Scripture: John 12:1-8
One
of the great benefits of camping ministry is that it takes us outside of our normal.
There are countless benefits to getting out of our routines every once in
awhile, not least that we might see something that we were blind to back home.
This is what we might call perspective, and perspective can only be
gained by stepping back and looking at things from a different angle. Our world
needs more perspective these days. The more perspective we have, the more
deeply God is revealed, and the more we may understand who God is.
Take
today’s Gospel reading, for example. There is something really obvious about
Jesus’ ministry that we all should have probably noticed the first time we ever
heard the Gospels, but if you are like me, you have been trained by a lifetime
of biases to ignore it—trained by a world that values certain voices over
others and taught to look elsewhere. If you look at this passage from one
perspective, you can reduce the episode of Jesus, Mary and Martha to a moral:
Be a Mary, not a Martha. And we move on.
But
it struck me as I was reading John 12 this week, especially as I continued past
the end of the appointed reading, that the whole of this chapter and indeed the
lion’s share of the Gospel of John consists of stories of temple priests,
political leaders, and, yes, even disciples of Jesus, who rarely if ever
understand a thing about Jesus. For example, the very next verses in John 12
talk of a plot amongst the priests to kill Lazarus because Jesus is getting too
much support on his account, since—you know—Jesus raised him from the dead. Then,
Jesus follows that up by explaining peoples’ unbelief before we head off to
chapter 13 and the washing of the disciples’ feet, which predictably leads to
some minor outrage on Peter’s part, because even the best of the disciples fail
to grasp who Jesus really is.
But you know who has a wide enough
perspective? Mary of Bethany, who anoints Jesus’ feet in this story…. Mary,
Jesus’s mother with her Magnificat… the
woman at the well…. the women who appear at the tomb on Easter morning… notice a
trend? Even though the vast majority of characters who appear in the Gospels
are men, they are too locked into viewing the world as they expect it to be.
Meanwhile, the women get it straight-away Now, in the interest of fairness, there
are a few men who get it, too: Lazarus, raised from the dead; a crippled man
who walks; a blind man who receives his sight. Another trend is emerging. The
people who see Jesus for who he is are the ones who are hurt and powerless: Women,
who had no power in ancient Israel; the sick and the dead, too; the unclean;
the rejected. As Robert Farrar Capon put it: Jesus Christ came for the least,
the last, the lost, the lowly, the little, and the dead. If you aren’t one of
those, you aren’t going to get it.
It’s
easy to think two thousand years later that we get it now. We have the
requisite perspective to understand. But I don’t see a lot of indication that
this is true. We filter Jesus through our own wants and desires just as easily
today as the chief priests did in the Holy Land two millennia ago. We still
make God in our image. You know this is happening when our Jesus loves all the
people we love and hates all the people we hate—when our Jesus judges all the
folks we like to judge and excuses those indiscretions we look past.
Mary shows us a
better way. When she takes the perfume and anoints Jesus’ feet, it upsets the
apple cart. In Matthew’s Gospel, all the disciples are there to rebuke her. In
John, it is just Judas, but the reaction is much the same. How dare she waste valuable
perfume for this strange purpose—anointing Jesus’ feet of all things! Frankly,
it’s weird. The perfume should have been saved for the throne; it should have
been used on his head; or, as Judas points out, it could well have been sold
and given to the poor. That would have been charitable. But this perspective
fails to understand anything about who Jesus actually is. Jesus is not coming
for the throne of the king; he is coming for the throne of the cross. And the
throne of the cross is a throne of death. Whether Mary grasps that or not, her
act of anointing Jesus’ feet marks him as lord over death. This is not a cutesy
story about being a Mary, not a Martha. This is the very moment where Jesus
becomes Christ—the “anointed.”
I
suspect part of the reason Mary is willing to anoint Jesus’ feet is because she
lives in a world where her status is already so maligned that she has no reason
to care if people scoff. Why should it bother her if Judas maligns her? This
grants Mary the freedom to express herself before Jesus as she wishes. The same
is true of the lame and the blind. In a society where they are reduced to being
nothing but beggars what have they to lose?
When
I was a pastor, we would take our youth on a yearly service trip somewhere around
the country. We would travel sometimes many states away to do the kind of
service that existed much closer to home, and our church members would
occasionally raise concerns about this—justifiably—because there is much
service that can and should be done at home. Why should we take our kids to
Idaho, or Colorado, or Michigan when we had plenty of service opportunities nearby?
Well, there is a good reason after all, but you almost have to go on one of
these trips to understand. The kids would hop off the bus different people than
when they got on, because they had been plunked from their comfort zone—which
is scary!— but out there, they inevitably discovered a strange, unexpected
freedom when they were no longer expected to be the person they were back home.
When they got away from their normal, they no longer felt the pressure to
justify their every action. Instead, they lived into the freedom that flows
from Christ, which inevitably led them to serve generously. Perspective made
them joyful.
Like
Mary, we are free to give lavishly, but it tends to take everything being
stripped away before we do it, because only then will we stop hedging our bets
and understand that Jesus it not just a nice idea but the very ground of truth
on which we stand. And when Truth stands in front of you, what else can you do
but offer up everything you have in gratitude?
Camp,
too, breaks us free from our normalcy. Outside of your comfort zone, you may
well discover that God has been there all along just waiting for you to notice.
This happens at camp not because we have some magical formula for preaching or
teaching, and not because our camp counselors are such great theologians—they
aren’t. Rather, camp reveals God to campers when the dominant voices
reverberating around their heads from life back home are stripped away and they
are free to experience God not how they are supposed to but how God actually
meets them.
Kids
come to Ewalu from home lives that are varied. In that home life, they are
taught who is trustworthy and who is not; what is good and what is bad; and how
to act and how not to act. And, generally, parents do a good job, but we can
never get past our inherent biases to make our kids into our own image. Our
hopes and fears slant our kids’ perspective, and they either fall in line or
they run in the opposite direction. I hate to say it—because I have a camper
myself—but camp frees kids from their parents, and their pastors, and their
churches (if they have one), and whatever news network is on in the car on the
ride home from practice, and whatever their friends tell them is cool or
uncool. Camp strips it all away.
But
this much can be achieved by going on vacation. More than offering a simple
getaway, camp centers what is essential. At camp, you hear that the love of God
is for you—that Christ came for you—that you are enough through Christ who
redeems you. Each year’s theme is different, but the center holds. This
summer’s theme is Boundless: God’s love beyond measure; and it is about the
height and depth of God’s love for us. Then, loved by God, we are set free in
Christ to respond by sharing that love lavishly with a world that needs it. We
can be Mary unconcerned with the cost of what we are sharing—just doing what is
right when everyone else is looking at us like we are crazy.
So,
maybe this scripture is about being a Mary after all, but only if we are very
clear about what Mary is doing. Mary is not following the masses; Mary gives
lavishly of what she has; Mary humbles herself to what is true, not what is
popular; and perhaps most importantly, Mary has no agenda but the humility of
walking after Christ on the road to the cross. When Christ is throwing the only
party in town, who cares what the stick-in-the-mud neighbors think?
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