God’s grace and peace be with all of you.
Let’s take a moment to pause and orient ourselves with respect to where we are in the church year. We are still in the season of Lent. You can tell because we have all of our purple banners and purple paraments out, I’m wearing my purple stole. You can also tell because it says “Fifth Sunday in Lent” on the front of our bulletins.
When we started the season of Lent, Pastor Nikki and I talked about how this is a season of preparation. Much like Advent is the season of preparation before Christmas, Lent is the season of preparation before Holy Week. So we’ve been in this time of preparation, and now we’ve nearly reached the end. Holy Week will begin next Sunday with Palm Sunday. Then we’ll remember Jesus’ last meal with his disciples on Maundy Thursday. We’ll recall Jesus arrest, crucifixion, and burial on Good Friday. And the Sunday after—two weeks from today—we’ll celebrate the resurrection on Easter Sunday.
So we are nearing the end of the season of Lent. We are nearing the climax of the story of Jesus, and our gospel reading today clues us in to that. Today’s reading from John begins, “Six days before the Passover…” When we read that, we should immediately think, “Oh, it’s just a few days before Jesus’ death.” We’re entering the final act here. And if you look in John chapter 12, immediately after today’s reading—the very next passage—Jesus enters Jerusalem while people wave palm branches and shout “Hosanna!”
So today, the Fifth Sunday in Lent, we find ourselves right on the brink of the final act of this drama. Jesus is about to enter Jerusalem where he will be betrayed, arrested, tortured, and killed. Alongside the disciples, we will see our Lord and Savior welcomed into the city as a king, then crucified and laid in a tomb. We will share the wonder and confusion of the empty tomb on Easter morning, and celebrate the miracle of the resurrection.
And today, just before all of that, the final story we hear is this: “Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair.” This is the same Mary who sat at Jesus’ feet and listened to him while her sister Martha served; the same Mary whose brother Lazarus Jesus raised from the dead; and here, with Martha and Lazarus and the rest of Jesus’ disciples looking on, Mary anoints Jesus.
Immediately, Judas objects. “This perfume was worth three hundred denarii!” he protests—nearly a year’s worth of wages for a laborer. “It should have been sold and the money given to the poor.”
Because this is the gospel of John, we get some little parenthetical comments from the narrator. Judas speaks up, and the narrator helpfully reminds us, “This is the guy who’s about to betray Jesus.” The narrator also informs us that Judas isn’t actually worried about the poor: “He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.” The gospel couldn’t paint Judas as more of a villain if he was wearing a cape and twirling his handlebar mustache.
But honestly, it’s a shame that Judas is so comically bad in this passage, because he raises a good point. Was this a good use of resources? Maybe the perfume should have been sold and the money given to the poor. If we were talking about a modern non-profit, someone would be asking, “Is spending all this money on perfume really in line with our mission?”
These are worthwhile questions to ask. Especially since we are still trying to be disciples of Jesus all these centuries later, we should ask ourselves, “Are we being good stewards of our resources? Are we serving as Jesus would want us to serve?”
Jesus’ response in this passage may only serve to complicate the issue. Jesus tells Judas, “Leave her alone… You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” At first glance, it seems Jesus is being downright fatalistic: there will always be poverty, so why even bother trying? Certainly, that’s one way this verse has been interpreted.
One commentary I read pointed out that there’s an alternate translation of this verse. Instead of “You always have the poor with you,” it could be read, “Keep the poor with you always.” In other words, Jesus isn’t making a statement about the state of the world; he’s giving a commandment for how his disciples should behave. Jesus himself is going away; but the community of Jesus’ disciples should carry on his care for and solidarity with the poor.
Or perhaps, in his response, Jesus is just saying that this moment is unique. He is about to be killed; one act of kindness isn’t out of line. Yes, there will be many opportunities to care for the poor, but only a few more days to care for Jesus before his death.
If you were here last week, you know that our gospel text was the famous parable of the prodigal son. Now, that parable is in the gospel of Luke, whereas this morning we have a passage from the gospel of John, but it’s interesting to see the similarities between the two.
In the parable, the younger son takes his half of the inheritance and squanders it. Then, when he has spent it all and a famine strikes, he goes back home to ask his father for forgiveness and beg for a job as one of his father’s servants. The father is overjoyed; he gives his lost son a robe and a ring and kills the fatted calf for him.
When the older son sees this extravagant celebration for his brother, he’s upset. The older son has done everything right—he didn’t ask for his inheritance early, he didn’t run off and abandon his responsibilities, he didn’t waste his half of the property. And then the younger son comes home and gets even more?
“Why was the fatted calf not sold, along with the robe and the ring, and the money set aside for me?” he could ask. After all, this is his half of the inheritance. His brother already got his share and spent it all. From the older son’s perspective, this homecoming celebration is completely unfair. It’s excessive, it’s wasteful, it’s unnecessary.
As Pastor Nikki pointed out in her sermon last week, when the older son complains, the father has this response: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.”
This brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found. When the child you thought lost returns home, an act of extravagant love is the appropriate response. When the impossible happens, it requires an excessive reaction. When the circumstances are extraordinary, the ordinary way of doing things is set aside.
Mary anoints Jesus’ feet and wipes them with her hair. It is an act of extravagant love, of extraordinary kindness. It is excessive, it is wasteful—and it is necessary. “Leave her alone,” Jesus says. “She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.”
Jesus is on his way to be killed. This dinner in Bethany, at the house of Lazarus, is his goodbye party. Mary anoints Jesus’ body ahead of time for his burial. It is excessive, it is wasteful, it is extravagant love.
Here Mary lives out exactly what Jesus has been doing throughout the gospel. In John, Jesus’ ministry begins with an extravagant wedding gift—the miracle of water turned to wine. Jesus shows extravagant grace to those he meets: Nicodemus the Pharisee, the Samaritan woman at the well, the lame and the blind. Jesus creates an extravagant feast out of five loaves of bread and two fish. Standing outside a tomb, weeping with Mary and Martha, Jesus gives a gift of extravagant life to Lazarus, and the dead man comes to life again.
Now, when Jesus turns toward his own suffering and death, Mary is the one who offers him extravagant love, extravagant kindness, extravagant grace. At the last supper, Jesus will demonstrate his love for his disciples by washing their feet, and he will tell them, “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” Mary is foreshadowing that act of loving service. She anoints Jesus’ feet and wipes them with her hair. It is over-the-top, it is excessive, it is extravagant—and it is exactly the kind of love Jesus commands his disciples to emulate.
It’s true that the dinner in Bethany was an exceptional moment. Never again will Jesus’ followers have a chance to anoint him before his death and burial. So we might think Mary’s act of extravagant love was a singular event in all of history, never to be repeated. But we are all called to show extravagant love. We are called to welcome home our lost brothers and sisters with extravagant celebrations. We are called to love one another with the same extravagant love that Jesus showed for us. We are called to serve with the compassion, grace, and dedication of Jesus, just like Mary.
And maybe that’s what Jesus really means in our gospel reading today. We can’t honor Jesus with extravagant love the way Mary did… but we can honor everyone else with that same extravagant love. We always have the poor with us. Jesus calls us to serve them, to honor them, to care for them—in short, Jesus calls us to love them, extravagantly. Amen.
Pastor Jennifer Preaching 