lent 5 Year C

Isaiah 43: 16-21 NRSV text
Psalm 126 NRSV text
Philippians 3: 4b-14 NRSV text
John 12: 1-8 NRSV text

We are presented this week with a beautiful story from John’s gospel: the anointing of Jesus’ feet with costly perfume by Mary in anticipation of his forthcoming death. Yet reading the commentators takes us into a different world altogether – the world of “Where did John get this from? Is it historical? Has he melded Mark and Luke together? How satisfying is John’s account?” The result is that it’s difficult not to feel that the point is being missed and lost!

Let’s be clear: a glance at a Synopsis of the Gospels shows immediately why this sort of discussion dominates. All the evangelists have an anointing story. Mark and Matthew situate it Bethany – but in the home of Simon the Leper (Matthew 26: 6-13/Mark 14: 3-9). Luke has it taking place in a Pharisee’s house (Luke 7: 36-50). In Mark and Matthew, the woman anoints Jesus’ head and the onlookers object to the waste of money that could have been given to the poor. In Luke, the woman is described as a “sinner” (a prostitute) and she anoints Jesus’ feet. The objection of the Pharisees is that if Jesus were a prophet, he would have known what sort of woman this was and (presumably) avoided contact with her.

John’s purpose is very different and we need to pay close attention to what he is trying to tell us. The issue isn’t “What happened? Did it happen as John says – or Mark, or Matthew, or Luke?” We need to forget our historical-critical criteria here. If we proceed as though history is the key to Truth, we will miss out on the Truth here. That’s not because history is unimportant; it’s just not important in the way that post-enlightenment scholarship has assumed it is.

Let’s remember something absolutely fundamental about the way in which John writes his gospel: what happens is less important for him than the Truth, or meaning of it all. Concretely, this means that for John, it is more important to construct his narrative to show the Truth than it is to record the events as they happened. In terms of history, John is right with the rabbi who said, “I want to tell you a true story: it might even have happened!” That’s not to say that John is unconcerned with history; it is simply to say that he is more concerned with the meaning of history – ie it’s relationship to God and God’s saving actions in Jesus. That’s why he tells us his story – not to convey information, but to excite belief (John 20:31). We need, therefore, to be alive to John’s genius as a theological narrator, and today’s text is no exception. The task, then, is to enter into the narrative world of John’s story of Jesus.

Jesus – the Resurrection and the Life!
The anointing belongs within the story of the raising of Lazarus. This is one of John’s Signs – the miracles that point towards the truth about Jesus’ identity and which are accompanied by discourses containing the “I am” sayings. In this case, the raising of Lazarus is the sign that Jesus is the Resurrection and the Life (11:25 ff). John devotes considerable narrative space to this miracle. It begins in 11:1 and is only completed in 12: 10-11: “So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, since it was on account of him that many of the Jews were deserting and believing in Jesus”. Do you see the irony? In John’s story, the miracles (signs) provoke either faith or opposition. Here, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. He is the One with power over death – and Jesus’ opponents choose instead to kill again the man who had escaped death (Lazarus) and the author of Life (Jesus).

The dynamic of the Passion is thus anticipated and established: Jesus is indeed the Resurrection and the Life. Jesus is the One who brings life to the dead. He is the One who saves. Yet Jesus can only give life at the cost of his own. The giving of Life is the gift of God. It is salvation – Life in all its fullness (cf John 10:10). Resurrection is the inextinguishable Light in the deepest human darkness (cf John 1: 3b-5) – yet human beings choose the dark rather than the Light! That choice means that they will move to extinguish the Light that has come into the world. Jesus is going to die.

Death in the midst of resurrection
We need to read Mary’s actions in this wider context. Mary, alone of the people at this semi-public meal in Bethany, understands that Jesus has given her brother life at the cost of his own. Here they all sit. It’s a meal of rejoicing. Mary, Martha and Lazarus have “given a dinner” for Jesus. Lazarus is here – and so, presumably, are a number of other local worthies!

It’s understandable, isn’t it? Here’s the chance to come and gawp – not only at the dead bloke now sitting eating, but at the other bloke who raised him to life! I’d have been there, I can assure you! It’s a bit like having the opportunity to spectate at a warmongers’ dinner at which both Tony Blair and George Bush are present – although the curiosity value is radically different!

The point is that this is a Resurrection Meal – a celebration of the dead being raised to life. It’s like an anticipation of an Easter Sunday meal – of the Messianic Banquet. It’s a great family occasion. The family that had been destroyed by death is restored. Everything is as it should be. Lazarus is there. Martha is (typically) serving. And the Resurrection and the Life is there in person! What more could anyone possibly want? The rules are “Be happy!”

And then, in the middle of it, something extraordinary happens. Mary takes a jar of nard – extraordinarily precious and costly (nearly a year’s wages for a labourer) – and smashes it. She pours the perfume over Jesus’ feet and uses her hair as a cloth to bathe him in it.

Note how this action jars (no pun intended!). We get the sense that Judas articulates the people’s unease – though in typically Judas-fashion. And when Jesus responds, “Leave her alone”, we’re given the sense that he’s speaking to everyone – not just to Judas. The point is that Mary’s action doesn’t fit the mood of extravagant rejoicing. There’s something here that is startlingly inappropriate. It’s a monumental gaffe – and the people don’t like it.

What is it that Mary has done to ruin the party atmosphere? This isn’t an act of penitence (as in Luke’s account). Mary understands. She is the one who sits at Jesus’ feet, and who takes in what he is saying. Mary has introduced the spectre of death into the feast of Life. That is what Jesus says: “She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial … you do not always have you with me” (vv 7-8).

That is not what the people want to hear. They do not want to anticipate not having Jesus with them – nor do they see any reason for having to do so! It is inconceivable that Jesus will die – after all, he’s the One who brings Life to the dead. But Mary understands that this is only at the cost of his own life. Mary realises how close Jesus’ “hour” is (it is only a few verses later that Jesus says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified – v23). Mary is the only one there who realises and accepts that you cannot have Easter Sunday without Good Friday.

Anointing the Servant King Jesus
There are two aspects to the anointing. The first is that Mary does what she will be prevented from doing by the resurrection – she prepares Jesus’ body for burial. In John’s gospel, Jesus’ body is prepared for burial by Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea (19:38ff). John is no doubt aware of the gospel tradition that says that the women disciples anointed Jesus for burial. In particular, there is good reason for supposing that John knows much of Luke’s material, and is aware of the fact and theme of the fidelity of the women disciples who, unlike the men, do not abandon Jesus at “his hour”. This is John’s way of making that same point: the faith of the women, who follow Jesus to the cross, is represented here by Mary, who anoints Jesus’ body for burial as an act of love and faith. John, however, also needs to have the post-mortem anointing by Nicodemus and Joseph. It is in exploring this that we come to the second aspect of the anointing: kingship.

One thing is quite clear: Nicodemus is there for theological rather than historical reasons. John identifies him as the one “who had first come to Jesus by night” (19:39). Here Nicodemus is very publicly identified with Jesus – over his death. He has come to anoint the body for burial – but has also come into the daylight. The importance of Nicodemus’ and Joseph’s association with Jesus’ death lies in the notice on the cross in John’s gospel: “The King of the Jews” (19:19ff). We are to read this in conjunction with the Prologue’s statement: “He came to his own, but his own people did not receive him. Yet to all those who did receive him and believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God …” (John 1:11-12). Nicodemus and Joseph, therefore – members of the Sanhedrin – are those of “his own people” who do believe. And what does this mean in the context of the crucifixion? These are the representatives of the true Israel – those who recognise in the crucified Jesus their Servant King. And here, they publicly give him a royal burial.

We need to remember that for John, Jesus is the King whose crucifixion is, ironically, his enthronement – his “lifting up”. It is precisely in his enthronement as King that Jesus is able “to draw all people to himself” – to save them. How? Because the King is also the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. Jesus’ death is the sacrifice for sin. But what sort of King is Jesus? John presents Jesus clearly as the Servant King. He is the King who – unthinkably – dies. His royalty is seen, not in the trappings of power and glory, but in their antithesis: suffering and death. It is seen in servanthood. In the next chapter, Jesus, “knowing that his hour had come … got up from the table, took off his outer robe and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him” (13: 1;5). And when the disciples object to the inappropriateness of such lowly behaviour, the semi-naked servant Jesus, divested of all hallmarks of authority (his cloak), tells them that servanthood is precisely what it means to be Lord and Teacher in his terms.

We shouldn’t miss the parallels here. To anoint Jesus for death is to anoint him for enthronement – as king. Mary anoints Jesus’ feet and uses her hair as a towel, as Jesus will later “anoint” his disciples’ feet and wipe them with a towel. Note that she anoints his feet; in Mark and Matthew, it is his head that is anointed (a clear reference to Jesus’ royal status). For John, that has all the wrong resonances. He wants to tell us that Jesus is a servant – and so the anointing of the feet is part of his deconstruction of what Jesus means by kingship. It is a royal anointing – but it is Mary’s recognition, too, that Jesus is a radically different sort of king! This is a king who is a Servant and whose anointing for coronation is simultaneously an anointing for burial – because his enthronement will be his crucifixion. This is the Way of the Cross in John – the Way of the Servant King. That she has understood Jesus so clearly is seen by the way in which John portrays Jesus as mirroring Mary’s actions at the Last Supper.

“I am about to do a new thing!” (Isaiah 43: 16-21)
John brings together in Jesus two traditions: the Royal Messiah (note, in the context of today’s passage, that “Messiah” literally means “anointed one”!) and the Suffering Servant tradition of Isaiah 40-55. In this sense, Jesus, for John, represents a “new thing”, just as he does for Paul (as we will see in a moment). But what sort of “new thing” is this? As we have been discovering in Luke’s gospel, it isn’t about “scrapping everything and starting over with something completely different”. John’s images of Jesus – King, Servant, Lamb of God – are drawn from the Old Testament in terms of the fulfilment of God’s promises and purposes. They have power precisely because of the continuity with the past. They carry with them the weight of Jewish tradition and salvation history because they are linked to the ways in which Yahweh has acted in the past to save.

The “newness” is about reconfiguration – putting the jigsaw pieces together in a different way to create a picture in which the old is recognisable, but in which the total picture is something startlingly and unimaginably new and more wonderful! Put differently: the story of Jesus makes it necessary to re-understand the inherited story of God and of salvation. You can’t understand Jesus other than through the old categories – but at the same time, Jesus blows those categories apart. It is like pouring new wine into old wineskins: they burst with the effort of trying to contain what is fresh and overflowing.

So it is with the great vision of Isaiah. Yahweh is promising deliverance from exile. The “bars” of the Babylonian prison – captivity – are about to be broken (43:14) and the shouts of gleeful triumph of the captors will be turned to lamentation. This is Yahweh doing what Yahweh does best – saving Israel! Look at who is speaking this oracle of salvation: it is “Yahweh your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel … your Holy One, the Creator of Israel, your King!” (vv 14-15) For Yahweh to be Israel’s King means that Yahweh is necessarily Israel’s Redeemer, because Israel is enslaved to a different King. Israel’s salvation is thus the enthronement of Yahweh as Israel’s King (do you hear the echoes with John’s Christology here?).

It requires an enormous effort of theological imagination and historical empathy to try and think ourselves into the context of Isaiah’s hearers. The exile has driven a coach and horses through their theology – which is a fancy way of saying that it has shattered their faith to bits! To be “Israel” means to be Yahweh’s people – to be “elect”. And that means to be incorporated into the long history of Yahweh’s saving acts: deliverance from slavery, land, monarchy and Jerusalem as both the seat of royal power and site of the Temple (Yahweh’s perpetual presence with them). Exile destroys all that. It calls into question the meaning of it all. It nullifies Yahweh’s promises and makes a mockery of all they understand themselves and their God to be.

And so Yahweh first reminds them that the One who is speaking is the same One who is the liberator of the Hebrew slaves (vv 16-17). This is the One whose kingship means that no other ruler has the power to enslave. Israel in exile is reminded of the climax of the deliverance cycle in Exodus, when they saw Pharaoh’s horses and chariots dead on the seashore (Exodus 14:30). “Remember!” says Yahweh.

And then, in the very next breath, Yahweh says something very peculiar: “Don’t remember!” What is going on here? Yahweh is saying, “Don’t cling to the old memories as though this is all you have! Salvation doesn’t just belong to the past; it belongs to the here and now! I am about to do something new! I am about to act again to save. It will be like the old thing – it is liberation from captivity and will be like provision in the desert (v20b), but it will be a new Exodus! You will learn something new about what it means to be my people. Its newness and freshness will be so wonderful that you will have to find new ways of speaking about it!”

To be Yahweh’s people must now be understood in terms of being the Suffering Servant. Through the sufferings of exile, Israel will be enabled to be the true Servant of Yahweh. This is the radically new thing that exile and return would accomplish. As it was with the return from Exile, so it is in Jesus, says John. And Paul agrees.

“Regarding all things as loss” (Philippians 3: 4b-14)
Jesus as King; suffering servanthood; crucifixion and death; sacrifice; radically new things that change forever what we thought we’ve always known about God and God’s ways – these are all themes at the heart of Paul’s gospel.

Paul’s quarrel in this passage is with the Judaizers – those Christian Jews who insisted that Gentile converts were requires by God to become Jews and observe the Jewish Law. In particular, he has in his sights “the party of circumcision” – those who insist that (male) Gentile converts needed to be circumcised. For Paul, this isn’t just a matter of abstract theology (if adult circumcision could ever be called “abstract”!): it’s about salvation. God has elected to save the world through Jesus in ways that he (Paul) could never have anticipated. And getting that wrong meant that Saul of Tarsus had gone around killing Christians in his “zeal for God” – and found himself persecuting Jesus whom God had declared to be the Messiah! How wrong could he have been?

Paul’s tolerance threshold is characteristically low! His opponents are “the dogs, the evil workers, the mutilators of the flesh” (3:2)! Hardly the recipe for peaceful co-existence among believers with theological differences, is it? But then, Paul was convinced from his own experience that this wasn’t about legitimate theological diversity: it was about misleading people so that they missed out on what God was doing.

Paul here is not trashing his Jewish theological heritage – though he might be read that way in v7. Rather, he is exquisitely alive to the way in which what God has done in Jesus – through Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection – is so audaciously unexpected and gracious that everything he had known had to be re-configured and re-understood.

What had Saul of Tarsus believed about Yahweh’s salvation? Saul was a Pharisee – a Shammaite, or radical. This is what Paul means when he talks about his “zeal”. He lived on the passages such as Daniel 2, 7 and 9, believing that they promised the coming kingdom of God very soon. He was one of those who believed that the promises of return from Exile had not yet been fulfilled: Israel had not been restored, not had Yahweh taken a stand on Mount Zion to defeat all the nations that opposed Jerusalem (Zechariah 14: 1-5). Ezekiel’s new Temple had not been built, with rivers of healing water flowing out to make even the Dead Sea fresh (Ezekiel 47). Most importantly, Isaiah’s great vision of comfort, forgiveness, peace and prosperity had never been remotely near fulfilment. The Messiah had not yet come – the Davidic king who would triumph over all Israel’s enemies and usher in the kingdom promised by the prophets. The general resurrection of Israel – to share in the kingdom that had been promised – had not yet happened.

People like Saul were fundamentalist-type revolutionaries. The problem, as Saul saw it, was the failure of Israel properly to observe Torah. This meant that (a) the Messiah was hindered from coming and (b) when he came, faithless Israelites would be under God’s judgement, rather than sharers in the promised salvation of the kingdom. Saul wanted God to redeem Israel! The job of all faithful Jews, therefore, was to bring about the fulfilment of these prophecies by their “zeal” for Torah. “Zeal” doesn’t just refer to personal piety: it refers to Saul’s determination to “do his bit” to hasten God’s salvation. It means being ruthless with failure. It means holy violence – rooting out and putting to death those (like Stephen and the early Christians) whose disobedience is hindering the fulfilment of God’s promised salvation. You can understand his passionate urgency, can’t you? The longer people are disobedient, the longer (Roman) enslavement, oppression and death holds sway.

And then the Osama bin Laden of the Jewish world meets the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus! As he lies, bruised and blinded in the dust, the awful realisation takes hold: the one true God had done for Jesus of Nazareth, in the middle of time, what Saul had thought he would do for Israel at the end of time! It wasn’t Israel who had been vindicated by Yahweh after suffering at the hands of pagans, but Jesus. It wasn’t Israel whose resurrection would usher in the kingdom of God, setting right all wrong and defeating evil once and for all, but Jesus alone whom God had raised! And gallingly, it meant that the Christians, who claimed Jesus as Messiah and sat so disgracefully loose to both Temple and Torah (the twin symbols of the Jewish faith and identity) were right!

This is the context in which we need to read what Paul writes to the Philippians. To be “confident in the flesh” doesn’t mean to trust in his own ability to pull himself up by his moral bootstraps: it’s a pun on circumcision. He cites his impeccable Jewish credentials – the things that would have counted, were God doing things the way Paul used to think God ought to have done them! What Paul has come to understand is that these belong to the “old way” of understanding Yahweh. That “old way” had blinded Paul to the Truth. His zeal had been misdirected. He had got it wrong! That is why he now sees these as “loss” – not because they were bad in themselves, but because they were wrongly configured!

Here’s the thing that drives Paul: because of Jesus, he had come to understand God in a way he had never done so before. God’s person and character were to be seen most clearly in Jesus. God’s power and glory were not to be seen in the divine exercise of annihilating power, but in God’s self-sacrifice and compassion. The “mind of God” is to be seen most clearly in Jesus, who “empties himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness, humbling himself to the point of unthinkability – death on the cross” (Philippians 2: 6-8). Ironically, this radical self-emptying (kenōsis) becomes the means of his exaltation. Because of his suffering, obedient self-sacrifice, Jesus the Servant is raised to the glory of King of the Universe. “Every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 3:11).

“Love so amazing, so divine …”
This, then, is the Servant King: Jesus is King because of the cross. It’s magnificent theology. But neither Paul nor John is concerned primarily to be a creative theologian! It matters because it is about salvation. It matters because it is about receiving all the good things that God intends for us in Jesus. Mary is presented as the one who understands what is happening to Jesus – but at the heart of her action (kneeling, pouring out the very best she has, and using her hair as a towel) is her love for Jesus. And Paul, passionate zealot that he is, uses language about “regarding everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” to speak of his love for Jesus. Both see in the Servant King the love of God incarnate. Both see in the Suffering Servant of God God’s love poured out – extravagant and infinitely costly. And both share the hymn writer’s response: “Love so amazing, so divine/demands my soul, my life, my all!” May we respond in the same way!

Amen.

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