John 12:1-8 “Bethany’s Passion”

This last week the Kauai Association UCC pastors met at the Lihue Christian Church. I was the first one there in the morning bedside Pastor Cheri, the pastor of the church. She was in her office, so I popped in to say hello to her of course. On the wall next to her office door was a rendition of that famous painting by Leonardo Di Vinci of the Last Supper. I had to look again. In the picture there were nothing but women. Where Jesus of Nazareth usually was to be found I saw Mary of Nazareth, Jesus’ mother, instead. The names of the other dinner guests were listed underneath the frame. Saint Teresa di Avila, Priscilla from the church in Corinth, and right down the line all the male disciples had been changed out with famous women of the faith.

To be sure women have always been critical to the Christian Faith. The early churches that flourished after the death and resurrection of Jesus found women in leadership roles unlike any other major religion. This comes from the example of Jesus himself. Although he called twelve disciples who were male, we see his ministry directed towards women again and again. Who was it who bore Christ into the world? Mother Mary. Who was it to whom he offered the water of eternal life? The Samaritan woman at the well. Who was it who anointed Christ, thus giving him the title of Christ which means anointed? Mary of Bethany. Who was the first one to see Jesus alive again after Resurrection? Mary of Magdala. Have you noticed how many different Mary’s there are? To avoid this confusion, in English we call one Mary simply Bethany. We call another Magdalena, and the like.

This passage that we read this morning, also talks about Martha. We cannot forget her; however, she really is not the main focus of this text. We read that she was in the kitchen mostly, cooking the meal. Just the same, the word here in the Greek is not “etimazein,” which would be the usual word “to prepare” a meal. Here the word is “epoisan,” which is to work at creating. It is what God did at the time of Creation. Likewise, the word here is not just “dinner” but “deipnon,” which is a feast or banquet. Martha is not just opening a can of Ravioli and throwing it in the microwave! She is creating a banquet for her honored guests. I think we can all respect that!

Mary of Bethany is the main character of the story here though. Bethany takes rare Nard, a perfume, kneels at Jesus feet and washes them by wiping them with her hair. The text tells us that the whole house was perfumed in this way. We also read that this anointing was for his death. This is indeed a very passionate moment.

I was thinking about this and it struck me that she represents every Christian woman that has done great acts of kindness to others because of an absolute love for Jesus Christ. She allows God to work through her to show God’s love through her actions. In this way, we could say that it is not merely a woman, but God that anoints Christ. God is merely doing this through the woman. We have seen this happen time and time again in the Bible. It is still happening today.

This is a true story from a lady named Sandi Falk: She was going back to school after raising three kids and had signed up for a sociology course. The class was asked to go out and smile at three people and document their reaction. Soon after she was assigned the project, her husband, youngest son, and she went out to McDonalds. They were standing in line, waiting to be served, when all of a sudden everyone around them began to back away, and then even her husband did. She however did not move an inch, She turned around and smelled a horrible "dirty body odor" and there standing behind were two poor homeless men.

She looked down at the short gentleman, close to her, he was "smiling.” His beautiful sky blue eyes were full of God's Light as he searched for acceptance. He said, "good day" as he counted the few coins he had been clutching. The second man fumbled with his hands as he stood behind his friend. The second man seemed mentally deficient. She tried to hold back her tears. The young lady at the counter asked him what they wanted. He said, "Coffee is all Miss," because that was all they could afford. To sit in the restaurant and warm up, they had to buy something, and they just wanted to be warm.

Then Sandi really felt it--the compulsion to reach out and embrace the little man with the blue eyes. That is when she noticed all eyes in the restaurant were set on her, judging her every action. She smiled and asked the young lady behind the counter to give me two more breakfast meals on a separate tray. She then walked around the corner to the table that the men had chosen as a resting spot. She put the tray on the table and laid her hand on the blue-eyed gentleman's cold hand. He looked up at her with tears in his eyes and said, "Thank you." She leaned over, began to pat his hand, and said, "I did not do this for you. . .God is here working through me to give you hope.”

I thought about this story in regards to the Scripture for today because of the words that Jesus leaves us with, saying “You will always have the poor with you.” This is really true. We will always have poor people. Two thousands years after Christ and several sociology experiments in such things as fascism and communism have not done away with poverty. In this country we used to have a war on poverty—I think maybe poverty won that war because we have more poor people than ever today.

However, like the woman at McDonalds that was trying just to smile at people to see their reactions as an experiment but then discovered that she was being used by God instead to help others and to give them hope, we have to see that if we are not just out on a given assignment as Christians. In fact helping other people out of a sense of simply “it is the right thing to do” becomes very “academic” very quickly. We quickly begin to ask ourselves “why are we doing this anyway?”

Bethany anointed Jesus with the expensive perfume–not just doing it because Jesus seemed to not smell so good. She did it because she loves Jesus. The woman helping the homeless men at McDonalds says it at the end to them: “God is working through me so that you might have hope.” What hope this must have given Jesus to be anointed in this way by Behtany.

Remember that in those days, everyone was waiting for the Messiah, a name in Hebrew that literally means the anointed. The epithet “Christ” after Jesus’ name also means “anointed” but in the Greek. And so, it is in this act from God through this woman that the prophecy is fulfilled. Jesus literally becomes the anointed one.

What does it mean to be anointed? It means that you have been made a ruler, a King, a Lord! I am sure that we all remember King David, the first great king over Israel? He did not get crowned as we think of kings from the Middle Ages. He was anointed. Let us turn in our Bibles to 2 Samuel 2:7, “Therefore let your hands be strong, and be valiant, for Saul your lord is dead, and the house of Judah has anointed me king over you.” Then in 2 Samuel 5, we see that once again David is anointed, this time not just over Judah, but of all of Israel.

When Bethany anoints Jesus, we must think back to King David’s anointing to become the King over all of Israel.

We do have to wonder though if it would have made a difference if someone other than this woman would have been the one to anoint Jesus as Lord? What if the disciples had been the one to anoint Jesus? What if the chief priests had anointed Jesus as Lord? God chose this woman to anoint Jesus instead. I think it is because this woman’s love for Christ was so pure and sincere that in God’s eyes she was the most worthy person to anoint the King of Heaven! And, that is why we must remember her.

To put it plainly then, it is our responsibility to please God, not other people. It is our job as Christians to show the love of Christ through our actions and this must be why we do what we do. Why do we come to church? We love God. We come to anoint our King in heaven, so to speak. Why do we feed the homeless? Is it because they are poor and hungry? No! We feed the poor because we love our Lord. Why do we get up in the morning and go to work? Because we love our Lord! Why do we stay with our families and raise our children? Because we love our Lord! This is Bethany’s passion–and ours, too.

As we read this text from John this morning, we see that there is another reason that the woman anoints Jesus. We find this in the text just prior to the anointing itself and in Jesus’ explanation why he accepts the anointing from the woman. He is going to die, and anointing is not just what one does to make an ordinary person a king, it is also what one does to prepare a body after death for burial. The perfume is put on the body of the one who has died in order to mask the smell of death—that smell of rotting flesh that is so foul.

And, we see in this moment of anointing a unique affirmation of one of the very cornerstones of our faith as Christians. Jesus did actually, physically die. He was beaten, tortured, mocked, ridiculed, nailed to the cross, pierced, died, and placed in the tomb that was offered by Joseph of Arimathea, one of the priests who did not agree with having Christ crucified.

Here we see that Christ fully understood that he was going to die. He allows himself to be prepared for burial even though he is still alive. He seems to know that there will be no other time for the ritual anointing of the dead. There will be no other time for the final blessings usually offered.

When we reflect on the passion of the Christ, we rarely think about how it must have smelled. If we were to consider this, then we would have to say that even through it all, the scent of the expensive perfume would have pervaded. In the garden at Gethsemane, Jesus would have still been smelling of the expensive perfume. When Judas came up to kiss him in that moment of betrayal, the perfume would have smelled sweet still. When he was being beaten, the soldiers would have smelled it on him. All through the passion, the perfume would have been a subtle and ever-present reminder of that moment of grace and love when the woman out of love for her Lord poured the perfume to anoint him. When Jesus appeared upon his resurrection, they would have still gotten the perfume into their nostrils!

When I served my first congregation back in Los Angeles, the church decided to allow a Korean Church to come in on Sunday afternoons after our regular service to host their own worship of God. We did not charge anything. We just knew that they needed a place to worship, so we opened our doors to them. After the first Sunday that they worshiped with us, I walked into the sanctuary and there was this smell in there that was really unique. It was the smell of the other church. I think it was a mixture of the cumulative perfume of all the ladies of that Korean church plus maybe a little kimchi and maybe a little of the mothball smell from their clothes. Strangely, when I smelled it, it just seemed like the smell of the Holy Spirit. And, there was a sense of the fragrance of the lingering Spirit after sincere worship. I soon began to hope that the smell would linger until our morning worship the next week so that our own congregation could breathe in the leftover Spirit from the previous Sunday afternoon!

To conclude, whatever we do in this life, let us do it out of our love for Christ. Let us bless Christ and anoint His head in every act. Let us anoint Him not just because He is our King and He died for us, but because in this anointing we recognize his resurrected body, and His Spirit ever present in our lives, too. Amen.