Year C

John 12:1-8

The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn

The Costly Gift

James Stewart once told a story of a nun. This lady had spent many years among the lepers in Africa, giving of herself, spending time with them, eating with them, and living with them. Day in and day out she gave her life to them to the point that she contracted the disease herself. On one particular occasion, a group of well to do folks were visiting the colony. One of the women saw the nun upon her knees, much in the posture of Mary binding the horrible and repulsive wounds of a leper. The woman shrieked, “Ooh! I would not do that for $10,000!” The nun looked up at her and replied, “I wouldn’t either!”

As we come to the end of our Lenten journey, and toward the end of Jesus’s life with the cross looming in his future, I wonder how many of us would cry out…”I would not do that for $10,000 or for any amount and yet Jesus continues his journey toward Jerusalem. The conspiracy against him has been launched with the blessing of Caiaphas and he accepts his calling. He has repeatedly said that the only proper end of his life is to be arrested and killed by the authorities. So today our Lenten texts bring us face to face with what Lent is all about. At last, some of those around Jesus are beginning to understand where the road to Jerusalem is really leading.  Mary seems to be the first follower of Jesus to begin to understand and her act of devotion in anointing Jesus’ feet signaled his coming death and sets the stage for the drama to unfold.

This particular night Jesus is in the home of Lazarus, Martha and Mary eating dinner along with some others, including Judas. Just before our story today, the two sisters had meet Jesus a few days after a funeral, overwhelmed with grief for their dead brother Lazarus and now at the table eating was Lazarus, alive. They were grateful. The perfume Mary uses to anoint Jesus is the equivalent of a year’s salary and the fragrance fills the room. Rather than anoint Jesus on the heard like kings at coronations or the wealthy at fancy dinner parties, she anoints his feet, which is the custom of Jewish burial rituals.

Mary’s action becomes the model for Jesus’ own behavior because in the very next chapter of John, at the last supper, Jesus washes his disciples feet as she did his. He then commends those disciples also to “wash each other’s feet,” so that eventually Mary’s act becomes the model for loving God and loving neighbor, for service in the world. Immediately after the anointing, we see Judas preparing himself to betray. In keeping with John’s constant theme in his gospel, there is always a stark choice between light and dark, and Judas has chosen the dark. It’s possible he tries to justify his anger at Mary’s extravagance-after all, he could point to the many times Jesus taught the importance of caring for the poor.

But John makes it clear that in all the choices Judas has already made to this point, in effect stealing from the poor, he has been setting himself against Jesus. We know the rest of the story…the next step is for Judas to betray him. When we compare the choice of Judas to betray Jesus and the choice of Paul to love Jesus-the contrast is particularly moving. Paul is someone who has been changed by his encounter with God. He lists all the things and choices in the text today that could have kept him from Christ. He killed people who loved Jesus before he met Jesus. What flows through this text is Paul’s overwhelming sense of joy and privilege in knowing Christ Jesus. Paul’s great theme, which runs through many of his letters, is of God’s power to make new, to recreate, to justify. Not because of anything we do, it is the work of God in Christ.

If Lent is, among other things, a time to reconsider-a time to focus on our relationship with Christ, a time to let the Holy Spirit work on us in order to remold us into the image of God as individuals and as the body of Christ-then this passage from Paul’s letter to the Philippians brings this season to its peak. Paul urges us to consider how it is we know Jesus Christ and he makes it clear that knowing Christ is more than just gaining information. We are called to identify so closely with Jesus that we find our past/present/and future in him. It means we set aside anything that might separate us from him because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus. It means we seek out where God continues to be at work in our world to make all things new.

What Judas did not recognize but Mary and Paul recognized is that the only way to be made new is through Christ, and that sharing Christ’s way of life leads to the resurrection, but only through the cross. Paul is not advocating that by “sharing his sufferings” we embrace suffering as a discipline. Rather, Christ in the cross shares our human death and breaks its power over us through his resurrection, which enables us to share his risen life. Whatever happens, we must not be parted from Christ but cling to him and made new through his death and resurrection. This enormous privilege and promise resonates today throughout the beautiful poetry of the passage from Isaiah.

The prophet proclaims that God is about to do a new thing and that Israel is to be on the lookout for God’s surprising action. Isaiah reminds the Israelites that God delivered them from Egypt long ago, but God is not finished. God continues to create, redeem, and restore. The new work of God recalls the old so that the tradition is not forgotten, but the new that God is going to do will go beyond what God has done in the past. This new thing which shatters the past and brings joy is the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ. Mary understands the new thing that God is doing among God’s people. She does right to leave aside the old ways for now and serve the new. Judas continues to see the world in its older form.

Paul does not deny that God was present in the events of the past that sustained him through the years before he encountered Jesus. However, he says, “whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss….because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” In Christ, we see the character of God. We see God’s faithfulness and God’s new thing that go hand and hand. It is because God will never give up, never turn away, never abandon what God has made that the power of God to create and raise from the dead is always at work. Therefore, Paul reminds us that we have no real choice-we must trust in Christ to lead us to God. We must “press on toward the goal of the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”

Jesus is the gift of God. Mary’s gift was both “costly” and extravagant. She was overcome with joy and thankfulness at the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus her Lord. Jesus offered his own costly and extravagant gift on a Friday afternoon. His gift of grace included both Mary and Judas, the faithful and unfaithful. He chose to give himself because God is not finished. The God who acted in the past to save Israel, to usher Paul into a previously unimagined relationship with God, and to send Jesus to demonstrate God’s love for us has more in store for us and the world. With this promise that God has the future and loves us, we can keep faith in the present and go confidently into God’s new future. In this way, we come to the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ.