Recently, my wife filled a large crystal
bowl on our sofa table with lemon-scented pot puorri. When I came home from
church she asked me how I liked the smell. My answer? “What smell?” I had
walked right past the bowl and never noticed the scent.
How come? Because I’m a dude, and, like most dudes, I’m pretty
nose blind. Face it, men—we’re pigs. Just like our four-legged porcine brethren,
we are capable of encountering a rich variety of olfactory experiences without
paying much attention to any of them.
We wear the same shirt days in a row. We take unwashed public lavatories for
granted. We eat French fries in our cars. We never think of putting those
scented plug-in doo-hickies in our work spaces.
But women are different. They feel with
their noses. We try not to feel at all if we can help it.
In this magnificent Gospel pericope assigned
for the Fifth Sunday of Lent (John 12: 1-8), a woman pours her heart out
through a giant jar of perfume. You can’t really blame Mary for this
extravagant act. Jesus has just raised her brother Lazarus from the dead. As
both Mary and her sister Martha are unmarried, they were dependent in their
culture on their brother for their very identity. The loss of Lazarus would’ve
meant dependency or poverty or both. Jesus did more than give them back their
beloved brother—he gave them back their lives.
In Mary of Bethany we see an overwhelming
passion of love and gratitude to Jesus. It’s actually rather sensual—and,
perhaps, a bit embarrassing to those who don’t understand it. Her gift of
anointing Jesus (who is already considered “the anointed” as that is what the
words Messiah and Christ mean) with perfume and then touching his feet with her
unbound hair is a shameless act of devotion. Such an act could only come from a
heart so full of adoration that it is blind and deaf to the restraints of the
culture. As this woman humbles herself to wash her rabbi’s feet, the sweet
fragrance of her love fills the room and touches all who experience it.
Judas can’t understand this outpouring of
love. He sees only the economics involved. The perfume is expensive, and the
money could’ve been put to more practical use. Typical guy. And typical of Christians at
times. We’re so often more comfortable discussing the church budget than we are
talking about our love for Christ.
But when we have a real encounter with
God, or when we encounter someone who has had a real encounter with God, we are
changed. We may not typically notice the aromas which surround us, but when
they are associated with a powerful experience the scent seeps into our cells
and becomes part of who we are, part of our body, part of our very being.
I think one of the messages of this Gospel
lesson is for us to learn to worship from our female side, to let ourselves be
open to the devotion to Christ which transcends theology or doctrine, which
transcends our need for practical explanations and opens us to the pure desire
to be in love with God. As we near the holy days in which we remember our Lord’s
suffering and death, let’s just experience the mystery of his great love for us
and simply love for love’s own sake.
Yes, it’s certain that we will always have
the poor with us. But how much better it would be to find first the Mary-like
passion for Jesus in ourselves, and then to love Jesus through love of the
poor.
May God bless and keep you during this
holy time. Thanks for reading
No comments:
Post a Comment