5 Lent March 13, 2016
Is.43:16-21 Ps.126
Phil.3:8-14 Luke 20:9-19
We
Americans who pride ourselves, often wrongly, about being a classless society,
are uncomfortable with cultural gestures which show unusual deference to people
of authority. We have read the story
about Mary of Bethany anointing the feet of Jesus with perfume and wiping them
with her hair. She was criticized for her
waste of the costly perfume and she was defended by Jesus. Jesus declared her to be a prophet because
she was actually symbolically preparing his future dead body for burial.
This can all seem quite macabre to us since
we don’t encounter such things in our everyday lives. I do recall a party game called the “King of
Siam.” Did any of you ever play this
game? In this game, a person is blind
folded and brought to have an audience with the King of Siam. He or she then must bow before the King of
Siam and kiss the ring of the King.
Once the initiate has kissed the ring of the King of Siam, the blindfold
is removed only to see the ring on the big hairy toe of the King of Siam. Laughter ensues, until the victim of the
humor watches the next victim. The
ringed finger is quickly taken out of sight before the blindfold comes
off. So we feel really yucky about
getting our faces close to other people’s feet in showing respect.
In ancient cultures respect for authority
involved having a foot fetish whether you wanted it or not. Certainly in kissing the Emperor’s feet it
symbolized the fact that he could literally walk all over you if he so
chose. Such honorific gestures were
adopted by European kings and popes.
As a Bible reader, I want to ask what does
the anointing of the feet of Jesus have to do with me when it seems so
culturally distant from my experience.
What function does this story have in the life of the early church,
particularly in the community which generated the Gospel of John? Why is this anointing of the feet of Jesus
associated with the inevitable death of Jesus?
In
our Church liturgical calendar, the death of Jesus is once again
inevitable. Next week we will read the
Passion Gospel twice, once in the Passion Sunday liturgy and again on Good
Friday. Since the Passion is in all four
Gospels in different edited forms, we know that the Passion was a liturgy which
was used in various widespread churches in the six or seven decades after Jesus
left this earth.
We also know that St. Paul wrote his letters
before the Gospels were written. In the
writing of St. Paul, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ had become the
metaphors of spiritual transformation. And
so the Death of Jesus had become a good thing in that the death of Jesus
symbolized a Higher Power to bring to an end all of the unworthy habits and
former identities of one’s life. Then one received the energy of the Higher Power
of the resurrection to be re-created, to be made a new creation in Christ.
The theology of spiritual transformation of
St. Paul, became hidden in the Gospel narratives about the life of Jesus. The Gospels externalized in narrative form
the interior spiritual transformation that was found in the writings of St.
Paul. Only the spiritual initiates in
the early church understood the spiritual significance of the Gospels. It is amazing how we from the point of view
of empirical verification and eye-witness journalistic writing have managed to
make the Gospels into exact accounts of history. And we have been fooled if we have not come
to know the spiritual significance of the Gospel literature. We have been fooled into making the art of
spiritual transformation into exact eye-witness historical accounts of the life of Jesus.
The Gospel of John from it first page is
discourse about how the Death of Jesus is a planned divine event. In the first chapter, John the Baptist is
already declaring Jesus to be the Lamb of God who is and will take away the sin
of the world. This is not subtle writing;
this is writing many years after the post-resurrection appearances of Christ
recounting the spiritual experience of how one can experience interdiction in
one’s life for one’s sinful, unenlightened ways. In chapter three, Jesus tells Nicodemus that
he is going to be lifted up, like the serpent in wilderness and that he would
draw all people to himself. This
glorification of the death of Jesus, something in itself which was God-awful, happened because of the afterlife of Jesus in
his resurrection manifestations to his disciples. The result of the post-resurrection
manifestations of Christ for the disciples was the transformation of their lives. These lives were so transformed that the
disciples wanted to share this spiritual method of transformation as a regular
practice within their communities and so the Gospels were written to encode the
life of transformation within narrative presentations of the life, death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The
placing of perfume by Mary of Bethany on the feet of Jesus comes in this
progressive presentation of the inevitable Death of Jesus in the narrative of the
Gospel of John. Human logic would not
naturally connect the anointing of feet with perfume as a sign predicting the
eventual burial preparations of the body of Jesus. We are dealing with a spiritual logic of
transformation as it was practiced and taught within the community which wrote
and read the Gospel of John.
The writings of St. Paul and the writing of
the Gospel of John are written proof that Christianity became a new faith
community which was born out of Judaism.
In fact, St. Paul writes that all of his resume of Jewish identity was
rubbish compared to his new identity with Jesus Christ. While this may seem like a harsh separation
from his past, it does indicate a confession of the reality of the Christian
community moving into the Gentile world.
The Jews who accepted the spiritual practice
of the Gospel had to “die to their Jewishness” in order to accept Gentiles as
their spiritual equals.
We sometimes read the Gospels as somehow
telling us why things happened when in fact the Gospels were written after the
fact that things had already happened.
The Gospels were written to reveal the new spiritual practice of a
Gentile Christianity.
And so perfume can be placed upon death, because
the hope of the message of the resurrection is that death has lost its stink.
The Death of Jesus in the Gospel of John is
presented as having two functions. It
provides us with the power of spiritual transformation in dying to what is
unworthy in ourselves. And since Jesus
survived Death in his afterlife, his death and all death are made into but
singular events which have to give way to a new future for the afterlife of all.
Let us today be like Mary of Bethany; let us
start applying the fragrance of perfume on what we anticipate to be passing
away. Let it be an olfactory celebration
that abundant life cannot and will not ever end. Amen.
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