Readings:
Sermon:
So here we find Jesus having a nice dinner party with his friends and what does one of them do? She unties her hair – a big no no in this society, and something which would have been very much frowned upon. Mary unties her hair and then brings out some ridiculously expensive perfume and uses her hair to wash Jesus’ feet. I’m sure that even today this would raise an eyebrow. It’s a very intimate thing to do and not something you would necessarily expect to be a public act.
Now a cultural foot note is probably helpful here because this perfume isn’t just a bit expensive. This isn’t my £25 bottle of Joop. This perfume would have been a year’s wage. So I looked up expensive perfumes on google and found one called ‘Chanel No. 5 Grand Extrait Baccarat Limited Edition’ of which a single bottle was going for princely sum of £25,000. This is the kind of thing we are talking about that Mary was using to anoint Jesus’ feet. Now I’m assuming you don’t have a bottle of this perfume at home for you to sniff today and so, sadly, you are going to have to use your imaginations for a bit. Here we have Mary throwing caution to the wind, untying her hair, getting down on her knees and washing Jesus’ feet with a twenty-five grand perfume. And in the grand narrative of Jesus’s life and passion what this act does is points towards Jesus’ death. By anointing his feet Mary is anointing Jesus as she would have done a corpse, her actions are pointing towards events that will shortly unfold.
But Mary’s actions aren’t told to us just to give us a foretaste of how Jesus’ story will go because they also offer us a challenge today. And the challenge is that they demonstrate an example of reckless abandonment in Mary’s discipleship. A reckless abandonment towards Jesus which has no embarrassment and when we hear about Mary’s actions we are challenged to ask whether we offer ourselves to Jesus with that same recklessness abandonment.
Now you may well be thinking about how reckless abandonment fits in with Lent and in order to understand this we need to see how this season is about developing practices to better become the people God wants us to be. And when we see how Mary responds to Jesus, it challenges us to also respond in a similar way: to give every fibre of our being to Jesus just as Mary did, regardless of what people might think. And so, the challenge is set: in the last part of Lent how can we practice giving our all to Jesus? So that when Easter arrives this practice has become part of our day-to-day discipleship.
And these actions of Mary also link with the presence of Judas in the scene taking place. At this point of story Jesus knows his death is imminent and the man who will ultimately lead his executioners to him is sat there with him. At this intimate gathering Judas sits alongside those incredibly faithful disciples. His role, I think, is to be the opposite to Mary and I found a great quote from St Augustine about Judas where Augustine said that Judas ‘followed our Lord in body but not with his heart’. As Mary recklessly abandoned herself to worship Jesus, Judas followed him but never gave him his heart. This is the choice we also must make. Do we respond to the call to give Jesus our heart? It is fairly easy to follow him in body but when that is all we do it is easy to fall away and follow an alternative path, as ultimately Judas would. But when we give our heart, when we give our all that is when our discipleship plants its foundations in God. And the rewards? The rewards are as lavish as the perfume Mary used.
So, an interesting set of events to lead us into Passiontide but events which shows us a model of discipleship which we can start to practice now so that on Easter Day we can worship the risen Lord with reckless abandon. Giving our heart to our Lord and saviour, Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Questions:
- What can you do to give yourself with reckless abandon to Jesus?
- How do Mary’s actions make you feel?
- What practices might you try in order to give your heart to Jesus?