Lent 5, Year C
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.
Last week, the children read today’s
Gospel story in Sunday School. As I moved back and forth between the
classrooms, I heard a loud chorus of disgust about the smells evoked in this
lesson.
In one room, the 1st-3rd graders were
choking over the homemade lavender-scented oil that Nissa had brought to
illustrate the lesson. “Euwww! Yuck! It smells awful!” they howled, writhing in
agony on the floor and covering their noses. (Remember?!)
Down the hall, the 4th-6th
graders were waxing indignant over Mary’s wild actions in the story. “Euww, she
touched his stinky feet with her hair! How could she do that? Feet are nasty! I
wouldn’t even touch my sister’s stinky feet. Ugh-and she’s going to have that
smelly perfume stuck to her hair all day, too!”
The children were right. Today’s
Gospel blasts us with troubling smells. First, there’s Lazarus. Remember, he’s
Jesus friend, freshly raised from four days of being dead in a tomb. The
children forgot about him, but he probably stinks, too. Maybe like a mix
between rotting skin and pond water. With some dirty clothes aroma thrown in. Can
you imagine sitting at the dinner table with him beside you? Eating your food
with fresh tomb-smells swirling around your nose? And now, can you imagine the
powerful wave of perfume that fills the room when Mary pours her precious oil
all over Jesus’ feet? Sweet, spicy, sticky, heavy scent—the smell of mourning,
the smell of good-bye tears, reminding you of the pain of your grandma’s
funeral? You’re just supposed to rub on a bit of it, Mary, not pour out the
whole bottle. Whew, it’s overpowering!
That’s the thing about smells, though.
They easily overwhelm us. They take us where we would never think of going on
our own. All it takes is a whiff of the ocean, and I’m a child again on
Galveston beach. A whiff of a fresh mountain pine, and I’m a scraggly camper in
the North Carolina woods. Some “Old Spice” soap, and my long-dead father is
holding my hand. And then there’s my favorite story of driving through the
industrial Ruhr Valley in Germany as a young adult living abroad: As the
powerful oil refinery smell seeped through the car window, my friends coughed
and spluttered. But I was filled with homesickness, rather than repulsion. That
smell instantly brought me home, home to stinky, polluted Houston, and my eyes
filled with longing tears.
The power of smells is mysterious and beyond
our control. It breaks down barriers of time and place … rather like the power
of the Holy Spirit does. We’re just minding our business, and suddenly God
comes down and moves us to speak up or to take some action that we never would
have done on our own. We’re just handing out mouthfuls of bread and sips of
wine, and suddenly time and place collapse, and we’re holding pieces of Christ
in our hands. We’re absorbed in living ordinary lives, safe behind carefully
constructed walls, and suddenly God is in there, too, turning reality upside
down, and we’re never the same again. God seeps into our present reality, and before
we know it, we’re transported and transformed.
Mary,
in today’s reading, is acting like a prophet. She is filled with the Holy
Spirit. Prophets do the unexpected to get our attention. They break down the
barriers so that God can get in. Think of the prophet Isaiah walking around
town naked to call attention to an approaching enemy attack. Or Jeremiah lying
on his side for months on a downtown sidewalk to make his point. Or Jesus
turning over the money changers’ tables in the Temple. Mary the Prophet takes
precious, valuable oil and dumps the whole thing out on Jesus’ living feet.
In
real-world terms, she is being purposefully wasteful.
In
the real world, powerful men were supposed to put oil on the heads of other powerful
men in order to anoint them king.
In
the real world, the only time that women were supposed to use that oil was to
embalm a corpse, and Jesus is still alive.
In
the real world, women in her day only loosed their hair in the privacy of their
bedrooms—not in a room full of men who were not their husbands.
Mary’s prophetic act is completely crazy. But
it works. The real world breaks down. Only Judas is left counting his pennies.
Everyone else is swept away as powerfully as we are moved by our sense of
smell. All of a sudden, the disciples find themselves in a new world. It is a
world filled with the terrible presence of Jesus’ approaching death. It is filled
too with the unfathomable power of a love so extravagant that the smell of it
knocks your socks off. And it is filled with a preview of the loving humility
that Jesus will soon teach them when he himself bends down to wash their own
stinky feet at the Last Supper. “Love one another as I have loved you,” he
commands us.
I
just heard a story this week on NPR about the power of a similar modern day
prophetic sign. Mr. Rogers, of the famed TV show, “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood,” was
a quiet, unassuming man. How many of you have watched that show? He was an
ordained Presbyterian minister, but he spent his days focused on very young
children, quietly showing them God’s love and care. In the late 1960’s, in the
midst of terrible racial strife in our country, he met a young black man named
Francois Clemmons. He asked Clemmons if he would come work on his show, playing
a kind neighborhood policeman. Clemmons, who knew real-life police only as
club-swinging, hose-wielding racists, was not excited about portraying one on
TV, but he accepted. One hot summer day, Mr. Rogers was soaking his bare feet
in a baby pool on the show. On the air, he asked the officer to join him in cooling
off in the pool. In this era when it was against the law for black bodies and
white bodies to share the same swimming pools, the two men sat side by side and
soaked their feet on national TV. Black feet and white feet together in the
water—that just was not done. It was as shocking then as was a woman letting
down her hair in public in Jesus’ day. The two men then sang a duet about how
to show people that we love them. And then, as the officer got out, Mr. Rogers
bent down and offered to dry his feet for him, patting them tenderly and
reminding us—oh so subtly—of that Maundy Thursday commandment to love one
another.[1]
When
was the last time that you let yourself be swept away by compassion, carried
away into the realm of God’s love? When was the last time that you got a whiff
of God that turned your world upside down?
If only we could walk down the hall to see
a room of adults choking over the stench of poverty, rolling on the floor in
desperation to pour themselves out in perfumed love for the needy. If only we
could go down the hall to find another room of adults waxing indignant over the
odor of injustice that fills the world, crying out over the way that it sticks
to our clothes and even our hair. “Who could stand it?” they would cry aloud.
And
Jesus would smile. And take a towel to dry our smelly feet.
[1] http://www.npr.org/2016/03/11/469846519/walking-the-beat-in-mr-rogers-neighborhood-where-a-new-day-began-together
