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ust what kind of anointing is this? John seems to have gotten it all mixed up. We know this story from Matthew and Mark. Jesus visits the home of Simon the Pharisee in Bethany and an unknown woman anoints Jesus’ head, much to the chagrin of his disciples, with an expensive jar of perfumed ointment. Jesus then chastises the disciples and praises the woman with that infamous line, “You will always have the poor with you, and you may do good for them whenever you will, but you will not always have me.”

      Only that’s not how it happens in John. Here the woman is not anonymous, but is identified as Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus– Lazarus whom Jesus raised from the dead. And Mary doesn’t anoint Jesus’ head, which would have made sense. She anoints his feet. And then she wipes them with her hair.

      Maybe John isn’t telling the same story as Matthew and Mark. Maybe he is remembering the story in Luke. Luke also tells of a women wiping Jesus’ feet with her hair. But then she was wiping off her tears, not the perfume. She puts on the perfume later.

      No, this story just doesn’t make sense. You anoint someone’s head, not their feet! And you leave perfume on, not wipe it off!

      Anointing, after all, was an important symbolic action in Israel. Kings and prophets were anointed as a sign of their calling and office. Many have speculated that this was Jesus’ anointing as the Messiah, the King of the Jews, coming in John’s Gospel just before Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, which we will remember today on Palm Sunday.

      Only thing is, kings are anointed on the head, not the feet. And as it turns out, Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem wasn’t so triumphal after all. He was not inaugurated as King in Jerusalem. He was crucified instead.

      Perhaps John had another kind of anointing in mind. There is a time when the feet are properly anointed, and when the perfume might be rubbed into the skin– the time just before burial. In Bethany Jesus is still very much alive, but in John’s telling, Mary’s action becomes prophetic: She anoints Jesus’ feet before he enters Jerusalem, because he goes there not to reign triumphant as a king, but to die the lonely death of a criminal.

J esus was not the kind of Messiah that was expected. He didn’t take the reigns of government, as some wanted. He didn’t really transform his society. He didn’t act the way that the strong and powerful do, the way a Messiah would be expected to. Perhaps that is the real reason Judas and the disciples were so upset: this odd anointing signals just what an odd and disappointing Messiah Jesus would be.

      The goal of most kings is to keep as far away from pain and suffering as you can. Security for the king and the king’s court is always the highest priority. Yet rather than leading him away, Jesus’ journey took him toward Jerusalem, toward the cross, toward the suffering and death that most of us spend our lives trying to avoid.

      And that’s precisely where Jesus as Messiah leads us. Jesus’ message wasn’t directed toward the powerful and the happy and the satisfied. His way wasn’t the way of kings and generals. His way was to go where the suffering was greatest and there to preach the good news of God’s love.

      The church is called to be an odd sort of community following this odd sort of Messiah. Within the church, our strength as a community comes from our capacity to be where human pain is the greatest, and to witness in the midst of that pain to the abiding love of God that was present with Jesus on the cross.

      That’s not the usual basis for communities to gather. We usually affiliate with other based on our strengths. Work groups, sports teams, clubs, and organizations gather around skills and expertise. People are invited or excluded according to whether or not they meet the qualifying criteria.

H ow odd for the church to be a place where we can gather instead around our pain, and so share as Jesus did in the pain of the world. It is our calling, like that of Jesus, not to avoid the cross, or to simply ignore the many crosses around us, but to draw near to the cross because that is where Jesus is, and that’s where our ministry is as Christ’s people.

      So when we see the cross in our inner cities, with families and children living amidst poverty and addiction, we don’t relocate to a more comfortable and prosperous place, but we stay, knowing that this is where we, as Jesus’ community, belong.

      When we see the homeless in the street we don’t turn the other way, but we invite them in for food and fellowship, because we know that our Lord kept such company as well.

      When our own members become tired or sick, no longer able to fully participate, we don’t put them to pasture, telling them they no longer qualify for membership, but we celebrate their presence among us, knowing that it is not because we are strong, but because we are weak and because we are sinners that we belong to Christ.

      And when the pain in our own lives becomes acute, as it does for all of us sooner or later, we don’t suppress or deny it, as our culture teaches us to do, but we acknowledge it and own it, because we know through faith that Christ is with us in our pain, and that it is our pain that binds us to the majority of suffering humanity, for whom pain is the norm and not the exception.

      Like most churches, over the years Pilgrims has been host to various Twelve Step groups: AA, NA, Al-Anon, and the like. I’ve always thought the church can learn a lot from what they have discovered. It is often the case that the most powerful spiritual development in the church is taking place not on Sunday mornings in the sanctuary, but on Thursday evenings in the church basement.

      The strength of these groups lies, I believe, in that they gather together around the point of their pain, and discover together the power of God’s love to heal and restore their lives. How powerful it would be if we were to start each worship service by standing up one by one and saying, “My name is Jeff, and I am a human being.” For to be human is to know pain, to know vulnerability, to know weakness, and to need the presence of God and community in our lives. It is all our feverish attempts to insulate ourselves from our own humanity, whether it is through our addictions, our materialism, our individualism, or our national security state, which causes so much of the world’s suffering.

I n John’s Gospel, just before this anointing, Jesus comes to Bethany and, hearing of the death of Lazarus, goes to the tomb and calls Lazarus back to life. In John’s Gospel there are two reactions to Jesus’ gift of life. The first is the meeting of the Sanhedrin, and the beginning of the religious leaders’ plot to have Jesus killed, the ultimate expression of the refusal to believe. The second is Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ feet, the ultimate expression of loving faith. Both responses prophecy Jesus’ death, the price he paid for offer God’s life-giving love in the midst of death.

      Reading the Gospels, we know that Jesus had nothing against caring for the poor. But in Jewish tradition, the urgency of caring for the dead took priority over caring for the poor. Just as Mary prepared Jesus to enter Jerusalem, so we need to do whatever it takes to prepare ourselves to follow Jesus on that Journey.

      That is the test of our faith during this Holy Week, not to have faith that is ready to stand as witnesses at the empty tomb on Easter morning, but to have faith that is willing to follow Jesus toward the tomb itself, to draw near to the many, many crosses in our world where Christ is being crucified again and again, and to see, through the eyes of our faith, the wonder of God’s love working to bring the gift of life even in the midst of death.

      So today, as we sing our hymn, you are invited to come forward to the cross, and place your palm branch at its base. We do so as an act of confession, because we are members of the same society that acted as agents of Jesus’ death. We do so as an act of solidarity, joining our lives in common cause with Jesus, who gave his life so that we might live. We do so as an act of faith, because we believe that even at the cross, the love of God is visible.      ✞

© 2007 Jeffrey K. Krehbiel