In today’s Gospel, we meet three friends of Jesus: Lazarus, Martha, and Mary. But they’ve shown up in the Bible already, and you may have heard about them. They live in Bethany, a village a couple of miles outside of Jerusalem. The story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection comes to us in four books of the Bible, called the Gospels. They record the work of four different people or communities trying to put together people’s memories of these important events into a coherent story to pass on to the future. The Gospels overlap in lots of ways, but they’re different too. And what they say about this household overlaps, but is different too!
Mark’s Gospel, the earliest written, doesn’t name these people, but does place Jesus in Bethany several times. On one of those visits, a woman breaks open a jar of costly ointment and pours it on his head. Luke’s Gospel has a story about Mary and Martha: Jesus comes to visit; Martha is very busy, tending the household and probably preparing a meal for her guest and his dozen-plus friends. Meanwhile, her sister Mary just wants to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen to his teaching. Martha tells Jesus, Tell my sister to come help me! And Jesus says, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part.” That’s all Luke has to say about Mary and Martha – but we do hear their names, and get a sense that they were close to Jesus. Consider that Martha felt comfortable complaining to him! That makes them feel very real to me.
And then there’s the gospel of John, the source of today’s story. It’s interesting how much John’s Martha and Mary sound like Luke’s Martha and Mary – another hint that these were real people!
Today’s reading comes from Chapter 12, but something pretty big happens in chapter 11: “Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill.” It’s interesting that John points forward, here, to a story he hasn’t told yet; notice that in today’s reading he refers back to this story, saying, “the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead.” I guess he wants to make sure we read these stories together.
Mary and Martha send a message to Jesus, asking him to visit and heal Lazarus. Even though we haven’t met them yet, this is an established friendship – John says, “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.” But he stays away for a couple more days – and Lazarus dies from his illness. Then Jesus and his friends come to Bethany. Jesus weeps with the sisters… then goes to the tomb, has the stone rolled away (despite concerns about the smell of death), and brings Lazarus back to life.
Today’s scene follows quickly in John’s Gospel, but some time has passed – a few days or weeks? The plot to kill Jesus has advanced, and Jesus spent some time lying low away from Jerusalem. But now the great Jewish feast of Passover approaches, and Jesus knows it’s time for him to fulfill his mission. So he and his friends head to Jerusalem – and stop over with his friends in Bethany for a meal. That’s today’s Gospel story.
Let’s pause and notice a couple of things about this household.
Apparently we have three single adult siblings, living together. That would be somewhat unusual here and now, especially if they’re over 30 or so. I won’t pretend to know how unusual it was in Jesus’ time. Certainly the norm was for people to live with a spouse, plus some extended family.
But people died a lot, for all kinds of reasons. Maybe one or more of the three had lost spouses. Maybe somebody just never got married, for any of many reasons. One gets the sense that Martha is holding the whole thing together, looking after both Lazarus and Mary. However you read it, I find it endearing that this somewhat unconventional household were such dear friends of Jesus.
The other thing to notice is their economic status. There are only a few clues. They have the capacity to host a large group of guests, and they have enough standing in their community that everyone shows up when Lazarus dies. But it doesn’t seem like they were really wealthy – Martha is dependent on Mary to help around the house, not a bevy of servants. So Mary’s expensive bottle of scented oil is probably not an everyday luxury.
Lazarus, Martha, and Mary. Lazarus never does anything very interesting except die. I’m a big fan of Martha; she deserves a sermon of her own sometime. But today I’d like to hone in on Mary, who’s at the center of our Gospel story. This is the last of three stories; what picture do we get if we layer those stories and see what they show us?
Let’s start with that story from Luke, the one where Mary just wants to sit at Jesus’ feet and Martha is annoyed that she’s not helping set the table. Last week we heard Jesus’ parable about a younger son who’s impatient with life on the farm with his father and older brother, demands his share of the inheritance, and runs off to blow it all on dissolute living. I’ve never put that story side by side with this little scene about Mary, Martha, and Jesus before… but it’s interesting to do so! I had to re-read all the Mary and Martha stories to convince myself that it doesn’t actually say anywhere that Martha is the older sister, because I am so sure that Martha is the older sister!
But even if that’s not true – I see some resonances between Mary and the younger son in the parable. How might Mary be a little bit like the Prodigal Son? I have the definite impression that this is not the first time that Martha has had to ask Mary to help out. In this scene, she’s not helping because she’s listening to Jesus, and she gets praised for that!
I wonder what she does instead of helping, when Jesus isn’t around? Drawing… reading… napping… going for long walks… gazing into the middle distance. Maybe she tries to help but doesn’t track what needs doing very well. Maybe she pretends to try to help and then breaks a dish or spills something to escape. Maybe Mary and the younger son are both people who are just not especially interested in, or suited for, the roles and the work that their households expect them to fulfill.
The big difference between Mary and the Prodigal Son is that Mary does seem to really love her family. We see that in the second story, John’s first story. When Jesus arrives in Bethany after Lazarus’ death, Martha meets him first, saying, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” They talk briefly about death, and resurrection. Then Martha goes to find Mary, and tells her, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you,” and she hurries to meet him. So much tenderness hinted at, there – that Jesus asks to see Mary; that Martha wants her grieving sister to have time with their friend and teacher.
Mary kneels at Jesus’ feet and says the same thing as her sister: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” You get the sense they’ve been saying it to each other a lot, over these agonizing days: If only he had been here! That’s all Mary can say; she is overcome by weeping, so much so that Jesus begins to weep too.
Then Jesus goes to the tomb, works his greatest miracle yet, and restores Lazarus to his sisters. That only deepens Mary’s devotion, as we see in today’s story: “Mary 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.”
We can see things we already know about Mary in this moment: She loves deeply – her family, her Lord. She listens closely to Jesus when he speaks. She’s not the most pragmatic or practical. This is the third time we’ve found her at Jesus’ feet – sitting close to listen; weeping in overwhelming grief; now, tenderly anointing and wiping. This extravagant, richly symbolic act seems like a culmination of sorts.
Why wash someone’s feet? We often talk about this on Maundy Thursday, the Thursday before Easter, when we hear the story – also from John’s Gospel – of Jesus washing his friends’ feet before his arrest. People’s feet got really dirty, in the ancient Near East. People generally wore sandals or other open shoes. Roads and streets were dusty, with animal poop and garbage and worse, especially in the cities. Foot washing became an act of hospitality for guests, both to offer comfort and relief, and to prevent all that filth getting tracked into your house.
But it wasn’t just a pragmatic act. It had social and interpersonal meanings too. Because feet were filthy, foot washing was done by people of lower status – often servants or slaves. That’s why the disciples struggle with it when Jesus wants to wash their feet. Foot washing was also something wives would do for husbands, as an expression of physical care and intimacy.
In reading around about this story, I saw some debate over whether Mary’s act expresses transgressive intimacy, or not.
It is hard to interpret all the meanings of a gesture from another time and place. But it seems to me that there’s a big dose of deep resistance, here, to the idea of anything sensual or “inappropriate” involving Jesus – a resistance that flies in the face of the facts. Just think about what’s happening here: she’s pouring oil over a man’s feet, perhaps rubbing it around to cover every surface, then wiping it off with her unbound hair. Imagine seeing someone do that at a dinner party! Imagine having someone do it to you! On the one hand, having your feet washed by someone else was much more common then than now. On the other hand, physical contact between unrelated men and women was much less common, and more culturally fraught. It seems undeniable to me that this was an act of uncomfortable intimacy for the onlookers. Maybe when someone complains about the waste – only John blames it on Judas – that’s the discomfort that they’re really expressing.
What is Mary doing here? Anointing, too, is an act with particular cultural meanings. Kings and priests were anointed for their roles, with holy oil poured on their heads. That’s what Messiah, the Hebrew word for God’s promised, long-expected savior, means – the Anointed One. That’s what Christ means – the Greek equivalent of Messiah. The special, scented oil we use in baptism is called chrism – same word as Christ. But, though there are other stories of oil being poured on Jesus’ head, that’s not what happens here.
People also anointed dead bodies with oil, as part of the cleaning and care shown for one’s beloved dead. That’s the meaning Jesus offers for Mary’s act: “She bought [this oil] so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.” If that’s true – if Mary bought or set aside this perfumed oil in anticipation of Jesus’ death – that tells us something about how closely she’s been listening to him.
Jesus has been talking a lot about what’s going to happen to him – what has to happen to him – but the other disciples keep resisting, misunderstanding, and denying. But Mary hears. Mary believes. Mary understands. Mary knows it’s coming, and that it’s coming soon. So she anoints her beloved friend’s feet, and wipes them with her hair – a gesture of devotion and tenderness that perhaps can only be expressed in action, not in words. The extravagance – the waste – is clearly part of the point.
What do we take from this exercise – of looking at Mary across the texts that name her? I’d never done it before, and I enjoyed it. She has come to life for me, a sister in faith across the centuries. I see and appreciate her quirks, her yearnings, her warm and responsive heart.
Ultimately, though, what I find here is not just a fuller picture of Mary, but a fuller picture of Jesus. Standing beside Mary, trying to get shoulder to shoulder, eye to eye with her, I start to see what she sees in Jesus – that he was someone who inspired this kind of devotion, tenderness, and trust. That says a lot. Think about the people in your life you feel that way about; it’s probably a short list.
That man – Mary’s beloved teacher and friend – that’s who we’re about to follow into Holy Week, friends. That’s who his friends and loved ones are about to lose.