Jesus arrived in Bethany for dinner, the end of chapter 11 says the religious leaders were looking for Jesus to arrest him as part of their plan to put him to death. Then immediately after the dinner, John 12:9-11 says the religious leaders were also out to kill Lazarus because many people had stopped listening to them and were instead listening to Jesus and believing in him because they had seen Lazarus raised from death to life.
For Jesus, at this point in his ministry, preparing for the joy of Easter also meant preparing for the sorrow and suffering of his own terrible death on Good Friday.
Now Judas understood none of this. So he criticized Mary’s extravagance and talked about those who were poor – a significant issue, a motherhood issue. I mean, who can argue with helping those who are poor? Let’s not forget, however, that Judas was both a betrayer and, now we are informed, a thief as well. Apparently, he often had his hand in the till. Nevertheless,
what do we do with this statement of Jesus that we will always have those who are poor with us?
Now we know from other stories in the Gospels that Jesus was always concerned about those who were poor and considered outcasts. He ate with them, spent a lot of time with them, healed them, taught them, loved them and literally focused his ministry for them. So to say he was insensitive toward those who were poor doesn’t hold any weight. But in this particular instance, something else was clearly more important for Jesus.
Let me approach Jesus’ famous phrase this way: there is a sense in which Jesus is being both completely accurate in what he says about those who are poor and also somewhat ironic at the same time. When we look at the history of the world, it is true there have always been those who are poor and, when we look at conditions in the world today, it is easy to conclude there always will be the poor among us. Even in Israel, there were always those who were poor across the centuries up to Jesus’ time. I say “even” because, in Israel of all places, that should not have been the case.
God had structured Israel in such a way as to provide protection for those who became poor for some reason and for Israel to seek ways to help and re-establish those who were poor. God knew people would fall into poverty in a selfish, greedy and power-seeking world. So God provided the laws and the means governing the treatment and the restoration of those in poverty. Here is the point: had Israel followed God’s injunctions in the Old Testament regarding gleaner laws (farmers were supposed to leave the leftover grain in the fields so those in need could gather it for themselves) and had Israel followed the laws protecting the poor from exploitation and the Year of the Jubilee when all debts were to be forgiven, there would have been fewer people who were poor and relatively few people who would be impoverished from one generation to the next – as we often find today in our own social system.
But Israel did not keep God’s laws. We only have to scan the book of Amos, for example, to see that Israel did not carry out God’s laws of justice and compassion. So it is not surprising the number of people who were poor increased. Cycles of poverty continued from generation to generation. What made matters worse was the abuse caused by unjust systems of business and unscrupulous merchants intent on padding their own pockets by trampling on those who could ill afford their goods.
So Jesus was right: we will always have the poor with us. But here is the irony: the likelihood of having poor among us will remain and even increase as long as we have people like Judas among us. As long as we have sinners among us. As long as there are people like us among us!
This story of Jesus and Martha and Mary and Lazarus and Judas is all about extravagance – extravagance that is generous beyond calculation. Mary felt her love and gratitude to Jesus so deeply she had to express this to him with all her heart -- extravagantly and lavishly. And Jesus knew the only hope this tired and perpetually impoverished world has lies precisely in the area of exuberant extravagance and radical self-giving. We are a people who tend to leave God at a distance rather that getting up close and personal and even emotional with God. We are a people who tend to calculate and hoard life’s treasures rather than pouring ourselves out in love for God and for others. We are a people who need to be captured again by the grace and love of God -- for each of us and for the whole world.
We have been reflecting on renewal in our worship services during Lent. Have your reflections told you that, maybe, change is possible – that maybe our hearts and our actions can be renewed and even enlarged? Maybe the secret to life really is, as Jesus said, losing it for the sake of the kingdom of God. In fact, maybe the renewal of all things begins at the moment when no less than the very Son of God – Jesus Christ -- stretches out his arms on the cross and quite literally wastes his life extravagantly so that we might be forgiven and also discover life now more abundant and real than we ever thought possible and the new life to come in God’s kingdom more than we could ever have imagined.
May this be so for you and for me. Amen.
Rev. Chris Miller
Lent 5
March 21, 2010
No comments:
Post a Comment