Freely Given

Robert E. Hall
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

March 25, 2007

Text: John 12:1-8

At a time when it was assumed that women should be barely seen, and seldom heard from---Mary’s actions must have been the source of gossip for many months or years.

 It was not unusual for a servant to wash the feet of guests, or for a student to wash the teacher’s feet, or for a child to wash the feet of their poor old dad. But she doesn’t just wash Jesus’ feet; she applies an ointment worth about 300 day’s wages for a laborer. She “emerges from the shadows, removes her veil, loosens her hair,” and pours expensive perfume on the feet of Jesus. Though the act is certainly an act of service, “this is no act of servitude. It is an assertion of freedom, dignity and power.” (“Intemperate Love,” Dean Thomas Breidenthal, Princeton Seminary, 2004)

This action by Mary of Bethany is a hint of the liberation that was present in the early Christian movement. It was an electrifying time, these earliest days.

Women experienced  freedom from domination by males,
slaves from masters; poor from endless futility. As a missionary friend of mine once told me, it is always a surprise to civil authorities in countries where he served, when people who came to know the love of Christ also came to believe in themselves as persons of God-given dignity, and to act like it.

SOMETIMES, WORDS ARE NOT ENOUGH

Whatever else Mary was expressing, she was expressing her love for Jesus. “Here was a chance to publicly demonstrate allegiance to this man who spoke and acted as no one ever had before on this earth.” It was a risky thing for her to do. She risked being misunderstood. But she was willing to risk appearing foolish in order to honor her Lord. “The power and witness of Mary’s discipleship displayed in this story is that she knows how to respond to Jesus without being told. She fulfills Jesus’ love commandment before he even teaches it….She gives boldly of herself in love to Jesus at his hour, just as Jesus will give boldly of himself in love at his hour.” (Gail R. O’Day, The Gospel of John: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflection, in NIB, Vol.IX, 1995.)

You may have seen the movie, “The Straight Story,” based on a real life story. Alvin Straight (played by Richard Farnsworth) lives in Laurens, Iowa. He has been estranged from his brother, Lyle, for over ten years----they haven’t spoken a word to each other. Alvin hears that his brother has had a stroke and may not live much longer. (When asked what they had fallen out over, Alvin says that that he can’t remember exactly, and it doesn’t really matter anymore.) He decides that he wants to set things right between them; he wants once again to sit out under the stars with his brother like they used to do when they were kids.

Trouble is, he has no driver’s license, no car, and very little money. Though he is offered help to take a bus, he declines. He does have a riding mower. He will ride his mower to visit his brother. His travels and encounters along the way are touching, but the final scene of the movie is worth it all. He arrives at his brother’s house, calls out to him. Lyle comes out, hobbling on a walker, obviously bumfuzzled. They shake hands without a word; both sit down in rockers on the porch. Lyle looks out and sees the riding mower. He asks Alvin, “Did you come all that way on that?” Alvin answers, “Yes, Lyle, I did.”

Sometimes, words alone are not enough. An extravagant, foolish demonstration of love is best of all.

We do not know more than this about Mary’s knowledge of Jesus. Surely she was thankful for the life of her brother, Lazarus, whom Jesus raised up. We do know that she was remembered as sitting at the feet of Jesus, listening to him talk, when he was a guest in their home earlier. We are told that she fell at Jesus feet when he approached their house after Lazarus had died, saying, “Lord, if you had been here, he would not have died.” But this we can be sure of: hers was an extravagant display of her adoration  of Jesus, her friend. She loved and dared to show it, for Christ’s sake!

What we see in Mary is that her “freedom went hand in hand with devotion to Jesus….[Hers] was not a liberation into being left alone, but liberation into being someone claimed by Christ; not liberation into self-sufficiency, but liberation into total reliance on fellowship with Christ; not liberation into self-control, but liberation into the immoderation and intemperance of Godly love.” (Breidenthal)

CRITICISM FROM A LIKELY SOURCE

No good deed goes unpunished----or so someone once said. Mary’s action immediately evokes a response from----of all people----Judas Iscariot. In Matthew and Mark, it is either the disciples or someone of those there; but in John, Judas is the heavy.

“Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarri and the money given to the poor?” Then John the evangelist adds a parenthetical remark: “He said this not because he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal [literally, lift] what was put into it.” As if Judas needed any other bad publicity!

It is a fair enough question. We ask these kinds of questions all the time.

Someone spends $100 on cut flowers for a memorial service, and we think, “Isn’t this a shame: this money could have gone to feed hungry people.”

We drive 500 miles for a birthday party of a treasured friend and it costs us a dollar a mile, all told, and we may think, I could’ve put that money to some other good use.

 On the spur of the moment, my niece ran down to Interstate 45, taking every bottle of water and soft drinks, snacks and soft drinks in the house, to pass them out to people who are stopped bumper to bumper on the way from Houston to Dallas, fleeing a threatening hurricane.

In the fellowship of suffering that happens in hospital surgery waiting rooms, you may feel led to comfort a complete stranger who is alone and has just received some terrible news.

 Or, as I once did, going by to see an uncle who had lost his job, his family and his dignity because of his drinking. I was a wet behind the ears college student, but I simply had to do something to show I cared.

As Ecclesiastes has it, there is a time for everything. The point in this story is that “sometimes we must simply follow Jesus as we are impelled to do. If the decision is pondered and scrutinized to death, as we weigh the list of pros against the list of cons, considering to the last drop [our] impact on family and friends, and how to be the least offensive----we have not truly understood that call.” (Synthesis RCL, March 29, 1998)  

To be sure, I would have probably been asking Judas’s question. I am not given to spontaneous demonstrative gestures. But I know that there are times that I should overcome my reticence, because words alone won’t do.

A doctor has helped a small boy through a tough illness. On the last day of his hospital stay, the doctor comes by, and the boy’s mother says that her little boy has something to give him. The little boy takes his little teddy bear, worn from use, and hands it to the doctor. To this day, the doctor tells, he has it on a shelf in his office with this note: “The most valuable payment ever received for services rendered.”

This extravagant love is woven throughout our Bible. The good shepherd leaves the 99 sheep and goes after the one who is lost. (The 99, could they have spoken, would have surely objected.) The Father wastes all those provisions on a party for a no-account son.(The elder brother surely would have used the funds more wisely.) The heavenly hosts are sent to sing to shepherds in the field. (Like Willie Nelson singing to the people under the bridge!) Or the heart of our story: God’s coming to dwell among us in the son of a peasant couple. God seems to major in unexpected displays of affection!

One has written that “love and intemperance go together….To be temperate is to make reasonable choices. But reasonable choices can be very self-centered choices….Love knocks self-centeredness off its feet….” Love is not the enemy of reason; “but reason must take its cue from love.” When I get clear about whom I love, then I can use my reason to make choices that will actually help my beloved. “But the priority always belongs to love in all its impetuousness, its ardor, its tendency to be ‘over the top.’” (Breidenthal)

Love, of course, can attach itself to things which are not worthy of our devotion: money or fame, or looks, or any of the other familiar idols of choice. Our love for our family, as crucial as it is, becomes destructive if we then think we are free to care for nobody outside the family.

What happened with Mary, I think, is that she found Jesus worthy of her loving devotion, worthy of this gift of herself, worth the embarrassment or ridicule she would likely receive.

JESUS RESPONDS TO JUDAS

Jesus responds to Judas, “Leave her alone. [Put your calculator away.] She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” Sermonwriter.org

I found this quote from George Bernard Shaw: “It is true that the world is governed to a considerable extent by the considerations that occur to stockholders in the first five minutes.”
       
It is the day before Palm Sunday. Jesus will enter Jerusalem. The plan of the religious authorities would be accomplished. But he would enter as one who had been anointed.

 Anointing has a rich triple meaning: kings would have precious oils poured on their heads as a sign and seal of God’s Spirit. Sick and suffering people would be anointed for healing. And, at death, the body of the beloved would be anointed, beginning with the feet.

Mary’s loving gift? What did it signify? It was received willingly by Jesus, for he defends Mary’s action. And for Jesus it was an earnest of what was coming: his suffering and death as accomplishment of God’s salvation of the world. Mary may have been to first to see clearly what was coming, and to accept it.

As for the remark about the poor: I have too often heard this text quoted to justify our neglect of the poor, as if to say, “Well, there will always be poor people, so we may as well not worry ourselves over their plight, for we can’t change this situation.” But Jesus was quoting scripture, from Deuteronomy 15, and the whole quote is this: “Since there will always be some poor people in the land, I command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.’” Jesus’ Jesus says to Judas, “Put your calculator away.” (Sermonwriter.org)  His willingness to accept Mary’s gift does not mean, of course that Jesus (like Judas is described) cared nothing for the poor. His ministry was directed almost exclusively to the poor, wherever he went.

MARY REMEMBERED

Mary will be remembered, the accounts in Mark and Matthew tell us. Indeed she is. For Mary shows us that we will only stay with the hard work of loving our needy neighbors in the name and spirit of Jesus by focusing our love outside ourselves, to the God of infinite love.
 
And unless we find ways to sit at Jesus’ feet, we will not have the passion it takes to stay with it.

As we approach Holy Week, we can ask ourselves, do we love Jesus? Not just admire him, or think he was a wise teacher, but truly love him?

Will you and I respond on those occasions when words alone simply will not do---when some extravagant, over the top action alone will convey our love?