There are so many stories crammed into Holy Week between the triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and the Resurrection on Easter Sunday that we could do with a month of Sundays in this week to tell all the stories. My plan is to roll them out one day at a time and I’ll use the stories that Wilda C Gafney has picked in The Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church as the stories to tell, as even one a day won’t fit them all in.
Today is Monday in Holy Week and today’s story (from John 12) finds Jesus, six days ahead of the Passover in the village of Bethany.
He came to the home of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. The very Lazarus that Jesus had recently raised from the dead. They were all great friends and Jesus often stayed at their house as he was passing through Bethany on the way to or from Jerusalem. The siblings held a dinner for Jesus and Martha served the meal while Lazarus sat at the table with him along with Jesus’ inner circle of followers.
Mary took a pound of balm made of expensive pure nard. The scent must have filled the whole house, spilling out into the streets of Bethany. Mary anointed Jesus’ feet with the perfume and wiped them with her hair.
Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus’ disciples, the one who was about to betray him, said, “Why was this balm not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” At face value there is merit to this question, indeed the poor could have benefited from this amount of money had it been sold rather than poured on the feet of Jesus, but Judas was not concerned for the poor but for his pocket. He was the keeper of the money bag and syphoned money for himself from the gifts and offerings made to Jesus and his friends.
Jesus, spoke up, and said, “Leave her alone. It was for the day of burial that she kept it.”
Mary poured out an extraordinary amount of expensive perfume on the feet of Jesus, anointing him for burial. What extravagance. That last line points us to the tomb where we will find ourselves at the end of this week. Mary’s action was both prophetic and an act of love for her friend.
To lavish love on Jesus the way Mary did is not within our realm of things to do, but we can lavish love on another human or other than human in a different way. In a story he told to explain about the kin-dom of God (Matthew 25), Jesus said, ‘My Father has blessed you. Come and take what is yours. It is the kin-dom prepared for you since the world was created. I was hungry. And you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty. And you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger. And you invited me in. I needed clothes. And you gave them to me. I was sick. And you took care of me. I was in prison. And you came to visit me… Anything you did for the least important of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
Perhaps this is how we spend ourselves with the lavish extravagance of Mary as well as the challenge posed by Judas (even if he didn’t fully mean it himself).
Is there something you can do to care for someone today?
Image credit: Mary anoints Jesus at Bethany, from a mosaic at Church of San Pio da Pietrelcina in San Giovanni Rotondo, created in 2009.