Sermon for The Fifth Sunday in Lent, March 25, 2007
Delivered by the Rev'd A. Robert Hirschfeld
Grace Church, Amherst, MA
Isaiah (43:16-21)
Philippians (3:4b-14)
Psalm 126
John (12:1-8)
"Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus' feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume."
Jesus comes to a special house. It is a house that has known the power of resurrection, already. Let me go back. (I wish we had some Bibles in these pews, because, then I could really preach.) Lazarus, whose body has died and was kept in a tomb for three days, is now alive by the power of Jesus' command. As it's recorded in John’s Gospel, Jesus had just been in Bethany before he took a little retreat in the hills of Ephraim. It seems that the one thing that really burned the religious authorities the most, the thing that really irked them and exhausted their already waning bit of tolerance for this Jesus fellow, was the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Too threatening, too disorienting, too much beyond their allowances of what was thought holy and pure was that moment, when Jesus shouts out to Lazarus, "come forth" and tells the others to unbind him and let him go. It is "from that day" that the previously dead man emerged from the tomb, that "they planned to put Jesus to death.”
God’s life and grace is too dynamic for religion sometimes, and religion is too frightened of it. The word religion comes from the same word as ligament, or ligature. It binds together. Think of this for a moment. Is our religion a ligament…is it like the connective tissue that connects us to God and each other? Does our religion provide a vision of the earth, its creatures, and our humanity as being woven in life and love together? Or is our religion a ligature, something that wraps up, binds us in comforting cloths, and keeps us bound up like a chain or a rope? Is your religion, is our religion, how we see ourselves as members of the Body of the Risen Christ, and in that Body are we drawn into the community of the Holy Spirit and God and living a life of Trinity, of relationship to each other? Or is our religion the thing that separates us by wrapping us in ligatures of self-righteousness and self-absorption? Imagine Lazarus, wrapped up, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, his face wrapped in a cloth. It’s an image of a kind of a certain kind of religion, I think, it’s an image of death. And in the face of those ligatures, Jesus says, “Unbind him and let him go!”
And what’s that wonderful detail that I haven’t mentioned about that scene? Do you remember? “Martha, the sister of the dead man (always the practical-minded one of these two sisters) reminds Jesus, just as he is about to do this amazing sign of the inbreaking of God’s Kingdom by commanding that the stone closing the tomb be removed, says to Jesus, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead for four days!” Do you how remember the King James Version tells it? "Martha the sister of the him that was dead saith unto him, 'Lord, by this time he stinketh, for he hath been dead four days!'"
And now, Jesus returns to that same household, the household of the resuscitated Lazarus, and Martha and Mary, and they prepare a meal for him. It is near the end of his public ministry, on the eve of his entry, for the last time, into Jerusalem, and his closest friends are there in the house, the disciples, all of them, including Judas. And soon after supper, they smell this wonderful scent, filling the whole house, the scent of some sweet fragrance. It fills the whole room. It’s Mary’s ointment. She is washing Jesus’ feet with her hair and empties out a jar of pure ointment, with a special tincture of fragrance, perhaps she purchased it as some cost, almost a year's wages for a laborer if we go by Judas’ reckoning. The stench of death of a few days previous is met with the fragrance of this ointment filling the house, a fragrance that signifies a sacrificial love, an adoration, a gratitude, and a farewell, for perhaps only Mary and Martha and the other women really believe Jesus when he tells them of what will meet him when he goes down to Jerusalem.
Imagine that scene. Who are you in that scene? Are you Mary, who has spent a lot of money in order to show her love to her Savior, the one she has already confessed is the One coming into the world to save it? Is your life characterized by that prodigal extravagance?
Or are you Judas? I think I know him very well, because I know that reaction in myself, how about you? I mean look at this, a woman, touching this man’s feet, wiping them with her hair. How utterly inappropriate! Not only inappropriate, but probably the law would say this borders on an abomination! If Judas had a cell phone at that moment, I could imagine him calling the temple authorities to cite Jesus in for a boundary violation! I know I would. The scene itself puts all the purity laws and holiness code of Leviticus and Deuteronomy in another context.
And then there’s the money thing. The hypocrisy, let’s name it, or perhaps it’s Judas’ “Yankee shabby chic.” We have a moldy, leaky, crumbling particle board counter top in our sacristy, the place where we prepare the elements for the divine liturgy of Christ’s body and blood and yet, many of us install those marble and granite countertops in our own kitchens and bathrooms.
Who are you in this scene? Part of the spiritual discipline of Lent is to spend time with these scriptures, time in quiet conversation with God or a friend and visualize, give voice to these characters. They are us. These scriptures are not some dead, static, wrapped-up words. This Bible is not an owner manual with directions on how to get to heaven. It’s a living narrative that is alive to us only insofar as we allow the Holy Spirit to fire our imagination to live into it.
And so one way we live into these wonderful stories is through our worship, and the liturgical actions, liturgy becomes a link, a bridge from the biblical world to our own world and life, and from our life to the Word. Here’s an example of how it works. Two weeks from today, Azi Golshan and Nate Brown will be baptized. They will become new members of the body of Christ through their baptism, which will be a kind of death to the old life of sin, and the fear of death, to the radiant life in the one who has, for all people, destroyed the power of sin and death. At their baptism they will be anointed. Now when we baptize here at Grace, we don’t just smear a little dry thumb on the forehead of the newly baptized, but we want to be ample, lavish, overflowing. We will give them, and the babies on the next day, a goodly amount of this stuff, olive oil with the essence of balsam added to it. This is an echo, an extension of what Mary applies to Jesus as he prepares for his journey towards the cross and then to the resurrection and his ascension. Paul, says of Christians that they should be “the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing: the fragrance of life.”
How do we get that lovely fragrance? Is it Chanel # 5 or Givenchy Homme? No, but it's in our adoration of God and our living our prayer in love, the giving of ourselves, the forgetting of ourselves in acts of love and sweet kindness, justice and humility that fills this house, and I pray, your house, with that fragrance of holiness. If our religion is anything else, then, in those elegant words of the King James Version of the Bible, our religion will stinketh. Pray it may not be so. And pray that ,even if it does at times that we may arise with Christ out of the tomb into the aroma of that garden where Jesus meets Mary again on that first Easter, and, we pray, this Easter, as well.