Lent 5

Isaiah 43.16-21 | Philippians 3.4b-14 | John 12.1-8

Sermon Preached by Dr Austin Stevenson

Among Jesus’ closest friends is a family in the town of Bethany, a couple of miles outside of Jerusalem. The home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus is, for Jesus and his disciples, a happy meeting place. It is also a context where the perceived tensions between hospitality and devotion are repeatedly explored.

Jesus is such good friends with this trio that when Lazarus’s sisters sent word of his sickness, they simply said “See, Lord, the one you love is ill” (11:3). Jesus came to Bethany then and raised Lazarus from the dead, and the event caused such a stir that the authorities in Jerusalem ordered for Jesus and Lazarus to be arrested. At that point, Jesus retreated to the countryside to wait.

Now, in chapter twelve, Jesus returns, stopping in at his friends’ house in Bethany before continuing to Jerusalem. For the third and final time in John’s gospel, it is near Passover, and this scene is the transition between Jesus’ public ministry and his death. A quiet moment before the coming storm. While they recline at the table, Martha characteristically serves the food, and Mary pours a large quantity of expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet. We’re told this perfume is worth three hundred denarii, which is about ten months’ worth of wages.

Judas, with avaricious intent, asks what sounds like a reasonable question. “Why was this perfume not sold and the money given to the poor?” Even more perplexing, given that many of us would ask a similar question in these circumstances, is that we can hear in Judas’s enquiry an echo of Satan himself.

“If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread” (Mt 4:3). As the desert sun beats down on Jesus, famished and weary after forty days of fasting in the wilderness, the devil mocks and tempts him, challenging Jesus to prove his credibility. It is not surprising, in this scene at the start of Jesus’ public ministry, that the tempter begins with bread, for what is more tragic than a bountiful world full of people starving to death? Just as God fed Israel with bread from heaven as they wandered the desert, so surely the first test of the Messiah is whether he will, whether he can, feed the hungry. We find ourselves confronted with this same challenge. If you are really the people of God, why do you build churches instead of bakeries? Why do you gather to pray when you could be making yourselves useful?

It is shocking to hear this challenge coming from the devil, and it’s not an easy one to dismiss. After all, Isaiah admonishes us to “seek justice, rescue the oppressed; defend the orphan, plead for the widow” (Isa. 1:17). Jesus himself later feeds thousands with bread by multiplying loaves on a hilltop. Clearly his denial of this temptation is not a refusal to care for the material needs of the hungry. The message of Scripture is not that physical goods and physical suffering don’t matter. Rather, the message is that “Man does not live by bread alone” (Deut. 8:3).  

Part of the insight here is that material goods only retain their goodness when they are ordered properly in relation to other goods. In other words, food is important, but other things are more important. When all else is set aside, when God is treated as secondary to more practical concerns, the result isn’t justice. The reason why is hinted at by the third of the devil’s temptations in the wilderness: to possess the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.

When we accumulate bread for those in need, we accumulate power. Think of Joseph’s ambiguous legacy in Genesis: by storing up Egypt’s grain to survive the drought, the surrounding nations are forced rely on Egypt for survival, which is ultimately how the people of Israel come to be their slaves.

Think of how much the western world has contributed to the impoverishment of developing countries, storing up grain through a rigged system of global capitalism, and then offering ‘assistance’ with strings attached. How often has our outstretched hand contained stones rather than bread? 

If that which comes from our hearts isn’t good, then that which comes from our hands won’t be good either. And everything that is good comes from God. Mary’s act of devotion, anointing Jesus with oil, is a radical display of ordering these goods properly, in a very particular time and place. As Jesus says, “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” Only by holding fast to him, do we find the strength and virtue to provide the world with bread, but also, so much more.

Now, there are two important caveats here. First, it is clear that not every extravagance done in the name of piety or devotion is justified by this passage. It depends on the context. But here we see an affirmation of the general fact that the church exists first that we might know God, that we might partake of his flesh and blood, that we might be transformed by the work of the Spirit into the image of his Son, and second, flowing from this, that we might care for the spiritual and practical needs of others, ‘seek justice, rescue the oppressed; defend the orphan, [and] plead for the widow.’

The other caveat is that, in this theme of bread running through the gospels, Jesus is not saying ‘only give them bread if they first come to me.’ He’s saying ‘you will only have something truly good to offer them if first you come to me, the bread of life.’ I was once invited to help out at a soup kitchen that required people to sit through a worship service before they were allowed to each lunch, and I think that’s precisely not what is envisaged here.

All of this comes together at the last supper, when Jesus becomes for us the perpetual bread of life, the eternal multiplication of loaves. It is not enough merely to keep people alive if there is nothing for them to live for. We cannot simply focus on bringing about ‘justice’, for who defines what ‘justice’ is? It is precisely by keeping these goods properly ordered that we avoid simply oscillating between activism and cynicism. Only he who is goodness itself can sustain us in our calling and direct us to what is truly good, truly just, and truly loving.