In the season of Lent 1987, I
joined a group of pilgrims walking across Massachusetts, from Pittsfield in the
West, to Boston in the East. The purpose
of our two-week journey was to make visible the human cost of our government’s involvement
in the civil wars in Central America. We
were hosted along the way by churches, temples, and monasteries of many different
traditions, who fed us, or let us stop in to use the bathroom and have a drink,
or invited us for worship, or gave us a place to sleep. The name that had been given to the
pilgrimage was Via Crucis, the Way of
the Cross, and as we walked we carried white wooden crosses, painted with the
names of victims of the violence.
The entire experience was a
momentous one for me, and I’ve been mining it for sermons as long as I’ve been
preaching. This morning I’m thinking
about the first warm day of spring, when we had come down into the Connecticut
River Valley after close to a week of cold, wet walking through the highlands of
Western Massachusetts. We arrived that
evening at the Episcopal Church in Amherst, where we entered a spacious
fellowship hall full of friendly people.
There were red and white checked tablecloths laid with real salad (the
kind that doesn’t contain jello, or pasta, or Miracle Whip™), and spaghetti
marinara and red wine. After supper we
went across the square to the Congregational Church, which was full to
overflowing, for one of the most powerful, spirit-filled worship services I can
remember, and then, finally, we made our way to the Presbyterian Church where
we would spend the night.
And when we got there, it was
announced that a team of massage therapists had arrived, who had volunteered to
rub our feet. They were people I knew,
friends and neighbors of the intentional spiritual community east of Amherst
where I was living at the time. I got my
foot-massage from a French woman named Brigitte, who lived with some other
folks in a house across the road from our commune. She was several years older than me, sophisticated,
vivacious, and attractive, and while I’d met her several times, I’m not sure
that we had exchanged more than a dozen words.
But as Brigitte was rubbing my feet we got to talking, and I was
surprised by the sudden warmth and interest I felt coming from a person I’d
thought existed on a different plane.
It seemed that my participation in the Via Crucis pilgrimage had caused her see me in a different
light. Or maybe it had made me see
myself differently, and Brigitte recognized the change.
An event like the Via Crucis creates a field of energy
that is positively charged. When people
undertake something out of love and concern for others, something that requires
some risk and effort and privation from the participants and that makes them
rely on the generosity and hospitality of others who share their love and
concern, it has a multiplying effect. In
walking across Massachusetts, I could do something for the people of Central
America that Brigitte could not, but she could do something for them, too, by
doing something for me. And our
relationship of mutual indifference changed in a moment, to one infused with
something more like love.
The gospel lesson today teaches us
about the transcendent power of this kind of positive energy field. It is John’s version of a story that appears
in different forms in all four gospels. But
while the others never tell us the name of the woman who anoints Jesus on the
eve of his final journey to Jerusalem, John identifies her as Mary, sister of
Martha and Lazarus. She is part of a
family with whom Jesus has an especially close and loving relationship, and she
has more reason than most to be devoted to him, even to the point of lavishing
a gift on him worth a whole year’s pay—in the chapter before this one, he
brought her brother Lazarus back to life, after four days in his tomb.
So you could say that Mary’s
extravagance is her attempt to make a gesture that in some small measure, proportionate
to the immensity of Jesus’ gift to her. But
perhaps because she is a woman, and he is a man, her action is charged with
something more than just gratitude and humble service. In that part of the world, then as now, a
woman’s hair was a potent symbol of her erotic power. For her to uncover her head before a man not
her husband, and let it down and wipe his feet with it, was an act of unseemly
intimacy. Yet the love that she quite literally
pours out is not for him alone. The
fragrance of the oil, the gospel says, filled the whole house. And the ministry of Jesus, which began at a
wedding feast, in an embarrassing superfluity of wine, approaches its climax a
house transformed into a bridal chamber, and the pleasure of love is shared by
all.
This shows how well Mary
understands Jesus’ ministry. For it was,
and is, a project driven by love—not love in the abstract, but real physical
pleasure in the presence of other people.
To befriend Jesus is to open one’s heart to the desire to connect. It is to enter a positive feedback loop where
my generosity inspires yours, where your compassion evokes mine, where we draw
strength from one another’s touch, and give solace to each other’s pain. To follow Jesus is to act on the faith that
love is a power that really can, and really will, transform the world. And it will do this by continually widening
the circle of our mutual belonging. Mary
loves Jesus, body and soul, but she does not seek to possess him. Maybe that’s why she anoints his feet and not
his head. She takes her precious bottle
of pure nard and pours it on the feet that have carried the good news of God’s all-embracing
love along the roads of Galilee, and through the villages of Samaria and Judea,
and are about to make one last trip to Jerusalem.
Judas doesn’t understand, because for him love is an abstraction. He is like all of us who talk about “the poor”
as if we know that they need better than they do, we who are always ready to make
public policy proposals and set up programs, and are always anxious about the
efficient delivery of services, and the avoidance of moral hazards, and it is
all ultimately self-serving and humorless and cold. Because there is something the poor need even
more than money and the rich need it, too.
It is to be in a field of energy charged with love that seeks the flourishing
of all. All of us, poor and rich, need a
story that connects us, and gives us a context for coming together. We all need permission and encouragement to touch
the lives of others in a way that brings pleasure and lessens pain. We all need to know that the service we give
and receive flows through us and through others in a positive feedback loop of
faith, hope, and love. And we need these
things because the powers of cynicism, and selfishness, and discord are so
strong.
Love demands more than clever ideas
and the dutiful allocation of funds. It
demands daily acts of courage and faithfulness.
If I ever spoke to Brigitte again after the night of my foot-rub, I
don’t remember it. A moment of warmth
ends, and the cold returns. We do what
we can for each other, but the lasting gifts—peace, justice, eternal life—are
the ones that only God can give. Yet
what other assurance do we have of God’s promises than the gifts we give, and
the risks we take, and the pain we suffer, and the sorrows we bear for each
other? I imagine that when Jesus set off
for Jerusalem in the morning, the fragrance of nard still rose from his feet
with the dust, and the memory of Mary was a comfort to him. So, in a way, was the knowledge that she had
kept back some of the oil to anoint his body for burial. His tomb would be filled with the fragrance
of the bridal chamber through the long darkness, when there was not yet even
the faintest scent of the garden in the morning on the first day of the week.
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