Bless the dying

5th Sunday in Lent, Year C - Readings

Mary anoints Jesus' feet with aromatic oil and wipes them with her hair; the house fills with the fragrance of the perfume. What is she doing? Jesus explains that she is anointing him for burial.

Not long before, Mary had rubbed the same kind of oil on her brother Lazarus's feet and helped wrap his body with spices in long strips of cloth before they buried him. Earlier, when Lazarus was sick, they had sent word to Jesus, but he hadn't come, and her brother died. She cried for days. Then finally Jesus came, and he raised her brother from the dead.

Now, they are all here together again, in Bethany, a small town outside Jerusalem, where Jesus knows his death is waiting. This evening, about a week before Passover, he has come to his friends' home for dinner. Lazarus is sitting at the table; Martha is serving the food. Judas is glaring at his weirdo little sister, who has now untied her hair, and perfume is filling the house.
Before we go further, I want to clarify some mix-ups that you may have about Mary and about this situation.
You are not alone (but you are also not correct) if you think this is Mary Magdalene. You're also wrong if you assume she is or ever was a prostitute. But this is not completely your fault; it used to be an official interpretation, articulated by Pope Gregory in a sermon in 591. Now, however, people officially agree this interpretation was wrong, but it's hard to change a story people have become so committed to. ("Mary Magdalene: Saint or Sinner?")

Why did the Pope say these women (Mary of Bethany, Mary Magdalene and another woman in Luke's gospel) were all the same? One actual theory is that there were just too many Marys and it was confusing, so the church combined them to clean up the story.
There are a lot of Marys in the Bible: there's Mary, the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Mary the wife of Clopas, Mary the mother of Joses and Salome, and "the other Mary" as well as this Mary – Mary of Bethany. But you can't just amalgamate them.
Imagine if we decided: It's too confusing to have three Carols in our congregation. From now on, let's just say they are all the same Carol. Won't that make things clearer?
We also have several Johns: we even have several Father Johns in our history. Why not, for the sake of economy, just combine them all into one conglomerate priest we could name "Fr. John William Bedingfield Sonnen" – "Fr. John" for short. And if there are priests whose names we don't remember, they can also be included as part of "Fr. John."


This is basically what happened to Mary of Bethany. But she is her own person, and who she is and what she does in this story are important in the Gospel, which is also part of our story.
We are Christians; Jesus is the Christ, and Mary of Bethany is someone who acted toward Jesus in a way that was exactly appropriate. As Episcopalians, we also strive to act in ways that are exactly appropriate in each situation – so it would be good for us to pay attention to Mary of Bethany.

Who was Mary of Bethany, and what allows her to respond to Jesus in a way that is so fitting?
Mary of Bethany is that same Mary of Mary & Martha fame – she sat a Jesus' feet while her sister was busy in the kitchen, and when Martha complained to Jesus that he should make her help with the work, Jesus said, Leave her alone; she's doing the right thing.

One thing I learned from Bishop Doyle's scripture reflections this week was that some scholars say Mary is also Judas Iscariot's sister. Imagine that! What a family group: Mary & Martha, Lazarus, and Judas. And their dad is Simon the Leper.
In this story, Judas is complaining about his sister's behavior. She has basically just poured a year's salary down the drain as far as he's concerned, so he complains to Jesus about the waste. Like he'd said to Martha, Jesus tells Judas, Leave her alone - she's doing exactly the right thing.


A lot of commentaries make what I consider to be a patronizing and idiotic assumption that when Mary poured the perfumed oil on Jesus feet, she had really no understanding of what she was doing or why.
I think she knew what she was doing. There is a long tradition of people, particularly the prophets, acting out messages: Jeremiah wearing a yoke to illustrate Israel's enslavement, Hosea marrying a prostitute to show how God is faithful to his unfaithful people, Ezekiel making a tiny model of Jerusalem and besieging it, and on and on – and they all did these things intentionally, putting the meaning into words later.
In the same way, Jesus put into words the meaning of Mary's actions, to clarify what she was doing and why. Every week, we do something similar when we participate in the Eucharist to remember Jesus' sacrifice for us and the new life we have in his new life: "We remember his death. We proclaim his resurrection…" Actions help us remember, and the words explain the meaning.

When it comes to memory, the senses are the best triggers - and the most powerful is the sense of smell. Nothing can pull you so powerfully or so quickly back into a particular time or place as a familiar smell. In this story, it's clear that people remembered the smell of the perfume filling the hosue, because they specifically wrote that into the story. The smell was a powerful part of their memory of what happened there. What might it have triggered for them on that night?

If people at that time were familiar with preparing bodies for burial, those smells would already be associated for them pretty powerfully, but especially for that particular family. Remember, it was not long ago that Lazarus had been raised from the dead – but before that, he died and had to be anointed for burial.

Lazarus himself was at the table that night; what would the smell have triggered for him? He was the one who had been embalmed in those oils and spices. As he sat there, maybe he smelled their sharp scent stinging his nostrils and was back in the dark of the tomb again, waking up bound head to toe, trying to suck air through layers of linen cloth around his face, struggling upright and pulling at the shroud, lurching forward and suddenly blinking in the sunlight. And now, with that same smell filling the air, Lazarus watches his sister anoint with embalming perfume the feet of the man who brought him back from death.
Martha stands nearby, the smell taking her even a few days further back, to the day of her brother's death: no time to grieve, too much to do, but then working together with her sister to prepare his body for burial, closing his beautiful eyes and then finally binding his face in white linen cloth. When Lazarus came out of the tomb four days later, restored – it was like a dream. After Jesus brought her brother back, it seemed impossible to imagine that smell ever coming into their home again – but here it was, filling her with fresh grief, even though her brother was sitting at the table in front of her, alive. How is it possible to equate that smell with Jesus? How could it be possible that he would die?

This is a family very recently acquainted with death, so it may be that not everybody needed to have it explained. Except Judas – all he could smell was money. But possibly for the others, a much deeper realization was settling in. Just because Lazarus had been raised, that didn't mean death would never touch them again. It would – very soon.
Mary paid attention and knew Jesus well enough to realize that this man, whom they loved and who had done so much for them, was preparing to die. As impossible as that seemed to be to imagine or accept, she had already accepted it and she had made preparations. Now, though she didn't want it to be, the time was right, and the house began to fill with the fragrance as she poured out her offering of love and grief.

Some of the most beautiful and mysterious works we perform as a Church are our prayers and service for those who are dying. Many of you have experience of offering this kind of service to those you love.
Mary of Bethany blessed Jesus in this way. May we take her as a model for how to "bless the dying, soothe the suffering and pity the afflicted." (BCP p.134 from the service of Compline in the Daily Office)
Amen.
Given to St. John's, Silsbee on March 21, 2010