Fifth Sunday in Lent (C), March 13, 2016; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of our heavenly calling, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Many of you know how endlessly fascinated I am by our assigned lectionary readings and by the narrative differences across our four canonical gospels. This being Lectionary Year C, we have been going along just fine, hearing about Jesus’ journey toward Jerusalem according to the Gospel of Luke. Suddenly our assigned Gospel reading lurched off into the Gospel of John for this story of Mary of Bethany anointing Jesus’ feet, set in the very few weeks between when Lazarus and Jesus were raised from the dead. It’s a fine story, and I guess Luke thought so too, but he used it in an entirely different way: different woman, different place and a different time. The differences between the stories of a particular woman wiping feet with her hair are not reconcilable in my opinion, and the variations and diversity of Gospel “truth” give us all kinds of elbow room, which is something for which I am always looking — for all of our sake.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus was dining with some of his Pharisee friends up north in the Galilee, very early in his ministry. The woman is unnamed. She was neither hosting the dinner, nor was she invited to the dinner. Luke describes her as a sinner, who, having learned that Jesus was there, entered the house to wash his feet with her tears and wipe his feet with her hair. There is no anointing in this version. There is no mention of costly ointment, or grumbling about extravagance or mention of people who were poor. Since we will hear Luke’s version of this story in June, if we’re going to veer out of Luke, why not veer off to tell Mark’s or Matthew’s version of the anointing woman? Written earlier than Luke and John, these two Gospels have nearly identical accounts.

As in John, Mark and Matthew write that Jesus was in Bethany (you might remember that Bethany is literally, “poor house”). But in Mark and Matthew, they were eating at the table of Simon the leper, when an unnamed woman (not a notorious sinner, just a woman) came up to Jesus with an alabaster flask of very costly pure nard – a perfumed ointment. Here’s the detail difference that matters most to me: the woman anointed Jesus’ head – in a bold and prophetic act. In response to the grumbling of the unnamed witnesses, Jesus says, “Truly I say to you, wherever this gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.” Except it rarely IS told in memory of her. She can’t get on the schedule of readings. She can’t get an appointment!

The story from Matthew never gets read as part of the Church’s three-year reading schedule. The story from Mark is an optional extension of the reading on Palm Sunday every three years when the already very long Passion Narrative is scheduled to be read! The two versions of the woman acting in a subservient way and anointing Jesus’ feet in Luke and John get read on Sundays in the same lectionary year (this one). Furthermore, artwork depicting a woman washing or anointing Jesus’ feet is bountiful, while artwork depicting a woman anointing Jesus’ head is almost non-existent. Beautiful music like our motet this morning? Sunday School lessons? You guessed it, stories of a repentant woman washing Jesus’ feet with her tears and wiping them with her hair. It’s powerful stuff. If I’d asked you before the service today if you knew the story of the woman who anointed Jesus, chances are, if you said, “yes,” you would have told me about the sinful, repentant woman at Jesus feet. We can’t remember the story of the woman anointing Jesus’ head because most of us never learned it in the first place; it does not get told in memory of her, in spite of Jesus’ Gospel instruction.

It’s not that John’s version of the anointing woman isn’t good, it’s just that I’m with Jesus in wanting you to remember the woman who anointed his head. In a sermon that my seminary professor Joanna Dewey preached long ago, she said “In Jesus’ time a host might anoint the head of his guest as a sign of gladness…a [sign] of rejoicing….Also to anoint a person on the head [was] to call that person to God’s service, to consecrate her or him, and to empower that person to carry out God’s service. Elijah was instructed to anoint Elisha. In earlier times, priests were anointed. Above all, kings were anointed. It was the function of a prophet to anoint the sovereign, to announce God’s choice as Samuel anointed Saul, and later David…[This] woman was a prophet.” [1] I want you to remember this woman and any woman who has been bold, extravagant, and prophetic in her love and work. Jesus says about the woman in Mark and Matthew’s Gospel accounts is, “She has done beautiful work.” [2] Furthermore, she was doing this beautiful work in the midst of great danger, standing with Jesus as he stared into consequences of his work, namely death.

The version in John of Mary of Bethany anointing Jesus’ feet is without merit. In John, it is a beautiful precursor to six days later when Jesus cares for his disciples’ feet. According to John, Mary has shown Jesus how it’s done, how to move forward while facing death, how to teach the others to care for one another. John’s account of Mary of Bethany perfuming Jesus’ feet and wiping the perfume with her hair is intimate and sensual. There’s no washing here, no sin, no repentance, no tears reported. Certainly burial anointing is not only done on the feet, but Mary of Bethany is only ever depicted in the Gospels as worshiping at Jesus’ feet. In the Gospel of John, this anointing is an extravagant and beautiful act of worship – embodied, loving, the fragrance of which fills the entire house. If we ever used incense at Emmanuel Church, this would be the day for it. The description of the beautiful fragrance is the perfect antidote to the complaint made just a chapter before in John’s Gospel, that rolling away the tomb stone to let Lazarus out after being dead for four days, will envelope them all in a terrible stench.

One of the interesting developments of this story in the Gospel of John is that it’s not “some people” who complained of the extravagance (as in Mark), or “the disciples” who complained (as in Matthew), but Judas Iscariot. The Gospel of John wants to be crystal clear how entirely specious is the argument that the ointment could have been sold and the money given to the poor. According to John, Judas Iscariot was not just playing his destined part in the salvation story, he was a liar and a thief in addition to a betrayer, and he didn’t care about those who were poor. Earlier in John, Judas was described by Jesus as one who tears apart what is otherwise whole (diabolo, diabolical). [3]

When the complaint about extravagance comes from the mouth of one who is stealing from the common purse, we can know that extravagant worship and concern for the poor are not mutually exclusive. Jesus’ response that “the poor will always be with you” is a direct quote of the Torah, Deuteronomy 15, in which Moses explains that God has provided plenty enough for everyone to have what they need. Here’s the passage: “if there is a needy person among you in your community, in any of your towns within the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbors. Rather you must open your hand and lend them sufficient for whatever they need…Give to them readily and have no regrets when you do so, for…there will never cease to be needy ones in your land, which is why I command you: open your hand to the poor and needy in your land…bear in mind that you were slaves in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you, therefore I enjoin this commandment upon you today.” In the Bible there is no shame in being needy, no shame in living in Bethany – the House of the Poor. The shame is upon those who are unwilling, because of hard hearts or tight fists, to give extravagantly, or lend extravagantly, expecting nothing in return. Without using words, Mary of Bethany demonstrates her prediction, her prophecy, her forward-looking and brave faith that death is strong, but love is stronger. She knows this, and we know it, because Lazarus is at the table with them

You know, the words that get used here to describe the ointment are also the words for faithful and costly. [4] Reflecting on the joy and the cost of Mary of Bethany’s discipleship reminds me of the work of the World War II martyr, theologian and Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who has been on my mind a lot this past week as the U.S. presidential election process in this country grows increasingly violent and diabolical (tearing apart the fabric of our society). Bonhoeffer was one of the first and clearest voices calling for Christian resistance to the Nazi persecution of Jews and political dissidents of any kind, after the Nazi party nationalized much of the Church in Germany and signed a Concordat with the Church in Rome. Like all of us, Bonhoeffer was not without fault or contradictions, but his grammar of faith has much to teach us. His beautiful book, in English known as The Cost of Discipleship, describes the Grace of God as free but not cheap. Forgiveness is given, and repentance is expected. According to Bonhoeffer, following Jesus demands that we as a Church call the State to account, care for the victims of the State, and interrupt the damage being done – commonly summarized as our obligation to not only “bandage the victims under the wheel, but jam the spoke in the wheel itself.” [5] Perhaps Mary of Bethany was both anointing the victim and jamming the spoke in her prophetic insistence on a love stronger than death. For now, I’ll end where I began: may we have the strength, the wisdom, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

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