Extravagant love
The Rev’d Devin McLachlan
St Bene’t’s, Cambridge
The Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year C
Sunday 6 April
John 12.1-8
When I meet with couples before they’re married in the church, I usually ask them how well they talk about money. For younger couples, it’s a question that can surprise them. They don’t think that people in love need to talk about money, and they’re not sure that the church should either. But if you’ve been around the block a few times, you know that in any relationship, money is bound to come up — no matter how little, or even how much, a couple might have.
The problem is, the real issue is rarely actually about money. Money is a cipher, a stand-in for something else. Sometimes it’s really about control, or about power, or about feeling needed or feeling cared for. Certainly the recent actions coming from Washington D.C. have made abundantly clear that even when we talk about money, we’re often talking about power, control, insecurity.
Judas, always the excellent politician, knows the value of the value of money. Judas’ indignation would be neither the first nor the last time that someone disingenuously claimed concern for the poor in order to push a quite different agenda. Judas’ shocked indignation about Mary’s extravagance is a stand-in, a cipher, for many things:
It is is a cipher for power and control: ’What right does this woman have to spend so extravagantly?’
It is a cipher meant to distract his colleagues from his own embezzlement: John tells us: “he said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.”
It is a cipher for prudishness: Mary’s actions are, in the culture of her time (and quite honestly in ours as well) verging on the indecent, her hair unbound, anointing Jesus’ feet. And with that, also a cipher for patriarchy: Those women, Judas sneers,
they have no common sense when it comes to money. Some in this congregation right now are old enough to remember when it was almost impossible for a woman to have her own bank account without a husband’s permission.
Most of all, Judas’ anger is a cipher for envy. Envy of the extravagant Love that Mary shows for her beloved Jesus, the night before his triumphant Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem, where death most certainly awaited. Judas envies Mary’s love. But Jesus sees that love for what it is — wonderful extravagance and generosity!
(Don’t be distracted here by the way John quotes Jesus. Jesus is making a scriptural reference, a paraphrase of 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’.” Jesus reply is still an affirmation to generous, constant, financial support of the poor, not an invitation to neglect the needs of others.)
Jesus sees Mary’s love for the extravagance that it is, and he celebrates it. She’s done it before — this is the same Mary who chose the better part, sitting at Jesus’ feet to learn when her sister Martha stayed working in the kitchen. You might have noticed that even in this passage, it’s Martha that’s serving dinner. Once again, kneeling at Jesus’ feet, her beloved brother Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead, seated at the table, Mary knows the “one thing [which] is needful” in this prelude to Christ’s Passion.
Her tears and anointing mark the beginning of a week which will see the disciple’s world turned upside down. She kneels at Jesus feet as the other Marys will soon stand at the foot of the cross. Mary of Bethany’s passionate and compassionate gesture is an extravagant display of adoration, of love and of worship. Wordlessly she draws attention to the One in their midst who is giving himself for the life of the world.
And Jesus will echo that extravagant love. A few days later, Jesus himself takes up Mary’s act of foot washing. In the narrative flow of John’s Gospel it appears that Mary’s gift has affected Jesus deeply — that he learned from Mary as he did from the Syro-Phoenecian woman. While Jesus does not wash the disciples’ feet with expensive perfume as she did, he does take the same posture toward them that Mary had taken toward him, kneeling to bathe their feet on that Maundy Thursday.
Jesus has taken the extravagant hospitality that Mary of Bethany offered to him, and returned it to the apostles. Returned that love with the command that they should in turn extend that love— not just back to him— but to one another, to the whole church: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13.34-35)
And then, as if that extravagant love were not enough, the next day Jesus makes his most precious gift, the gift of his life upon the cross, where those poor, anointed feet will be pierced with Roman nails.
It is a gift of love beyond price which he freely gave to the whole world.
It is a gift of love we celebrate this first day of Passiontide.
It is a gift of love we celebrate today, in this place: extravagant, indecent, and shocking.
It is a gift that we are invited to receive and to give, to go forth into the world in Christ’s name, to kneel down at the feet of the poor and the downtrodden, to wash their feet with our tears, to fill our homes with the fragrance of Christ’s love,to lay down our lives for those we love, and to love extravagantly the whole world.
No words are required. No wealth is required. All that God asks from us is the only thing of ours which we truly have to give — our passionate, imperfect, heartfelt, extravagant love.