1Six 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.’
DON’T give up on comedy, even though it is Lent and we are heading towards Holy Week. A comedian recently set Lord Carey straight by noting that persecution is in the Christian DNA: we thrive as a minority; it “keeps up the quality”.
The observation came from Frank Skinner, a 21st-century Shakespearean Fool, and a practising Roman Catholic. He is right about the seriousness of being at the margins; it is, after all, what Lent is all about. The 40 days that Jesus spends in the wilderness margins are the model that we use to prepare for our celebration of the Lord’s death and resurrection.
The context in which we recover our balance and sense of Christian perspective is invariably a marginal one. The first reading today specifically directs us to the wilderness as the context in which to discover how God acts. The exile of Israel in Babylon is the social reality that Isaiah is addressing here.
This is marginalisation on a big scale. For Israel, the chosen people of God, exile calls into question their self-esteem and understanding of God’s promises. It is the hardest of all environments in which to sing the Lord’s song of freedom. It is also a place of self-denial that bears fruit in spiritual re-awakening and hope.
The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes: “If you eat the bread of Babylon for very long, you will be destroyed . . . but Israelites who are exiles will not accommodate that imperial bread.”
There is wisdom here that surely connects with our own experience. For people of faith, this present era of materialistic consumerism is like living in Babylonian exile. Although it is the social reality of our context, it is not the source of our spiritual and intellectual nourishment.
Brueggemann goes on to point out that the prophetic message of Isaiah finds its true voice by surveying the past as a template of the future God promises his people. The lesson of the past is that God acts in new ways to reveal the authenticity of divine, covenanted love. The rehearsing of the stories of the past does not in itself bring about a different future. The prophets who do this are not magicians: they use “linguistic capacity to confront despair, rather than be surrounded by it . . . [using] words that evoke alternatives”.
Ours is an era in which the Christian voice will not easily win admirers, as we question our culture of comfort, and invite resistance to both the blandishments of prosperity and the global inequality required to sustain it. Our task is to evoke alternatives, based on the conviction that God has acted generously — irrationally, by human standards. He draws new life from wasted hope and from beauty sold for cheap satisfaction.
The assertions that we make about the dignity of life, the value of difference, the nature of what is sacred, and the inviolability of the conscience mark us out as cultural exiles. Our certainty that poverty, disease, and war are sins that disfigure us all may win few votes.
Yet our conviction is that this is a stand we take, right now, because we believe that God acts to vindicate the promised truth we have seen in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ: “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43.19).
The voice of faith and the voice of compliance with contemporary culture are also heard in today’s Gospel. Mary anoints Jesus; it is a spectacular statement of faith. Judas complains about the expenditure because he fails to understand that poverty begins from a failure to recognise the true sovereignty of God — something Mary’s action demonstrates with simple profundity.
The irony of these two voices, Mary’s and Judas’s, is that they both promote the opposite of what we think we are witnessing. Judas — blind, it seems, to the true identity of Jesus — thinks and acts within the confines of the human agency that has produced poverty, as it always will. Rightly or wrongly, the others perceive him as a thief, suggesting that he lacks the spiritual capacity to break the cycle of greed and self-interest that create poverty.
By contrast, Mary understands generosity that is reckless and animated by love. She has the heart of the true prophet, who can evoke an alternative world, in which the worship of God is the foundation of liberating, redemptive action. She has already seen this in Jesus, when he arrived at Bethany after the death of Lazarus (John 11.32). Jesus intuits her action now as a statement about the significance of his death.
In the burial for which Mary prepares him, Jesus will go to where Lazarus had been, in order to release others from the poverty of death. This is the decisive “new thing” that God is doing “once for all” (Hebrews 9.26), which is evoked by the former things God did for his people, both in Egypt and in Babylon.
Today, the scriptures call us to resist collusion with the culture of exile: it is an investment in a transient world of our own creating, and it is death. Instead, we are invited to review the past and the future liberation it evokes. Here, indeed, is the “comedy” of the wisdom of God.
Dr Martin Warner is the Bishop of Whitby.
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