NOTE; As Lent marches forward - this is Lent V - and our small ensemble prepares for Holy
+
On the fifth Sunday in Lent – in anticipation of our pilgrimage to
the Cross of our Lord before the start of Holy Week – I am struck by the
way Holy Scripture stands in such stark
contrast to so much of our contemporary reality:
+ Jesus
experiences the overwhelming aroma of perfumed oil poured out upon his feet in
excessive abundance: he may be nearing
his death, but in the company of the beloved, he rejoices and opens himself to
the extravagant grace of love and beauty.
+ The Psalmist, aching for relief, suddenly finds
herself singing a song of laughter that is actually hope being poured into her
soul from the Lord: so stunning, in
fact, is this sacred gift of grace that she exchanges her tears for a smile and
trusts that God will make all things new.
+ And the poet
Isaiah? He is enraptured with a sense of God’s splendor, announcing that all
those who rely upon force, violence, manipulation and control will be
extinguished: do not even attempt to
recall those former things, he advises his broken-hearted colleagues; for the
Lord our God is about to do a new thing.
A blessed thing. A beautiful thing.
These
readings make clear to those who have eyes to see that “all the contemporary crises of our culture can be reduced to
a single crisis called the
repression of beauty.” The late John O’Donohue cut to the chase in The Invisible Embrace:
Perhaps for
the first time (in decades) we can gain a clear view of how much ugliness we endure
and allow. The media generate relentless
images of mediocrity and shallowness in their talk-shows, tapestries of
smothered language and frenetic gratification. They are becoming the global
mirror of our lived experiences… enshrining the ugly as the normal standard and
treating the presence of beauty as (either) forgotten or naïve or romantic.
And not just
the media: Our fundamental institutions and work habits have become equally
coarse, obsessed with the idolatry of the bottom line.Winning at
all costs, O’Donohue observes, has become our standard for evaluating worth in
this era of arrogance and brutality: “Coarseness,” he writes, “always creates
the same relentless chaffing.
It makes
every texture it touches raw and rough.
And there is an unseemly coarseness to our times which robs grace from
the textures of our language, feeling and presence. Such coarseness falsifies
and anesthetizes our desire (for that which is good and true.) This is
particularly evident in the spread of greed, which to paraphrase Shakespeare
“makes hungry where most she satisfies.” Greed is unable to envisage any form
of relationship other than absorption or possession.
Small wonder
that the appointed lessons sound revolutionary, saturated as they are with an
abundance of splendor: they stand in
clarifying opposition to the ugliness of contemporary culture and invite us beyond
the status quo into the concealed order of creation. The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer
articulates this skillfully when he writes: “the experience of the beautiful…is
the invocation of a potentially whole and holy order of all things.”
+ “We shall rejoice,” sings
the Psalmist in accord with the philosopher. “Rejoice so vigorously that those who sow in
tears in glad song shall reap. And the one who walks along and weeps shall
become the bearer of glad tidings, bringing renewal and healing to the soil and
the soul.”
+ For by the grace and gift of God,
all things shall become… what? What does Isaiah say? God shall make all things new! Whole and holy
– drenched with beauty – revealing in reality what was once only the concealed
order of creation. Now, by faith, the
Word shall become… flesh.
Today’s gospel involving Jesus, Mary of Bethany and the perfumed
oil poured upon his feet is the essential counter-cultural lens through which
we have been called to examine and challenge the politics, economics and ethics
of this moment in time. This story – in
modestly different ways – was deemed so vital by the early church that it was incorporated
into each of the four gospels. The differences between how Matthew, Mark and
Luke tell it are less useful than the fact that in all of the
gospels we’re told that it was a sensual woman who anointed Christ’s feet with
the perfumed oil and caressed them with her hair.
Without
shame or inhibition, Mary incarnates extravagant love, exposing not only the
fears, biases and brutality that were gathering around Jesus and would soon erupt
in a downpour of violence; but offering us an alternative to the cruel
coarseness that has captured our culture.
Mary shows us what authentic discipleship looks like with her embodied
creativity and compassion – and we can only reply: beautiful. Mary of Bethany gives shape and
form to Christ’s nonviolent alternative to oppression – and does so by
relinquishing fear and control so that God’s loving-kindness might be poured
into her very flesh.
To my mind,
St. Paul must have been
thinking of her when he told the early church in Romans 5: by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord
Jesus Christ and live in grace… that is why we boast in our sufferings, knowing
that suffering produces endurance, and
endurance produces character, and character produces hope and hope does not
disappoint us, because hope is God’s love being poured into our hearts through
the Holy Spirit. With courage and humility, Mary demonstrates
what it looks like to live the love of Jesus in our world.
And no
sooner does she pour out the expensive perfumed oil upon the Christ’s feet just
like the Spirit has been poured into her heart than Judas explodes in anger and
judgment: “Why wasn't this perfume sold and the money
given to the poor?" According to the
gospel of Mark, Mary’s extravagance was the straw that broke the camel's back
for Judas because after her anointing, Judas goes out and betrays his master. My
hunch is that Judas mostly only wanted to slow down the Jesus movement from
gaining steam because it was such a challenge to the status quo. I don’t
believe that he hated Jesus. He just wanted more control. After all, he was a
gradualist not a revolutionary. And the
passion of Mary’s generosity pushed him over the edge. So before you could
count the 10 Commandments, Judas was involved in an “equally opposite, and
ugly, emotional reaction to Mary’s love: as one disciple devoted herself
to the master, the other betrayed him.” (Mako Fujimura)
Now let’s be clear
why Mary’s act was so troubling. Scholars of
ancient Israel tell us that “a pint of pure nard was worth about one person's
wages for a year. In today's terms, it would therefore be at least $30,000.” Judas’ objection to the anointing was not
capricious: he believed it to be an incredible waste. Mako Fujimura, the brilliant
visual artist, once put it like this: “if you saw someone pouring expensive perfume
on another person, the natural reaction would be to question "why?" Was
the object of adoration worth this amount of devotion?
Was
the woman crazy, deceived by a charismatic figure or merely foolish?” And if you found out the anointing cost 30
grand…? See where this is going? I submit to you that the ruling wisdom of our
generation – our market place ideology, our insistence on bowing down to the
bottom line and our fear of being out of control – is not all that far away
from the reaction and conclusion of Judas.
As a nation, we don’t invest in the education of our children or the
nurture of our teachers. For the past 40 years, more and more arts and sports
programs have been hacked away from our public school budgets without any
significant progress in how we perform in the hard sciences of math and
science. We claim we’re doing this to
cut costs and get more bang for our buck. But according to the most recent
analysis of standardized testing, after all these years of sacrifice and testing,
the US still ranks only 35th out of 64 countries in math skills and 27th
in science.
We
don’t get what it means to use our resources for extravagant, life-giving love.
Think how much cash we dump into Super Bowl commercials every year: do you know that each 30 second ad cost $5
million? According to Fortune Magazine
that means that beer, car and chip commercials alone cost over $4.5 billion
dollars for one football game. No salaries or bonuses for the players – just
the ads. Last year, on any given night,
there were 47, 725 homeless vets sleeping rough in the United States with
another 45 million Americans living under the poverty line.
+ There
is NOTHING beautiful, gracious or loving about these facts. And most of the time we don’t even notice
because we have repressed beauty for so long that our imaginations have
atrophied and our ethics have shriveled.
+ And
if you think I exaggerate hearken back to the absurdity and border line
obscenity of a recent debate between the Republican front runners for the
office of President of the United States. It was an ugly, stupid festival of
lies, slander and hatred. And the only
thing that made the Democratic debate in Michigan any better given one
candidate’s slippery ethics and the other’s shallow shrillness, is that at
least important issues were discussed there, but I’m not sure the public good
was advanced in any of it.
And
so my soul wants to share with you what the British poet, Kathleen Raine, wrote: “When our vision is lost, our consciousness
contracts: we forget (our true calling) over and over again until recollection
is stirred by some icon of beauty. Then we remember and wonder why we ever
forgot.”
It
is as if she were channeling the Psalmist who sang that healing and hope came
to her as if in a dream: in a vision from beyond, our mouths were filled with
laughter and our tongues with glad song. Professor Walter Brueggemann writes that
this is always how human beings reconnect with the holy: it comes to us
as if we were in a dream. We hear a song
on the car radio – and we’re transported to another place – remembering a love
greater than ourselves. We’re out
walking in the woods and have our breath taken away by the silence as the sun
streams through the trees and we recall that we are a part of God’s creation.
We go to the movies – or a symphony – or a play or even a museum and all of a
sudden we find ourselves weeping for joy or gratitude – or sorrow and remorse –
because we have been touched by an icon of beauty and something of the
concealed order of creation has been revealed.
Hope
breaks through our normal consciousness when we least expect it. That is one of
the mysterious ways God comes into our lives. Do you remember how the Bible
begins? In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, the sky, the
water, the stars above, the waters below, the animals, the plants and human beings
and before the Lord rested, all of this creativity was called… what? GOOD! BEAUTIFUL!
THE VERY IMAGE OF THE LORD IN THE WORLD! THE
ESSENCE OF GOD MADE FLESH IN FACT! Repeatedly, in Scripture and our
lived experiences, God comes to us in unexpected beauty and reminds us: I make
all things new, your sins are forgiven, what was lost has been found, pick up
your lives and walk.
That
is why I have been persuaded that Mary’s act of anointing the Christ’s feet
with perfumed oil and swaddling them with her hair is a model for our nonviolent
resistance to the ugly, vicious, dumbed-down and brutal culture we have been
called to cure. Look, Judas wasn’t a bad man.
In a moving reflection on this text, one artist (Mako Fujimura) wrote:
Judas
was an extraordinary man with extraordinary gifts; he, along with the other
disciples, healed the sick, delivered people from demons, and preached the good
news of the Messiah. He gave up everything to follow the Master. And yet,
because he confused his limited imagination with the reign of Christ and
God’s grace, thinking Jesus had come to give him earthly powers and
privileges, his heart ultimately deceived him.
When Jesus stepped closer to the cross, Judas realized the way of Jesus
was about more than personal power and winning: the cross stripped Jesus, and
his disciples, of all earthly privileges and power. And the only earthly
possession Christ wore on the cross was the very aroma of the perfume Mary had
poured upon him. Judas, you may recall, betrayed the one he loved for 30 pieces
of silver; notably less than the worth of Mary's perfume.
In times such as our own, we need MORE creative acts
of compassionate extravagance and beauty like Mary’s – not less. And here is one
of the reasons why I believe this to be true: earlier this week I was reading the Jewish Forward, an on-line news daily
about what’s important in the world of contemporary Judaism, and there was an
article about how Jewish historians and holocaust survivors interpret our
current state of affairs in the United States. The academics, as you might
imagine, were circumspect, making clear distinctions between the rise of
fascism in Europe and the enduring potency of American democratic values even
in this era of increasing intolerance and vulgarity.
But
those who lived through the terror of Kristallnacht – those who survived
Treblinka, Auschwitz and Birkenau – those who pledged NEVER AGAIN on their
watch – those sober souls sensed in their bones that something diabolic was
brewing in the home of the brave and land of the free – and without a bold
challenge it would wound us all. After making pilgrimage to Auschwitz back in
the early 80s, I vowed to listen carefully to what these sisters and brothers
know in the core of their being. After
spending time in the backwoods of Mississippi and visiting the shrine to Civil
Rights workers murdered by white supremacists, I came to the same conclusion
about what we now call the Black Lives Matter movement, too: their hard won
wisdom warrants our careful consideration.
It
also demands our conscious resistance to the hatred currently being cultivated:
our non-violent resistance – our creative and beautiful, intentional,
disciplined and compassionate resistance – is like Mary’s anointing the feet of
Jesus. You see, we face a choice of being beacons of solidarity – a living,
embodied, clear, creative and compassionate community of resistance to the
ignorance, rage, ugliness and bigotry – or collaborators with hatred. If we do
not celebrate and strengthen beauty, joy and grace with abandon every single
week of the year – we join ranks with Judas not Mary. If we give the religious and political
barbarians a pass at this moment in history, we wash our hands like Pontius
Pilate. That’s what Mary’s legacy says to me: what she did in her extravagance to Jesus is what
God has done for us: God brings us forgiveness of sins – God pours hope into
our broken hearts – God shares with us the spirit of truth and beauty and
empowers us to do likewise in the real world.
Do
you know what Jesus said after Mary anointed his feet? The gospel of Mark
records it like
Those
words were recorded to give hope to you and me: they tell us that Mary is like
us – and we can be like her. Count on this, dear friends, our generosity to the
broken, our solidarity with the refugee, our commitment to non-violent
resistance through extravagant beauty and disciplined compassion, our culture
care, our songs, our Sanctuary, our way of being together in community, our
advocacy for the hungry, our camaraderie with our sisters and brothers in the
gay/lesbian/trans community and our consistent cleaning of our rivers is going
to be misunderstood. And judged – and some will fall away. Every few weeks I get a letter or email
telling me God is going to send me to hell because I am leading you astray with
Christ’s call to solidarity. Truth!
But
we take heart, for Mary’s story is unequivocal:
God is for you and for
your acts of adoration, resistance and creativity in these broken times. Even when the world does not understand, God
rejoices. And
that is why what we do here every week is so important: it is small, it is
humble, it is often rests on precarious financial grounds that we don’t know
how it will survive. But it is so, so beautiful. Tender. Vibrant.
God
calls us to live like Mary, not Judas, but the choice is ours. So as you walk
about the Sanctuary today and pray on your Lenten pilgrimage to the Cross, hold
Christ’s words to Mary in your heart: “she has done a beautiful thing for the
Lord… and wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she had
one will be told in memory of her.”
credits:
3) empireart.pl
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