“Anointed
for Burial”
John
12:1-8
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
March
21, 2010
Lent
5
Have you seen the new movie version of Alice
in Wonderland? It is not a
remake of the 1951 original, but rather a kind of sequel.
According to Emily who has seen it,
So when she falls down the rabbit hole
into Underland this time (what Alice calls Wonderland),
she not only is older than the first time she visited but also seems to be a
different person – less bold, less confident, less her true self – so much
so that when her friends from her earlier outing in Wonderland meet up with her,
like the March Hare and the Mad Hatter, they are pretty sure she is The Wrong
Alice. The Mad Hatter, played by
Johnny Depp (which explains how my swooning daughter remembers all of this), is
so taken aback by the difference in
Unless we are very vigilant, life has a
way of doing that to us, does it not? We
lose our “muchness.” We become
more careful, cautious, and circumspect. We
accommodate ourselves more and more to adult rules and ways of life.
We go along in order to get along. We
allow ourselves to be constrained, construed, configured, confined, and consoled
by the “order of things” and by the conventions of polite and proper
society, all of which have their own rewards, but the price we pay is our “muchness.”
I wonder if the true nature of our
religious and spiritual journeys on which we are embarked is not in some way
purposed to get our muchness back, or to get it for the first time if we think
we’ve never had it, and to let it grow in us.
Muchness is akin to joy and generosity and passion and love and largesse.
It is expansiveness, openness, extravagance, big-heartedness.
When I thought about how to talk about
muchness, I remembered three little parables that Jesus told that do not so much
define muchness but simply sound like it, expressing something of the character
of it, an elan about life that comes to us when we take God and gospel to heart
and trust the abounding nature of life so that we live neither parsimoniously or
sanctimoniously:
The
he goes and sells all that he has and buys the field.
The
he went and sold all that he had and bought it.
The
In our reading today, Mary took a pound
of costly perfume, poured it over the feet of Jesus, and wiped them with her
hair. Sure, Mary could be and was
criticized for what she did. A
denarius was a day’s wages and, figuring the value of three hundred denarii,
the cost of the perfume, in today’s coinage, at minimum wage, comes to
$17,400. The fact that Judas had
ulterior motives (he wanted a piece of that purse) does not mean that his
question did not have an air of legitimacy: “Why
was this perfume not sold and the money given to the poor?”
Then, too, a single woman in any way touching a single man, as Mary
did with her hair, was a scandalous indiscretion.
But Mary did not care about any of that
because she was, in the Mad Hatter’s jargon, “muchier.”
This Mary is the same one who earlier had sat in rapt attention at the
feet of Jesus absorbing his poetic preachments about the
A couple of weeks ago, the Aging &
Saging Group watched a terrific Japanese film called Departures in which deceased persons’ bodies are lovingly and
ceremonially prepared for burial or cremation in the presence of family and
loved ones. It is a stunningly
moving movie and the ritual beautiful beyond words to tell of it as the bodies
of loved ones are prepared for their departure from this life into whatever
comes next. Mary was doing something
similar as she bathed the feet of Jesus with the expensive oil as a way of
honoring his extraordinary life and expressing her love.
Jesus showed his approval by rebuking Judas:
“Leave her alone…You always
have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
No one could say that Jesus did not
care about the poor and we cannot use what he said to justify any neglect of the
poor today. He had devoted the bulk
of his ministry to them and he clearly would state before his own departure that
“whatever you do or do not do to the
least of my brothers and sisters, you do or do not do to me.”
But he also knew that the poor would fare better in the long run in
an atmosphere of “muchiness” than cold and calculating bean counting.
He knew that lavish and extravagant gestures of love leave a larger wake
than any tightfisted accounting ever can.
When I was a boy, my mother every night
prepared a good cooked meal for my family and what I remember is that I never
had to eye everyone else’s plate before taking my heaping helpings of the food
that had been prepared. There always
was more than enough and while a Judas might have eyed the abundance and
reminded my mother that there are starving children in China, the truth is that
those children were not likely to have been in line for those particular
potatoes and that particular pork loin anyway and my mother’s munificence and
muchiness was a nightly act of love in whose light her children might learn
generosity and joy for a lifetime.
It strikes me that a lot of religion
and modern church life could benefit by a recovery of muchiness for so much of
it so often seems joyless, duty bound, moralistic, and, well, prudent.
Where are the extravagant gestures, the wasteful acts of faith and love?
Why do we allow the specter of scarcity to scare us away from living
abundantly which is, as John points out elsewhere in his gospel, the sole reason
Jesus gave for his ministry on this earth?
Mary’s anointing of Jesus for burial
with the expensive perfume was a way for her to declare that in the light of the
largeness of his life and love and vision, she was not going to live a small,
miserly, penurious, impecunious, impoverished life (impecunious, by the way,
being today’s effort to uphold my reputation for using big words and preaching
cerebral sermons J).
Mary in effect was saying to Jesus and to the others who were gathered in
that house, and to all of us who have read about her lavish deed through all
these subsequent years, that after he is gone yet shall he live in her through
the big and big-spirited way she would live her life.
She is declaring that she will not lose her muchiness but develop it and
delight in it to the glory of God through all of her days.
With what costly elements, gestures, or
acts from our lives might we anoint Jesus for burial to honor his life and to
commit ourselves to the restoration of Christ-like muchiness to our lives?
Might it be that we break open the secret delight we harbor in holding a
grudge against someone? Oh, that
would be costly. Might it be that we
pour out a treasured relationship that is holding us up or back?
Might it be that we offer up a long held opinion or line of thinking that
smacks more of fear than faith? Might
it be that we give over the excuses to which we steadfastly cling for why we
cannot do something that would heal us or free us to be more truly ourselves and
enlarge our life?
These days of Lent are the gift of the
church to us to take stock of our lives and to amend them.
Some of the changes we know we must make might feel like death to us.
But, like Jesus – who died, was buried, and raised to new life – it
is through all these little deaths we are willing to suffer for Christ’s sake
and ours that Easter will come to
our life. And no Mad Hatter in our
Wonderland will have to say to us, “You have lost your muchiness.”
Amen.
Copyright © 2010 by First Presbyterian Church