Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Lent 5, 6^th of April, 2025

John 12:1-8

‘The chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the council, and said, “What are we to do? This man is performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.”’ (John 11:47-50)

The trouble with the lectionary is that it jumps around. Two years ago, on the fifth Sunday of Lent in the liturgical Year of Matthew, the lectionary gave us the story of Jesus’ raising of Lazarus. Now, on the same Sunday in the liturgical Year of Luke, we hear the sequel to that event, which caused many of the Jews who had seen what Jesus did to believe in him. The lectionary separates the two stories, possibly because back in the thirteenth century scribes put a chapter break between them. But we really need to read them together. Today’s short story, the anointing at Bethany, is set at the turning point of the Gospel according to John and only makes sense when we see what happened immediately before it. The whole sequence, with the raising of Lazarus at the centre, is about life and death and life after death, anticipating the death and resurrection we will commemorate and celebrate on Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

The story begins with Jesus hearing that Lazarus of Bethany is sick unto death. His sisters send Jesus a message, ‘Lord, he whom you love is ill.’ Jesus does not immediately hasten to Lazarus’ bedside, though. He waits two days, saying that Lazarus’ illness ‘is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it’. When he does decide to go, his disciples protest. Jesus has retreated beyond the Jordan River; if he returns to Judea, his life will be at risk. But when the disciples see that Jesus is determined, ‘Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow-disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”’ May Thomas never be referred to as ‘Doubting’! (John 11:1-16)

When Jesus arrives, Lazarus is dead and in the tomb. Martha goes to meet Jesus and reproaches him, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.’ In this conversation, Jesus makes the greatest of his ‘I am’ statements, telling Martha, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.’ In response, Martha makes the greatest statement of faith in the Gospel: ‘Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.’ (John 11:17-27)

Initially, Mary does not seem to have the same faith as Martha. She kneels at Jesus’ feet, weeping, and reproaches him in the same words that Martha used, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ (John 11:32) Unlike Martha, she does not follow this up with a statement of faith. We do not hear from her again, even after Jesus has called, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ and the dead man has emerged, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face covered. (John 11:43-44)

The raising of Lazarus from the dead is the last of the ‘signs’ Jesus does in the Gospel according to John. The Jewish Council, understandably afraid of the Roman reaction to a messianic pretender, plots to kill him. But Jesus does not cross the Jordan again. Although he must know that he is a marked man, that he is now on the religious leaders’ most wanted list, he turns his face toward Jerusalem, towards his death.

But first Martha, presented in the Gospel according to Luke as an earnest, hard-working hostess (Luke 10:40), and her brother Lazarus, fresh from the tomb, and her sister Mary, the one who sat at Jesus’ feet (Luke 10:39), have a dinner party. Who can blame them? Lazarus had been dead long enough to cause a stench: ‘Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead for four days.”’ (John 11:39) Then the glory of God was revealed, and Lazarus answered Jesus’ call to new life. Of course he and his family celebrate and give thanks.

At dinner Martha serves; she literally ‘deacons’, and Lazarus sits at the table with the other disciples. But now it is Mary who best models what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. Martha had made her declaration of faith in words; Mary makes hers in action, with an extravagant anointing of Jesus’ body. She unbinds her hair, loosens it as women did only for their husbands or when they were in mourning, and she pours expensive balm on the feet of Jesus. This makes no sense. Hosts washed the feet of guests, or got their slaves to do so. If they particularly wanted to honour a guest they might anoint the guest’s head with oil, as the Lord is described as doing to the psalmist in the twenty-third psalm. (Psalm 23:5) If the oil is scented, the person anointed will be able to smell it when it runs down their beard or over the collar of their robes. (Psalm 133:2) To anoint someone’s feet, rather than simply washing them, would be a waste of good oil.

But Jesus’ hour is looming. Here, while Jesus is having a meal with his friends, he is also being prepared for his burial. Mary and Martha would have anointed Lazarus’ feet as part of the ritual of preparing his body for burial. Mary now does it again, for the man who in less than a week will be dying on a cross. Jesus knows he is going to his death; Thomas knew it to be a risk when Jesus returned to Judea; it is unsurprising that Mary of Bethany, who has so recently experienced her brother’s death, foresees it and acts on her foreknowledge.

The perfumed oil that Mary uses is extraordinary for its richness and rarity; its costliness and quantity. The house, probably a small one, is filled with the scent. Judas Iscariot asks, ‘Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?’ John says that Judas’ concern for the poor is hypocritical – he just wants to steal from the disciples’ common purse. Perhaps the only thing worse than not caring about the poor is pretending to care about them. Here, on the verge of his act of betrayal, Judas is pretending to know what it means to be a faithful follower of Jesus. But even if Judas were sincere in his objection, he has missed what is happening. ‘You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me,’ Jesus says. He is quoting Deuteronomy, where the people of Israel are instructed: ‘Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbour in your land.”’ (Deuteronomy 15:11) We are commanded to respond to the poor with open hands, because they will always be with us. But, here, at this moment, the focus is not on the poor but on Jesus, because in him God is doing something unique, something that has never been done before and will never be done again.

While Lazarus lay dead in the tomb, before he raised him in the act that will lead to his own death, Jesus told Martha, ‘I am the resurrection and the life’. Now Mary anoints Jesus’ feet as though he were already dead, with costly oil, with unbound hair, with passionate love, and the jar of perfume in her hands is a symbol of the resurrection and the life. The scent of the perfume contrasts with the stench of Lazarus’ rotting body. Jesus is journeying to death, but here we see and smell the radiance and the glory of the resurrection.

One biblical scholar suggests that Judas Iscariot might be the older brother of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, and describes his intervention as ‘betray[ing] the typical accent of the uncomprehending elder brother. He is a masculine Martha gone wrong.’[1] We do not need to believe that Judas is the older brother and Mary the younger sister to see the two of them contrasted. Judas is a hypocrite who wants to steal from the common purse; Mary pours out the best perfume money can buy, perhaps the whole of her life savings. She provides a pattern for how people of faith should respond to the love that took Jesus to the cross, pouring out her whole self in gratitude and honour.

In the same way, Jesus will pour out his own life, his own honour and dignity, dying a scandalous death as a sign of God’s love. Like Mary’s perfume, God’s love is not something to be conserved and admired. It is to be poured out, emptied to the last drop, until its fragrance fills not just the house but the world. This is what we will celebrate on Good Friday and Easter Sunday: God’s love shown in Jesus’ death; God’s new thing given for the sake of the world. Amen.

[1] J. N. Sanders, ‘“Those whom Jesus loved” (John XI. 5)’ New Testament Studies, December 31, 1954, pp. 29-41.