(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “When the Going Gets Weird”, originally shared on March 28, 2022. It was the 202nd video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
What’s the weirdest celebration you’ve ever attended? Today, we’re going
to look at one that Jesus attended that I’m pretty sure was even weirder, including
the part that might make a reality TV star blush.
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?
Does that strike you as weird? Well, when
the going gets weird, the weird get going.
Would it occur to you to wash Jesus’ feet
with $37,200.00 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.
What’s 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, where 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 close friend 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 who he
loves.
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 mother’s parents’ back
yard.
Fragrance has 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
powerful 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? What would you give 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.
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
$15.50 and multiply it by 8 hours for a day’s work, we get $124, or the near
equivalent of one denarius. Multiply that by 300 and we get $37,200.00. 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 $37,200.00
a pound to get that. It cost something 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, that 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.
That is, when the going gets weird in life, the weird get going by God’s
grace.
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