I’m not sure I should admit this but when I come across this gospel reading I hear Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar; “Woman, your fine ointment, brand new and expensive, should have been saved for the poor! Why has it been wasted? We could have raised maybe three hundred silver pieces or more. People who are hungry, people who are starving matter more than your feet and hair!!”
The musical is staged a little differently from John’s writings…and it’s a different Mary…but what’s clear in both is the difference between Judas and Mary and how they each respond to Jesus in what will be the last week of his life.
Now I love Mary of Bethany- I’m quite fond of women who disrupt the norms. I love her passion, her vulnerability and her willingness to go against what society expects of her, and we also see her deep love for Jesus, who’s like another brother to her, Martha and Lazarus. When Jesus stayed with the family previously it was Mary who sat at Jesus’ feet, listening to his teaching, rather than attending to household tasks.
Jesus now returns to stay with the family at a time he needs to rest, to gather his thoughts and to prepare for what lies ahead, his entire journey from this moment is lading towards the cross, but it’s important to put this visit in the context of what has happened right before; Lazarus has just been raised from the dead.
This meal is a celebration, a thank you, and Mary processes the events of the previous days, those extreme emotions from the grief at her brother’s death to the joy at the miracle of his rising from the dead. She’s also processing the things she’s heard Jesus preach and teach, the things he’s said only to his most intimate circle, and she’s overcome by emotion and realisation. I don’t know how much of this is conscious thought and there’s certainly something of a prophet about Mary.
She grabs the expensive oil of nard- this would have cost an average person’s yearly wage so it’s possible it may have been intended as part of her dowry- but that doesn’t matter now. She falls at Jesus’ feet overwhelmed by love, gratitude and the realisation of who this man is and what lies ahead. She thanks him, blesses him and cries for him, anointing his feet as if for burial and in meeting her need to express these emotions she also sees a need in Jesus, the need of an exhausted man on the verge of something unspeakable, the need for his human body to be soothed and rested, in a place which for him offered rest and safety.
She rejects whatever’s appropriate, what’s expected, what’s proper, and expresses herself from a place of raw emotion, anointing Jesus’ feet with the oil, the spicy fragrance filling the whole room and afterwards prompting Judas’ sneering response.
You may think Judas has a point, how often do we scrutinise the way our community spends money? How many times do we think our limited funds could be put to better use? This oil was an asset that if traded could have done a whole lot of good, but it was used in an extravagant, physical act of love. We can weigh the cost in silver pieces but what price do we place on acts of love and acts of healing? Is there a price in attempting to show love to God in the way that God shows love to us?
God’s love for us is so extraordinarily lavish, how could we ever show such extravagant love in return? As Judas is calculating the price of acts of faith in his head, Mary is showing extravagant love and faith with her entire body and it’s shocking to everyone except Jesus.
The way our faith has been received by us over the centuries means in many ways we’ve become a people who value the intellectual over the physical. We’ve developed such a complicated relationship with our bodies that we forget that our fleshiness matters. We know this because Jesus chose flesh. The divine eternal Christ chose incarnation in a human body. And yet we still think of bodies as being less than holy, we’re ashamed of our physicality functions of our body.
This is of course until are bodies are in need of healing. Despite this deep-rooted belief that our souls are good and our bodies are bad, our belief around health flips this around- bodily health is given more value than mental health or spiritual health.
Our church services centred around healing are almost always prefixed by the word “wholeness”; wholeness and healing. We may come to these services at a time when we or those we love are suffering from physical illness, but the shape and aim of our prayers is to facilitate (to quote clever theologians) 'the enabling of a person to function as a whole in accordance with God's will for them'. To allow us to more fully become who God intends us to be.
We often come like Mary, falling at Jesus’ feet and offering all we have because it’s the only thing we can think of to do. Praying for healing is not an act of faith we've intellectually calculated, it’s an extravagant act of love as we place all of our trust in God. We don’t come expecting miracles, we probably don’t know what we expect, but what we receive is something extraordinary. Healing means something different to each of us, but I believe at its very heart, healing is about the completeness of our relationship with God- and what could be more extraordinary than that?
The theology we've inherited has contributed to a disconnect between our minds and our bodies, the aim of healing is to reconnect us, body, mind and soul, both to ourselves and to our creator; to invite us deeper into the relationship of love and healing that exists within the Trinity. To deepen this relationship, strengthen us and allow each of us to see reflected back the person God knows us to be, wants us to be, and through that reconnection understand how we can love the Lord our God with all of our heart, with all of our soul, with all of our mind and with all strength, particularly at those times when strength is so hard to find. Amen.
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