353 Another Prodigal

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Another Prodigal”, originally shared on April 2, 2025. It was the 353^rd  video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.) 

   We heard about two prodigals last week and today we’ll hear about another. The prodigal woman. Today, we’ll hear about what a weird story has to teach us about God.

   Some people give up things for Lent, things that they like, to help them focus on sacrifice discipleship, discipline, and living a life for others, the mood of Lent. They are sometimes extravagant in their self-denial.

   Others add things for Lent, things like additional giving, advocacy, transformation, and public evangelism, things that are also the mood of Lent. They are sometimes extravagant in their generosity.

   Sally and I added an every-Friday trip to McDonald’s for Filet-O-Fish sandwiches. 😊

   McDonald’s has been offering a discount on their only fish related menu option during Lent as a nod to those who are giving up meat for Lent, at least on Fridays, which some people do all year ‘round.

   OK, it’s not extravagant, but we want to support one of the few things in popular culture that is an accommodation to Christian behavior. And it was dinner.

   But let’s consider the actual prodigal, or “excessive” action in the Gospel text that will be read this coming Sunday, John 12:1-8. It happened at a dinner party. And it was a pretty weird party. For starters, Jesus was the main guest.

   What would you do if Jesus came to your house for dinner? Kind of crazy, right? What if one of the guests was your sister, between you and whom Jesus had recently settled a work-related issue? What if another of the guests was your brother, who Jesus had recently raised from the dead?

   Doesn’t that strike you as weird?

   Would it occur to you to wash Jesus’ feet with $39,600.00 worth of perfume, and then dry them with your hair?

   Well, that’s exactly what happened. We see it in John 12:1-3,

12 Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. ² There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. ³ Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.

   If you were at that party, at this point you might be asking “What is going on?”

   Jesus has come to Bethany, a little town just about 2 miles over the Mt. of Olives from Jerusalem. He’s with some of his best friends, siblings Mary and Martha and Lazarus.

   All four Gospel writers tell this story in slightly different ways. We’re looking at the one in John today.

   Mary and Martha you might remember from Luke 10:38-42 where Jesus and the 12 hungry disciples come by their and Lazarus’ home. Martha gets to work to feed them all. She complains to Jesus that Mary isn’t helping her but instead is sitting at Jesus’ feet, i.e., listening to and learning from him. The story concludes with Luke 10:41-42,

⁴¹ But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; ⁴² there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

   Lazarus you might remember from John 11:1-44. Jesus has mysteriously lingered during Lazarus’ illness and Lazarus has died. He’s been dead for three days when Jesus arrives at Bethany and Mary tells him that if he had been there Lazarus would not have died. Jesus weeps. He orders the stone to be rolled away from Lazarus’ tomb. Then, we read in John 11:43-44,

⁴³ When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” ⁴⁴ The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

   Now, just a few days later, Jesus is with them in their home, at what appears to be Jesus’ favorite place on earth. These were his closest friends who were not among his close disciples. We have no record of him teaching publicly there. He just came there to relax and hang out with people who loved him and whom he loved.

   Mary and Martha and Lazarus appear to be having a celebratory meal with the 12 close disciples of Jesus, with what Leonard Sweet calls, “Food. Family. Friends. Fragrance.”

   Fragrance is associated with the sense of smell that can help us identify things, feel things, sharpen our concentration or dull it, heal us and produce desired outcomes. It can also be a time machine.

   When I smell raspberries, I’m back in my father’s parents’ garden. When I smell geraniums, I’m back in my mother’s parents’ back yard.

   Fragrance has also long been used in worship. We filled the church I served in San Dimas with incense on Wednesday nights. When it was first proposed and concerns were raised about people with allergies, a physician’s assistant in the congregation told us that incense was one of the treatments for certain kinds of allergies.

   Mary used a pound of a perfume that was extravagantly expensive and powerfully fragrant to anoint Jesus’ feet. Its fragrance didn’t just fill the room. It filled the house!

   Well, what would you have done in gratitude for the life of your brother? How grateful would you be?

   If your parents or some other loved ones have died, what would you give today in exchange for 15 more minutes with your parents, or a friend or a loved one?

   Seen in that context, it doesn’t seem so extravagant, does it?

   After she had used it to anoint Jesus’ feet, she dried them with her hair.

   Women didn’t let their hair down anywhere but in front of their husbands in those days. More extravagant, “prodigal”, behavior from Mary.

   Mary anoints the feet of Jesus as a sign of service and dries them with her hair as a sign of humility.

   She uses a perfume more properly called “spikenard”, which was native to North India and imported in sealed alabaster boxes. The perfume, we find out later, is worth 300 denarii.

   “Denarii” is the plural form of “denarius”. A denarius was the daily wage of an unskilled laborer. So, if we take today’s minimum hourly wage of $16.50 and multiply it by 8 hours for a day’s work, we get $132, or the near equivalent of one denarius. Multiply that by 300 and we get $39,600.00. That’s almost a year’s wages, as the 52 sabbath days would have been taken off!

   The thing is that we will all be united someday. And it didn’t cost $39,600.00 a pound to get that. It cost something way much more precious.

   It cost the blood of Jesus, poured out for the sake of the world on the cross!

   How do we show our gratitude, not only for our lives but for our eternal lives? Jesus says this about life lived in response to the love of God poured out for us on the cross, in Mark 8:34-37,

³⁴ He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. ³⁵ For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. ³⁶ For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? ³⁷ Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 

   Nothing. There is nothing we can give in return for our lives, nothing we can do to earn our salvation. It is purely a gift from God.

   How can we then live in response to that gift?

   First, by recognizing that we are in the world, but we are not of the world. We’re going to seem weird to the world.

   Second, by listening to the presence of the Holy Spirit within us, in whom no weird thing is weird.

   Third, by knowing that God, and only God, decides what is weird and what is not weird, that God is reality revealed to us by the Holy Spirit to experience life-transformation, and to live abundant lives by God’s direction, by God’s grace.

   Do you feel weird being a Christian? Do you feel that you stand out among your peers? God shows us how to respond in today’s Gospel reading.

   That is, when the going gets weird in life, the weird get going by God’s grace. And God shows his grace by receiving this extravagant gift from another prodigal, Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus.

   Then things got even weirder. Here’s the rest of the story in John 12:4-6.

 ⁴ But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, ⁵ “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” ⁶ (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) 

   Yup. You think that this story can’t get any weirder, and then we learn that Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus’ inner circle, one of the 12 disciples, was a thief. An embezzler.

   Oh, and John incidentally also mentions that he was “the one who was about to betray him”.

   Judas was upset that Mary had poured out so much expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet, when it could have been sold for 300 denarii, $39,600.00 in today’s money, and the money given to the poor.

   Except Judas didn’t care about the poor. He wanted that money in the common purse so that he could steal some of it.

   Judas raises his objection on good grounds, as would many today. How many people could be helped with $39,600.00? That much money could be life-changing, not just for one or two, but for many people. Though he was a thief, some of it, presumably, would have gone to help people.

   He didn’t get that money, though. But he would soon sell Jesus out for 30 pieces of silver, in exchange for identifying Jesus at night when the authorities came to arrest him, try him in a kangaroo court, and kill him.

   Jesus’ death would be the pivotal event in world history. It was coming, and it wouldn’t be long in coming. It was time to prepare.

   Mary poured out the nard/perfume to prepare Jesus’ body for burial. She was showing gratitude and honoring Jesus by humbly anointing his feet.

   Maybe she saw that things were not working out so well for Jesus.

   Or maybe she wanted him to smell the flowers while he was still alive.

   But how does Jesus respond?    

   With what seems to be a callous remark. It seems dismissive of the genuine needs of the poor.   

   We see it in the conclusion to today’s reading, in John 12:7-8,

⁷ Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. ⁸ You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

   Jesus reflects on Deuteronomy 15:11,

¹¹ Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.”

   But I think of Jesus’s statement as being a response along the same lines as what some say about corporations or high-profile rich people who announce that they will provide matching funds for giving to some good cause. “XYZ has announced that they will match every dollar given to the ABC cause for the next 3 days!”

   Why doesn’t XYZ just donate the money? They’ve already budgeted it.

   It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. This money spent to honor Jesus doesn’t have to mean less money spent to support the poor.

   In a similar vein, I would ask, “How do our churches present themselves to the world”? What do we do with the resources that God has placed in our hands?

   I remember a two-panel cartoon I saw when I was in seminary of a guy who was praying in the first panel out on his front porch, “God there’s so much homelessness and need in the world. Why don’t you do something about it?”

   And in the second panel a cartoon balloon comes out of the sky with the words in it, “That’s funny. I was about to ask you the same thing.”

   In an increasingly secular world, what does the world know about us, or think that it knows about us? How would it hear the truth?

   And, what answers do we give to the world when the world isn’t even asking?

   Certainly, the negative impressions dominate in the popular media. But what positive things are we known for?

   Back to McDonald’s!

   I remember when I turned 55. I qualified for Senior discounts! We were on a family vacation and so I walked into a local MacDonald’s and asked for a “Senior” coffee and reached for my identification. You can get coffee at a discount if you’re a “Senior” at MacDonald’s. The young guy behind the counter sold it to me at the “Senior” rate without any question. He didn’t want to see my ID. He didn’t question the fact that I was a senior, and that kind of bothered me. Do I look like a “Senior”, I thought?

   What answers do we give to the world when the world isn’t even asking?

   It appears to me that the only things that we want the world to know about us these days is what side of the political divide we stand on, and what our positions on social issues are. What social services we provide, and that we are friendly without being weird. And we answer them the way people want us to answer them. We want to be liked and accepted.

   But the more secular our culture becomes, the weirder the expressions of our true character will be. This isn’t anything new. Paul wrote to the Corinthian church in 1 Corinthians 1:18,

⁸ For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

   We are weird in the eyes of a secular culture.

   However, standing true to who we are presents a positive, peculiar alternative to the world which sin has made. In some ways, people are looking for churches that are hard to join and easy to leave. They want their Christianity to mean something, to bring new life!

   If we do not make a clear proclamation of “why” we do what we do, we make the “what” we do no different than that of a secular organization using religious language.

   The life transformation that Jesus won for all who believe is what we proclaim during Lent especially.

   We heard about two prodigals last Sunday, two men, and this coming Sunday we’ll hear about another one. A woman.

   They all point to our prodigal, excessively generous God.

   Male or female, Jesus poured out his blood for our salvation, life for all who believe and are baptized. And it would not be long now before Jesus would be washing the feet of his disciples as a servant. And the feet that Mary washed would be driven through with nails. Let that expensive, extravagant gift be our message, the thing that we are known for.

   It may be weirder than the world’s message, but it’s true and it leads to new and eternal life.