Phil 3:4b-14; John 12:1-8
Passiontide Sunday
St Barbara’s; 06.04.2025
Rev Jeremy Bevan
Easter’s on the way: palm crosses and shouts of ‘hosanna’ next Sunday, then the trials and tribulations of Holy Week before a new day, a new world, dawns with the resurrection. Amid all the hectic activity, it’s good to be able to slow the pace down a bit – and drop in on a dinner party that Martha, Mary, and Lazarus are throwing for Jesus.
But this is a dinner party with a difference, as Mary takes a jar of hugely expensive perfume and washes Jesus’s feet with it. Amid protests from Judas, Jesus defends Mary, telling the astonished dinner guests that what she’s done is a symbol pointing to his approaching death, foreshadowing the anointing of his dead body with perfumes and spices. That’s certainly one way to make dinner go with a bang.
But what was Mary like? How did she become like that? And what might our response to her be?
We might say she’s impulsive. Washing someone’s feet with a quantity of perfume worth roughly £40,000 in today’s money certainly looks like that. To Judas, of course, it’s conspicuous consumption, someone with reckless disregard for the poor flaunting her wealth. I suggest, though, that Mary’s act is neither impulsive nor reckless.
From what we learn of her elsewhere in John’s and the other gospels, Mary is perceptive. She can read the deep significance of people and situations in a way not everyone can; see what things mean, and where they’re heading. (Wouldn’t it be useful to have that gift in our confused, topsy-turvy world?) She knows intuitively that Jesus is the source of overflowing life. In the previous chapter of John’s gospel, when Jesus arrives after Lazarus’s death, she exclaims, “If you’d been here, Lord, my brother would not have died.” John hints, too, at her extensive network of friends and contacts. She’ll surely, then, also have picked up on the chief priests’ intentions to arrest Jesus and have the Romans execute him for raising Lazarus from death.
Knowing all that, what Mary does with the perfume looks far more planned than impulsive. But it’s nevertheless her generous, wholehearted, loving response to a looming catastrophe. Just as Paul in that Philippians reading wants to know Christ and his sufferings, so Mary’s symbolic action s her saying, “Jesus, you’re our only genuine hope for changing the world. Come what may, I’m ready to give you all that I am and all that I have.”
That’s Mary, then: perceptive, tuned in to events, loyal to Jesus, trusting in him. How far are we like her – at work, school, home, community?
How did she become like that? Not by accident. Luke’s gospel tells us about another episode in the house of Martha and Mary. Martha complains at Mary for sitting at Jesus’s feet, drinking in his teaching, while there’s food to prepare, a table to lay. Luke depicts Mary as having a hunger for more of Jesus. She recognises he’s not just any old house guest, but one who, uniquely, has the words of life; he’s the key that gives life meaning, purpose, direction.
She had of course seen Jesus at work, raising Lazarus from death. Today’s gospel passage very pointedly notes that Lazarus is right there at the dinner table. I wonder whether Mary’s understanding of who Jesus is, her trust in him, allowed her just a glimmer of hope that death might not be able to hold Jesus, as it had not been able to hold Lazarus? It’s interesting that the Eastern Orthodox church celebrates her as one of the women who went to the empty tomb that Easter morning, ready to anoint his body with her perfume.
Mary spent time with Jesus as a friend, along with her brother Lazarus and sister Martha. She listened to him intently, must have been challenged and changed by her encounters with him as she contemplated what he said, what he did, who he was.
What about us? Could we imagine being that wholehearted for Jesus? If not, what might be stopping us? If you need more time to think that over, read the passage again when you get home, and ask yourself this question: “What’s the particular invitation of the Holy Spirit to me today through this passage?”
Mary did not become the way she was by accident. As Easter approaches, she has much to teach us in the focus and attention she gives Jesus, in her desire and willingness to let him breathe new life and hope into her. As you ponder what the Spirit might be inviting you to become through the Bible passage, maybe this picture will help? [Image on screen]
- Jan Vermeer’s Christ in the house of Martha and Mary (1655), Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh (his largest painting)
- I was transfixed by it when we went to the gallery last autumn, going back to it again and again, just to gaze at Mary, seated in the foreground. Paying rapt attention, absorbed in the awe-inspiring presence of Jesus. Even though his attention is now on Martha’s complaint, Mary appears oblivious, evidently still sunk in profound contemplation of something Jesus has said
- Imagine yourself in Mary’s place, at Jesus’ feet. Hearing his parables, his wise sayings. Seeing whole new perspectives on life open up before you as you reflect on who he is. As you contemplate Jesus afresh this Easter with Mary, may the Spirit’s particular invitation bring you closer to him.
