The Smell of Life

This sermon can be listened to here

Gate Pa – Year C 5^th Sunday in Lent, 2022

Readings:

Psalm                     Psalm: 126
First Reading          Isaiah 43:16-21 
Second Reading     Phil 3:4-14      
Gospel                    John 12:1-8      

     What I want to say:
-          Use my own memory of running around Vogel Street in Gisborne as a wee boy as a way in to exploring the power of our senses to hold memories alive. How does that help us into this story
-          This is more than creating life giving memory. It is the story of someone found by love, who offers love. In contrast we have Judas. Sadly Jesus’ response  to Judas has been used down the centuries to justify continuing Judas’s cynical approach to the poor, cf Jesus or Deuteronomy.

What I want to happen:
What are the memories that give you life?

The Sermon

     1.     Introduction: - Vogel Street

A couple of weeks ago I was walking barefoot out on our back lawn. It had been raining. The kikuyu grass was thick, damp, and soft. As I walked over it in the warm sun, I could smell the grass.

And I was transported back so many years to Gisborne, to my grandparents’ house. Their back lawn was called the bowling green. It had thick, dense kikuyu grass on it. And I remembered racing around on my pretend motorcycle, red cowboy hat on for a helmet – you must be safe, doing all the stunts of the stunt motorcyclist we had seen one of the previous nights.

The power of that feel of grass with the smell offered me a long-forgotten memory. And such joy and freedom. The sense of life in all that. And all the sense of family and love that came with it. A gift.

I wonder what life giving memories you have, and what helps you remember them?

     2.     Mary’s Gift

In our gospel story we hear of Mary’s radical gift to Jesus. This story is not like the one in Luke’s gospel at Simon the Pharisees house in Galilee.

In this story Mary is not a woman of ill repute. She is Martha and Lazarus’s sister. By all accounts, they are from a family with means and connection. Lazarus’s death had brought Jesus back from the relative safety of Galilee, where Thomas had said that they would come and die with him. His bringing Lazarus back from death had sealed his fate, and the threat to his life was palpable. He had stayed out of sight until this meal. Lazarus too was now under threat.

So, as Jesus journeys into Jerusalem and the Passover festival, and all that awaits him as part of that, Lazarus and his sisters welcome him with a meal. There is fear and anxiety in the air, in this house that not long ago had been filled with the smell and sound of Lazarus’s death.

Last week we were told the story of scandalous joy. The outrageous  father does not wait for what his rude and wasteful son has to say, but embraces him with love and welcome, and joyously throws a party of celebration. Abundant joy led to rules being broken and welcome offered when none was deserved, much to the anger of the older son, lost in duty.

This week we have another story of scandalous joy. Of Mary taking the role of a servant, and not just washing Jesus’ feet but anointing them with expensive nard. A sensual gift of love.

In releasing her hair to wipe his feet she breaks so many taboos. It is shocking. Imagine a traditional Muslim woman doing that today. It is simply a disgrace that she would do this.

     3.     “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me,”

As Mary anointed Jesus’ feet, a number of the men gathered would have felt very uncomfortable. Some would have been offended at the sight of her hair. Judas was. He said so.

But he disguises his offence with feigned concern for how that money might have been better spent on the poor. John makes it clear that he really didn’t care about the poor. Whether that is true or just propaganda I don’t know. But he is portrayed as someone who hides his greed by pretending concern.

Jesus wasn’t interested in fake concern. He stood in the biblical tradition of the Mosaic Law and the prophets of holding the poor at the centre. But sadly, over the centuries, his comment to Judas has been used to join Judas in not caring for the poor.

“You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me,”

Interestingly this can equally be translated as

“Have the poor with you always”. Or “Keep the poor among you always”.[1]

which echoes Deuteronomy 15:11

“Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth…. I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbour in your land.’”

But that is not what many have taught down the centuries, including by wealthy church leaders. They have used Jesus’ retort to justify ignoring the plight of the poor, and accepting them as simply the way God intended. Or to suggest that any action for the poor is a distraction from the Christian duty to worship God through Christ.

But Jesus came from a poor family who lived in a poor community in Galilee. Galileans were looked down on by Judeans as poor hillbillies. He was one of the poor.

Jesus is not suggesting an either or here. In all the gospels Jesus stands in the tradition of the prophets, and is always portrayed as on side of poor. It is one of the things that gets him into so much trouble.

Mary’s action wasn’t an either or.

It was simply a scandalous act of love and gratitude for being found and freed. She repented of what constrained her and acted with deep generosity.

And she offers a gift of love and life to this man who will face down those who seek his death.

Mary’s response to Jesus didn’t preclude an equally scandalous and generous act to others who are poor. Maybe it even invites it.

      4.     The Gift

Her gift was not just for that moment

As Jesus walked into Jerusalem the next day that fragrance walked with him, reminding him of the joy and love offered.

As he was arrested, tried, beaten and whipped, as he dragged his cross to Golgotha, I wonder what the memory of that night offered him as he struggled on.

As he hung dying, with the women gathered at the foot of the cross, including Mary, maybe, and the men who promised to die with him nowhere to be seen, I wonder what this memory offered him.

As he drew his last breath, I wonder if he would still smell the nard?

This was a gift offered to him, to help carry him in all that lay ahead. It was gift of love, hope, and life in the face of hate, fear, and death.

     5.     Some Final Thoughts

I wonder in our darkest moments, what gifts have sustained us. What memories of life help us. What are the moments that remind us that we have been held by love?

I wonder in this lent how we might pay attention to those memories and all they offer us?

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[1] Lindsey S. Jodrey <https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fifth-sunday-in-lent-3/commentary-on-john-121-8-4>