Sermon for SMHP, Year C, Lent V, April 7, 2019
John 12:1-8
Six days
before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had
raised from the dead. 2There they
gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table
with him.
3Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of
pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was
filled with the fragrance of the perfume. 4But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples
(the one who was about to betray him), said, 5“Why
was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the
poor?” 6(He said this not because
he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse
and used to steal what was put into it.)
7Jesus
said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of
my burial. 8You always have the
poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
I
like to start with a little quiz, and it’s usually a word thing, but today…it’s
math! It’s a fairly simple problem so
shout out your answers.
[Slide
1]
A
baseball and bat cost $1.50 together.
The
bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.
àHow
much is the ball?
How
many say 50 cents?
It’s
25 cents. The ball is 25 cents. The bat is $1.25, a dollar more than the
ball.
If
you said fifty cents…cheer up: according
to scientists, you’re more likely to be a person of faith. If you figured it out, well…actually, you’re
just a logical person of faith. Unlike the
people who study the brain, we don’t actually reinforce the false dichotomy
between logic and faith.
This
little puzzle is one of many little teasers designed to show that our brains
aren’t always as methodical as we think they are. They often take a shortcut by seeing what
seems like the right answer. Scientists
call that intuition. Intuition sees
$1.50 and $1.00 more, and says that the ball in the puzzle costs fifty cents.
Wanna
do another one?
[Slide
3]—move three matchsticks and make the same fish swim in a different direction.
Give 30 seconds or so, then show answer.
Our
brains sometimes focus right in on what seems to be the right answer, or make
up rules that aren’t there.
I
put one in your Insert as well. If
you’ve done the nine dot puzzle before, just play along. The task is to draw four straight lines and
connect all of the dots, without lifting your pencil, pen, finger.
Give 30 seconds or so, then show answer.
Our brains want to stay inside the box. But you have to get outside. Here’s a solution. Here’s a similar one, started from another
point. Here’s one that I think it
cheating. It will appeal to the folks
who don’t mind getting outside the lines.
And
with that, we finally get to the part of this sermon that is about Jesus. And about the scandalous thing he said that
day in Bethany.
Which
was? What does Jesus say at the end of
our lesson?
You
always have the poor with you.
How
much brain power has been spent trying to understand what the heck Jesus meant
there. If you Google it, both “You
always have the poor with you” and “The poor will always be with you”—the two
most common modern translations—you will get a billion and a half hits.
On its face, there’s
nothing particularly scandalous here.
Two thousand years later and we can say that there has never been a time
in this world in which this was not true.
Maybe a couple of matrilineal societies in which everyone shared
everything, but never a time when the world alleviated poverty. Or even tried.
We’ve
been going backward in this country for decades now. Here’s a chart of income share from 1980 to
today. The red line is the top one
percent. The blue line is the bottom
twenty percent. I call this chart, “Why
I give my time to Stand Up KC.”
Jesus
is right. It appears that we are hell
bent—no pun intended—on coexisting with grinding poverty. It’s why it is so important to fashion our
lives on his teachings, and to witness to his concern for the poor. If you want to take this phrase as a sign
that we should do nothing about poverty in our midst, you might want to read
the rest of the gospels.
The
poor will always be with us. That’s why
we need Jesus. We need to lean in to his
life, his teachings, his words.
Like
his last words in this lesson, which were not, “You always have the poor with
you.”
What
are his last words?
Those
words get lost in this lesson, don’t they?
Like the space outside the dots or the matchsticks on the top.
This
whole lesson, from its first words, is a reminder to focus on what is important
in the story of Jesus—to look at the whole picture and understand what it means
for us.
“Six
days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he
had raised from the dead.”
In
Chapter One of this Gospel, Jesus comes on the scene and is announced by John
the Baptist. “Behold the lamb of God,
who takes away the sin of the world.”
You
might know that I struggle, as a preacher, with John’s gospel, which is often
highly metaphoric. But what John gets
one hundred percent right, and why we need this fourth, non-synoptic gospel, is
in understanding the point of the Passion.
Jesus,
the lamb of God, who takes away the sin
of the world, went to dine at the home of his friends, in Bethany, just outside
of Jerusalem, six days before the Passover.
Everybody
understand what John is saying to us here?
If not, look to the final words once again: “You will always have the poor, but you will not always have me.”
While
at his friends’ home, Mary anointed him for burial, starting with his
feet. The feet that had walked hundreds
of miles preaching about the kingdom of God and the one and only true
commandment upon which they all rest: “love
one another.”
She
anointed his feet and Judas launched The Religious Right by pretending to care
about the poor but instead caring about the money, and the whole house was “filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”
Filled with the
smell of spikenard, a plant used to make an expensive oil often just called
nard, which was commonly used to anoint bodies for burial.
The
whole house smelled like extravagance,
and
love,
and
death.
Three
things that our brains struggle to understand.
But smell often cuts through the dissonance in our brains. It is our most evocative sense. And the only way to truly understand this
lesson is to sit with Mary, and Martha, and Lazarus, and Jesus, and inhale the
fragrance of that room. The lamb of God,
who takes away the sin of the world, anointed with a pound of fragrant oil.
We
sit, my friends, at the doorway to the holiest time of the church year. I want to suggest to you that you stop and
smell the spikenard.
[Slide]
Give
your brain a break over the next couple of weeks. At least your linear, rational, logical
brain. Open your senses—see Jesus, taste
the supper, hear the songs of lament and the songs of joy, smell the incense
and the candles and the rain on Palm Sunday and the daybreak Easter breakfast.
This
story defies logic. And that is okay.
Jesus
is with us. Always and to the end of the age. But this is only so because we walk with him
through his Passover into suffering and death.
As we make our way through these days, we are formed to see and to tell
what we see.
Ultimately,
it is these days which will form us as witnesses for Jesus Christ. Those who know us will see in us a love, a
hope, a joy, that defies logic, defies rational explanation.
It
is a love that can stand at the foot of the cross.
It
is a hope that can keep vigil, all night long.
It
is a joy that lives a resurrection life, over and over again.
Let
us be holy witnesses, people of Christ!
Witness
our hope. Witness our devastation. Witness our love. Witness our joy.
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