“You
always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
Today’s Gospel lesson relates the story of a woman who anoints Jesus’ feet with a perfumed ointment and then wipes them dry with her hair. A version of this story appears in varying forms in all four of the canonical Gospels. While scholars are fairly certain that the words attributed to Jesus here are probably not his, clearly this was a story that animated the understandings of him among the early Jesus movement. As a result, this story has much to tell us about the Way of Jesus that is worth knowing.
Which Mary?
This version of the story from John is set in the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus in Bethany just after Jesus has raised Lazarus from the dead. In six days Jesus will depart for his fateful encounter with the Romans in Jerusalem. The woman who interacts with Jesus is Mary of Bethany, Martha and Lazarus’ sister. It’s important to note who this woman is and who she is not.
She is not the woman of ill repute in Luke or the mystery woman who shows up in Mark and Matthew’s accounts. More importantly, she is definitely not the Mary Magdalene whom historians increasingly recognize as one of the main leaders of the early Jesus Movement.
Pope Gregory the
Great would conflate all of these women in his 6th CE account, tarring
Mary Magdalene as a penitent prostitute. For many centuries that would be the teaching
of the church. It was a very effective – if dishonest - means of burying the
role of women’s leadership in a church with an all-male hierarchy seeking to
legitimate patriarchy and to subordinate women in the process.
But Mary’s engagement with Jesus arose out of her gratitude for his raising of her brother, Lazarus, from the dead. She also recognizes something important here. Her anointing of his feet with nard symbolically pointed toward the coming anointing of his body in preparation for burial after his crucifixion.
Both the symbolism and the actual impending death of Jesus escape the disciples completely. Like many of us, their vision is too immediate and too literal to see the truth to which these symbols point. Maybe they just don’t want to see it.
Instead, they become distracted by Judas’ criticism of Jesus for allowing Mary to lavish expensive ointment on his feet even as the desperate poor languish all around them. Jesus responds that while the poor will always be around, he will not be present with them much longer. Indeed, within another six days, Jesus will be on his way to Golgotha.
Self-Abnegating
Devotion
Let’s start with Mary. Her willingness to engage Jesus in this intimate manner runs afoul of the customs of both her Hebraic culture as well as that of the highly misogynist Greco-Roman culture of the Roman Empire. Letting down her hair in public is a big no-no. This is the kind of behavior that causes people to call women who do such things prostitutes. At a very basic level, she is an incredibly courageous woman, willing to violate cultural mores to demonstrate her devotion to Jesus.
As followers of Jesus, we ignore that aspect to our peril.
But what is more striking is Jesus’ response to her. He is taken by her compassion and her self-abnegating behavior. This woman has put aside her own dignity and status. She risks censure for violating communal norms. But she realizes Jesus is not long for this world and responds to that insight with a display of loving kindness. Jesus is clearly moved by this. And when he responds to Judas’ criticism of her behaviors, he essentially says “You should be so thoughtful, Judas.”
This story is but one of many such stories in the Gospels that evidence that, compared to the patriarchal culture of both Rome and Judea, women were highly valued in the Jesus movement. As is often the case, Jesus draws a distinction between the Kingdom of Caesar with its dominating patriarchy and the kingdom of G-d where women are no longer seen as mere property of their husbands. The Way of Jesus turns many aspects of Caesar’s kingdom on their heads. That’s precisely the reason that so many people talked about Jesus during his lifetime and continued to do so long after he was gone.
It’s also the kind of thing that could get a guy crucified.
A Cavalier Jesus
But it’s the second aspect of this story that has always troubled me. I have always been disturbed by this passage which ends with Jesus making what strikes me as a flip remark about poverty: “The poor you will always have with you….”
There is a sense in that comment that somehow poverty is normative for any given society. There are no obligations to relieve it, much less prevent it. Many defenders of our market fundamentalist system have used this verse as its legitimation – so what if our economic system benefits some while generating crippling poverty for many and inequalities which render our society unstable. Poverty is a given. Even Jesus said so. Deal with it.
But bear in mind that
all of the Gospels are the product of several cultural inkpots that their writers
dipped into in their creative process. In this case, it the scripture of the
Hebrew tradition, the beginning point for all the Gospel writers in their
telling their stories about Jesus, which serves as the lens through which this
story is told.
In constructing this dialogue, the writers of John’s Gospel have borrowed a passage from the Torah to create Jesus’ response to Judas. The words “The poor you will always have with you…” come directly from Deuteronomy 15 which begins with the words placed in Jesus’ mouth: “For there will never cease to be needy ones in your land…”
But that is only half of the verse. The remainder of it points to the response demanded by G-d in the face of that reality: “…which is why I command you: open your hand to the poor and needy kinsman in your land.”
Now, that sounds an awful lot like the Jesus of history who scholars are fairly clear actually said, “Give to all who beg.”
The writer of John cleverly used just the first half of that verse to set up an awareness of the precariousness of Jesus’ life, soon to end in crucifixion. In scolding Judas for his condescension in criticizing the actions of Mary - the only one who actually gets what is happening to Jesus - he goes on to say, “You always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me." But the point of John’s reference to the poor here is neither to normalize poverty nor to excuse his listeners from responding to it. His point is that Jesus is about to die even as his disciples do not want to deal with that reality. Rather than fight among themselves about how they should spend their meager funds, this is the time to be fully present with Jesus while he is still there.
Lent Calls Us to
Reconsider our Presumptions
So what difference does
any of this make to those of us who would follow Jesus?
This is the fifth
Sunday of Lent. It is a time for reflection on our lives, for reconsideration
of our attitudes and for repentance from ways of being human that are harmful
to ourselves and others. The Way of Jesus calls us to question our own cultural
presumptions just as Jesus challenged those of his own day.
We might ask ourselves why we expect men and women to act in certain ways and demonize them when they behave otherwise. Indeed, we might ask ourselves why we presume that our inherited understandings of the sexes exhaust all the possibilities and why we deny people the right to tell their own stories and live their own lives as they see fit. Where in all of that is our respect for their humanity? And what gifts are we missing when we deny anyone an equal place at our table?
The Way of Jesus also
calls us to question how we see others vis-à-vis wealth. It requires us to reconsider
our rationalizations of a system which rewards its winners, telling them they
are somehow entitled to their privilege, while demonizing the poor, constructing
them as lazy. Anyone who has ever toiled in the agricultural fields or in the
kitchens of restaurants – the working poor who insure that all of us actually get
our daily bread - knows that is simply not true. So why do we buy into this?
Jesus knew only too well that the ways we treat women and the poor are always a matter of human choices. The pointed question our Gospel poses us this day is how and why we make those choices that generate or acquiesce to human suffering. What is our own role in attitudes and behaviors that deny the humanity of our fellow children of G_d? And what is the Way of Jesus calling us to consider here?
Those are tough questions. And I think it’s hardly a coincidence that we are asked to wrestle with them during this penitential season we call Lent. Let us pray:
Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (Collect, Lent V)
Orlando,
Florida
If the
unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it
religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do
not come in sound bites.
Those who
believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma
Gandhi
For what
does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk
humbly with your G-d? - Micah 6:8, Hebrew
Scriptures
Do not be
daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now.
Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are
you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom
of the Jewish Sages (1993)
© Harry
Coverston, 2022
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment