Lent 5
Isaiah 43:16-21; Ps 126; Phil 3: 4b-14; John 12:1-8
It’s been another difficult week. I have the feeling we’re going to be tired of difficult weeks long before we run out of them. The headlines were a bit apocalyptic: depending which newspaper you looked at, you saw something like “End of the American-led world order,” “End of the Western world order,” “End of the economic system.” If you have savings, you probably have fewer of them than you did two or three days ago. If you don’t have savings, you may be wondering how you’re going to keep everything together with higher prices. The Lord says, “Behold, I do a new thing,” and it sounds so hopeful. And yet, even for those of us who see the flaws in the system that seems to be passing away, we can’t avoid a suspicion that the space between the end of an old thing and the start of a new one may be rocky terrain indeed.
When our world falls apart, we get to learn what we really believe. A few years ago, the climate activist Paul Kingston gave an extraordinary interview, in which he spoke of accepting that he had failed. He asked, “What do you do when you accept that all of these changes are coming, things that you value are going to be lost, things that make you unhappy are going to happen, things that you wanted to achieve you can’t achieve, but you still have to live with it, and there’s still beauty and there’s still meaning, and there are still things you can do to make the world less bad?”[1]
This week begins our journey to the cross, the last meal that Jesus shared with his friends, mere days before his arrest and trial. Before the Passion, the anti-passion. A glimpse of goodness and kindness and community to get us through the tough part — perhaps, even, to ground Jesus in why it will be worth enduring what he is going to endure.
The framing is not generous: fully half the passage is devoted to Judas’ unpleasantness. But for me, the heart is the gathering around the table, six days before Jesus’ arrest. Jesus gathers with Mary and Martha and Lazarus — not his disciples, but his friends. Lazarus, newly raised from the dead, is a living embodiment of the hope that Jesus comes to bring. Mary fetches a flask of perfume — ruinously expensive — and pours it out on his feet as an extravagant gesture of love. And the fragrance spills out, over Jesus’ feet, into his robes, into the air — pours out the window into the town — fragrance “as of all flowering things together” (H.D., “The Flowering of the Rod”) — the fragrance of devotion and love.
Where do you find those things in your life? How do you act to create them? I hope you do, because we need them now. The world is changing in ways that will test us all, and we will need to anchor ourselves in what is good to avoid becoming unmoored in the storm. We will need to kindle the fire and hold the light for ourselves and for all those who need a haven of compassion and peace.
We see that passionate devotion today in the words of St. Paul: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” I want to know Christ — but how do we know him? St. Paul’s answer is not exactly reassuring: we know Christ by sharing his sufferings and becoming like him in his death. We know Christ by the path of radical vulnerability.
So many of us, I think, want a God who will keep us safe. Who will protect us, shield us from life’s dangers, give us enough to eat, save us from the time of trouble, shield the ones we love. It is a child’s image of God, and yet, in Christ, we are called to put aside childish things. (Even the beautiful ones). We read in Hebrews, “everyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is unskilled in the word of righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, for those whose faculties have been trained by practice to distinguish good from evil.” (5:13-14) It is a call to maturity — and maturity knows that the overwhelming majority of Christ’s people have not been safe or protected, have not had enough. They chose to follow Christ anyway.
Christ spares us nothing: not sickness, not poverty, not death. He spares us nothing, because all of that is integral to who we are. To be human is to be vulnerable: our very flesh ensures it. Every person will be ill. Every one of us will know want — whether it’s food or water, or the right words to say to someone we love, or the power to embrace a weeping child and make it be all right. Each of us will taste our own poverty in our own flesh. And yet, that fragile flesh is the place we meet God.
So many spiritual traditions are about transcending the flesh that it is a bit shocking to realizing how much of Christianity is about inhabiting it: inhabiting it now, in this life, and inhabiting it in the resurrection of the dead. The claim is not that we will get to leave our body and go to be with Jesus. The claim is that Jesus came to share our flesh: to stretch his infant fingers, to run on the sand, to travel dusty roads, to feed and to be fed, to bleed and to suffer and to share in our death, so that we might share in his life. He came not to make us more than human, but to enable us to be truly human — because that’s enough and more than enough to be.
We don’t like that, much. Particularly in the West, we’d much rather take refuge in abstractions: the nation, our identity, our honor, our “values.” But abstractions permit horror: in the name of goodness, we can destroy so many actual people, and imagine we are doing the right thing. In the name of the future, we can trash a whole world. We are so good at dishonoring one another, at violating one another both spiritually and in the flesh, with imprisonment, with torture, with hunger and homelessness (in lands where there is more than enough), with warfare, it’s important to remember that that flesh we are harming is not something transitory, but something eternal. In the words of C.S. Lewis, “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.” (The Weight of Glory).
Mary knows that. When she pours out her perfume all over the feet of Jesus, what is she doing but honoring her friend in the flesh? And the rituals we do here are not meant to be special, holy, set apart from our lives: they are meant to be special, holy, and to become the pattern for our lives.
The question is not whether we can do these things when we are strong, but whether we will choose to do them when we are feeling small, frightened, and vulnerable. Whether, when the writing seems to be on the wall, we will still be willing to go to the Cross. And let me be clear: the cross will come, into every life. We can be dragged to it kicking and screaming, or we can embrace it willingly, seeing it as the way the of maturity and love.
That is what we practice every Sunday: the building of community, the upholding of others, the everyday practice of devotion and love. You may have thought we offer our worship as a pure act of adoration, pouring out the best we have upon Jesus, just as Mary poured out her perfume. You’d be right, of course — but also, our worship is a spiritual practice: it is meant to shape our souls. We try on the words of God, loving words, judging words, insightful words, so that when we are confronted by difficult things, those words will be on our lips and in our hearts. We practice generosity, both the giving of our selves and the sharing of things (money, food, time, skill) so that, when times are scarce and others’ lives depend upon our willingness to give, giving will be second nature to us. We build communities of support so that when people need a place of refuge, we will know how to offer one, how, even, to be one. We listen together to the words of Christ knowing that, together, we can give one another strength to live them. Not here, in a special ritual, but everywhere, until such love becomes the most ordinary thing of all.
[1] Cited by Daniel Smith, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It…and He Feels Fine,” NYTimes, 17 April, 2014.