March 21 Lent V
I knew Larry Benfield and I were going to hit it off the moment he plugged in his little hologram Jesus. One doesn’t get very sophisticated hologram technology for $8.95, but the way the little image flickered and flitted was pretty cool.
My friend Jesse had just given me a memorable ordination gift: a glass block with one of those sappy resurrection scenes in which Jesus glistens as if he has spent the past three days not in a grave but a spa. My device also plugs in. White Christmas tree lights complete the stunning effect. Larry approved.
Clearly in the area of religious kitsch at least, my new rector’s tastes and my own overlapped a little. And, as a liturgical question, we also agreed that both these things should stay unplugged during the season of Lent.
Whatever the reason we found these collectables worth collecting, they at least seemed to be a helpful corrective to the tendency of Episcopalians to be so bound up by the shackles of good taste.
And so does the gospel of John sometimes. At least it does if we’re paying the slightest bit of attention.
Consider the story we just heard. Now we’re conditioned to read the Bible as always tasteful and appropriate. So, for instance, when Jesus shows up in a scene we tend to experience him as someone who might say something sweet and agreeable, like, “Consider the lilies”, at any time. But that’s not the Jesus of the gospel of John.
Did you not stumble over any of the bizarre details in we just read? There’s a dinner party at the house of Lazarus, a formerly dead guy. His poor sister Mary is making preparations. It was just a few days prior, when Jesus was about to open Lazarus’s tomb that she cautioned, in the King James Translation, “Lord, by this time he stinketh.” So we know she’s attentive to smells. Maybe because she’s the cook.
Now, her sister Martha has poured a pound of pure nard on Jesus’ feet and is wiping it with her hair. Pure nard. Stuff so potent I’m told a vial the size of your thumb would clear a room. A pound of it is as outrageous a quantity as the 150 gallons of water Jesus turned into wine at that wedding in Cana in the second chapter of John.
This is not a subtle, tasteful, understated kind of gospel, and this is not a subtle, tasteful, understated kind of savior.
But there’s more. Judas is at the meal, and John takes special care to make sure we realize he’s a really bad egg. He tells us in advance that Judas is a betrayer, and that he’s a thief who doesn’t really care about the poor. Then when Judas tries to stop Mary’s strange, extravagant anointing of Jesus’ feet, Jesus says, “Leave her alone. She’s just anointing my body for burial.” As if that’s supposed to explain everything. Come on, Judas. Haven’t you ever seen anyone anointed for his own burial with a full pound of nard at the dinner party of a formerly dead guy before?
The characters, the gestures, the smells in this story are bizarre. The scene could be dropped unedited into one of the wild, magical realist novels of someone like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But we may have to buy into the strange world of John’s gospel before it can really go to work on our lives—even our lives in a much less fantastical world.
There’s a dilemma or at least a tension in the Christian faith. Jesus’ life needs to make some kind of intersection with our lives to be meaningful. But if Jesus’ life fits too comfortably with ours, it may not make much difference to us. A too familiar Jesus just ends up affirming all our own tastes and affections and pet peeves. And our vices are never the really offensive ones. Because we’re the kind of folks who would have been hanging out with Jesus if we’d lived in his day, aren’t we? We’re Christians. We’re his kind of people. And he’s our kind of people.
But look around the room again in this scene. Who are you? The thoroughly wicked Judas? The recently dead Lazarus? Mary, dumping a year’s wages on Jesus’ feet in a nasal burning gesture of affection? Are you like Jesus, to whom all this seems to make perfect sense? Grateful, but pretty nonchalant about the fact that Mary has just anointed him for burial?
This Jesus isn’t ours. His tastes, his manners, his friends are all strange to us. And this may be something crucial to keep alive as Christian people—the strangeness of Jesus. The sense that he’s not our kind of people. The sense that he is not ours.
Jesus has been used to defend chastity and polygamy, nuclear warfare and pacifism, free markets and socialism. And this isn’t all bad. Our faith should impact how we live and the way we view our world in very real ways. But there’s a seductive temptation to make Jesus one of us. Which is to place ourselves, and folks like us smack in the center of God’s universe. We’re the ones who’ve got it mostly right. Sure, we have to say our confessions each week, but we’re generally polite, likable, well-balanced people. Pretty much what God had in mind for humanity.
But in the Bible, even to be God’s chosen people was to be in relationship with the wild, unpredictable source of holiness itself. And in a remarkable way, John’s portrayal of Jesus may help keep us a little closer to the offensive, startling, incomprehensible nature of God, even when God was incarnate.
What kind of difference might it make to our lives if we refuse to let go of this gospel’s strangeness? Well, our choice of responses to God in this story basically seems to be between that of Judas, and that of Mary. And, let’s face it, Judas’s response is the one that makes sense. Maybe that’s why John felt the need to remind us what a bad guy he was every time his name was mentioned. There are reasons for Judas’s assessment of the situation. Who wouldn’t agree that a year’s wages could be put to better use?
Mary’s actions make no sense. A year’s wages even at 2010 minimum wage with two week’s unpaid vacation is $14,500. How is this anointing a good idea by any recognizable standards in our world?
But when we let ourselves enter the wondrous world of John, the contrast is stark, if still bizarre. Judas “keeps” things. Mary pours them out on Jesus. Judas kept the common purse, and kept a little extra of that for himself apparently. Mary’s outpouring is absurd, wasteful, and lovely.
Both of these people were responding to Jesus. But Judas calculated how being close to Jesus might be most helpful to Judas—just how we’re taught to make our way in this world. But Mary opened herself and let something ridiculous be drawn out of herself. And Jesus lets us know that it’s Mary’s kind of response he’s hoping to elicit from us.
When we let Jesus become too familiar, when we let him morph into someone pretty much like us, someone who approves of our tastes and habits and friends, whom do we resemble most? When we co-opt Jesus for our agendas, and preferences, and arguments, we’re acting more like Judas than Mary. We’re using Jesus for our own purposes, reducing him to a manageable size. For it’s Judas who wastes something in this story. Judas wastes the glory present in the house of Lazarus that day, by deciding what to do with it in advance.
But when we keep Jesus a little strange, maybe we can live more like Mary, opening ourselves to whatever extravagant gift an encounter with the living God might draw out of us. A gift we’ve not yet imagined, perhaps. A gift our rational, sense making selves might rule out before it’s called forth.
So if a little tacky religious art is a helpful reminder that there is no offender of good taste like the actual stories of the Bible and the actual Jesus portrayed therein, go get some. Because to use God only to affirm our own reasonable tastes and purposes, and to reduce Jesus to someone too much like ourselves is not just a sin. It’s a waste. A waste of glory. A waste of the glory that would bring some strange, extravagant, but badly needed gift into this world, out of ordinary lives like ours. Amen.