Saturday, April 12—Day 39

Jesus, therefore, six days before the Passover, came to Bethany where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. So they made Him a supper there, and Martha was serving; but Lazarus was one of those reclining at the table with Him. Mary then took a pound of very costly perfume of pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped His feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of His disciples, who was intending to betray Him, said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and given to poor people?” Now he said this, not because he was concerned about the poor, but because he was a thief, and as he had the money box, he used to pilfer what was put into it. Therefore Jesus said, “Let her alone, so that she may keep it for the day of My burial. For you always have the poor with you, but you do not always have Me.”
John 12: 1-8

Leave Her Alone

I don’t know if there’s much sexual innuendo that makes us that uncomfortable anymore in this culture, although, in church maybe it wouldn’t take much, certainly if we’re talking about Jesus it wouldn’t take that much. Whatever it would take for us, I think it would have taken a lot less for people in the first century and for a short little story this one seems to be packed full of it. With Mary and her long hair and Jesus’ feet and the scented oil. I mean imagine this story in a culture where women aren’t really supposed to eat in the same room with men and men aren’t supposed to touch wet objects that women have touched much less actually touch women (other than of course their wives but even then there were restrictions) and where women were expected to wear their hair braided always in public unless they meant to advertise that they were a prostitute. This seems like a flagrantly uncomfortable story.

Right before this, Jesus has raised Lazarus, a friend whom he loved, from the dead. This story takes place at a dinner, maybe in honor of Lazarus, at least the text makes a point of mentioning his resurrection and his presence. Lazarus’s sisters, Mary and Martha, are there. Martha is dutifully behaving exactly as women were expected to. Mary on the other hand, is pretty much doing nothing that would be the least bit expected. She’s washing Jesus’s feet.

Maybe you think, “oh they did that all the time,” and people did wash their feet all the time, but generally you washed your own feet. Besides being very personal, feet are also very sensitive. Imagine someone washing your feet—it’s intimate and sensual. Slaves sometimes washed their masters feet, but other than that people simply did not wash each others feet (at least in public). You could, and people do, read Mary’s forward and unusual gesture as all about being “a slave.” She’s showing her humble subservience, she’s acting like his slave by washing Jesus’s feet.

Well…yeah, but with the perfume and the hair down and the hair drying the feet, she’s almost certainly also acting a little affectionate, a little like a lover (c’mon).

The perfume (the fragrant ointment of pure nard) is not something that was a regular feature of foot washing, and adding it to the foot-washing thing makes the whole thing even hotter. There are Greek plays of the era that ridicule the debauchery of exactly this sort of thing: Comic, self-indulgent characters who revel in having young slave women caress their feet with perfume, say things like, “ah, to have my feet rubbed and perfumed with fair soft hands, isn’t it magnificent?”

If this sort of thing was outlandish debauchery for the Greeks (who were generally fairly debauched) imagine what this scene must have seemed like to the Hebrews (who were generally puritanical in comparison).

Not only did Mary let down her hair, not only did she wash Jesus’s feet, not only was there perfume involved but she actually perfumes her hair from the scented oil she has rubbed on Jesus’s feet. That’s not very puritanical sounding. So much about this story is so completely out of bounds that it seems surreal. This woman where women aren’t supposed to be, doing what she’s not supposed to be doing, water and feet and hair and smell of perfume permeating everything.

Imagine a pound of perfume. It’s hard to imagine because all you ever see is an ounce or two or maybe five, but never a pound. I can hardly stand to be in an elevator with someone who has one dab of perfume on their wrist. It seems like it would be nauseating to be in a house where someone was pouring a pound of it on someone’s feet.

It’s really an impossibly enormous amount of perfume. It’s not even luxurious, it’s comic. It’s so exaggerated, it’s nearly obscene.

Apparently it was worth what would be a decent year’s wages. Imagine thirty thousand dollars of perfume poured out at once in an enclosed space (actually while people are trying to eat dinner). This is beyond lavish. This is unreasonable. This is not a rational act.

However uncomfortably outside the bounds this all was, how inappropriately sensual, Jesus clearly reads Mary’s act as love, and far from rejecting it (because it was somehow unseemly, unorthodox, irrational) he gives it value she couldn’t even know it had. She’s not wasting perfume, not wasting anything. She’s anointing him for his salvific act, preparing his body for burial. What seemed like a sexualized encounter because of it’s “inappropriate” intimacy becomes, in the context of the gospel of John, the exemplary act of love, and essential glimpse into what it means to be a disciple of Christ.

In the passage immediately preceding this one Jesus raised Mary’s brother Lazarus from the dead. It’s not explicit in the text, but it seems implicit to me, that part of what she does and feels is a response to that. If Jesus had just raised someone I loved from the dead (brought someone back to me that I loved), I would wash his feet (with my hair if it were long enough). I would bathe him in a pound of costly ointment.

If what we hear from this text (if what we learn or believe or feel) is that what God wants of us is for us to get down on our knees in a demeaning posture and perform a demeaning act, if we believe this is what it means to worship God, to be a disciple of Jesus, it might make us feel all sorts of things: a little afraid, maybe angry or disgusted or apathetic or entirely offended but I doubt it would make us love.

But what if it’s not what it means to be a disciple. What if being a disciple is an authentic response to being loved. And what if being loved…actually feels like being loved. Not like some abstract belief we adhere to, not like something so-called-purely-spiritual, as if there could be such a thing, but something that has to do with the part of us that thirst and hungers and feels and suffers and loves and cries, our passions, our needs—what is thoroughly and essentially human in us.

Maybe God didn’t bring your brother back to life, raise him from the dead, but maybe we can glimpse somehow from this story that God’s love is that good. God’s love is that connected to what we need, to our guts, to our passion, to our essential primal humanness. And worshipping, loving God—is our natural real uncalculated, unselfconscious response to that love. Maybe God’s love is that good, not something you have to talk yourself into believing in. and the disciples response is not something you have to fake. To love Jesus doesn’t mean to respond to a demand to be subservient, to fall on your knees in devout piety, it’s a response to a love that is that good that you want to, that you will.
Debbie Blue, Founding Minister, House of Mercy, St. Paul, MN

Blue, Debbie, “Leave Her Alone,” Sensual Orthodoxy, (St. Paul: Cathedral Hill Press, 2004), pp. 97-101.

Prayer
Gracious God, for love you created all things and gave me life and strength that I might love you and know your love for me; as Jesus commanded us to love you with all our heart, soul, and mind and to love our neighbor, let my heart rejoice in your love and let that overflow my life to those you call me to love. Amen.