Keeping in Touch
Keeping in Touch
One of you reminded this week of a little exercise I use sometimes at the beginning of small group meetings. Its something of a guided meditation where I ask the group to imagine themselves walking into a great museum. Inside, there are enough floors, corridors and high-ceilinged rooms that it would take a lifetime to explore every corner, except rather than art, I invite them to imagine different wings and different rooms for different sections, book and stories of our sacred scripture. Once I guided them in, I left the rest to them and to the Holy Spirit. What they saw and heard was anybody’s guess, a favorite story, a portrait of a particular figure, a multi-media sculptural rendition of the Burning Bush. The sky wasn’t even the limit.
I had the feeling when reading our passage for today that John was after a similar effect in his writing of this story of Mary anointing of Jesus’ feet. Its details are notably thick. Some interpreters can hardly get beyond John’s invitation to imagine what the room in that house would have smelled like with all that fragrant oil. What is the smell of God’s salvation, they ask? An interesting question, I suppose, but perfumes sometimes give me migraines so I hesitate to ponder what that means for my salvation. The details of the description of Mary’s sitting at Jesus feet are most definitely palpable though, are they not? Its like John wants us to be right there, in the room with this small crowd of Jesus followers.
If we can let ourselves imagine it though… For starters, take the precious oil. John tells us how much it costs. A lb of nard: 300 denari, a year’s salary in first century
All week long, my mind has been filled with morbid images of those who make it their job to prepare bodies for burial or cremation. Granted, unlike Jesus in our story, the bodies I have in mind are already dead. I am not talking here of our distinctly American funeral industry, though there are no doubt people therein who “get” what I’m about to say. I am talking about those who, either for religious, culture or personal reasons, feel called or compelled to honor the bodies of dead loved ones through some ritual of anointing or cleansing. Depending on a person’s background, these rituals may be highly prescribed by tradition or I’ve heard also of more contemporary and home-grown gestures of preparation. I completely understand this is NOT for everyone, yet when I hear about it happening, a person washing the body of a loved one, or dabbing oil upon the eyes or lips, which happens even in this country more than you might think, I find myself in awe at the thought of it, in awe that people are willing to become so physically intimate with death.
A Victorian poet named Ernest Dowson captures the sentiment in his poem “Extreme Unction”
Upon the eyes, the lips, the feet,
On all the passages of sense,
The atoning oil is spread with sweet
Renewal of lost innocence.
The feet, that lately ran so fast
To meet desire, are soothly sealed;
The eyes, that were so often cast
On vanity, are touched and healed.
From troublous sights and sounds set free;
In such a twilight hour of breath,
Shall one retrace his life, or see,
Through shadows, the true face of death?
Vials of mercy! Sacring oils!
I know not where nor when I come,
Nor through what wanderings and toils,
To crave of you Viaticum.
Viaticum is a term used by Catholics for the Eucharist given at the time of death. Its from the Latin "via tecum" which means "with you on the journey”!
The funeral director turned author Thomas Lynch, whose work is the inspiration behind HBO’s highly acclaimed original series “Six Feet Under”, puts it this way.
“…whether dead bodies are consigned to the earth, the fire, the sea, or the air, it seems that family and friends should take part in filling the holes, stoking the fires, keeping the vigil until the job is done. To farm out the honorable duties that attend the disposition of the dead, by cell phone and credit card, to some eager "death care" salesperson seems a missed boat, a lost chance to bring meaning to our mortality….Whatever is done, I want my people to watch and wait until the job is finished. I want them, like their species has done for 40 or 50,000 years now, to look into the hole or fire or sea or cyber-tomb--whatever void I am consigned to--I want them to look into that depth or darkness or blinding light and watch and wonder and bear witness. It honors the dead, instructs the living, and ennobles the species in ways that matter.
There’s something about all this talk of handling the dead that defies explanation but has the ring of truth nonetheless. I think far more than the smell or amount of oil, its what makes our passage today so gripping. Mary’s act of preparation for Jesus’s burial, albeit in a mode of anticipation, is a way of bearing witness and enobling humanity through Jesus who is for Christians the quintessential human being. How she could have the presence of heart, mind, soul and body to bear that act is astonishing. Judas, meanwhile, might just as well participate in the flagranty death-denying culture of our 21st century. His words of judgment upon Mary’s extravagant and profound gesture are quickly checked by Jesus. His intentions will reveal themselves again soon enough when he gives Jesus up for a bag of change.
I once had a theology professor who had become something of an elder statesman of the div. school campus. He was just a year or two from retirement. He walked slowly. He talked slowly. He seemingly even thought slowly, which in his case, was a good thing. If you had the patience to hang with his lectures, you would be duly rewarded with some utter gems that would lumber their way off his lips. Once when he was lecturing, he took an especially long pause, the kind where you could tell he was thinking something through not for the sake of the class, but for his own sake. We waited for it, patiently. He told us this: “I’m becoming increasingly convinced that aesthetics and ethics are the study of one and the same thing.” It may sound obvious at first, but bear in mind that this guy reads Kant for fun. What I think he was getting at was that what is, in essence, beautiful, is also morally “good” and what is morally “good” is somehow also beautiful. I’ve been finding myself torn between the two this week as I’ve been taking in our passage.
On the one hand, I’ve wanted to step back, to stand in awe and to admire this gesture as if it were hanging on the walls of the Met. Don’t touch it. Don’t mess it up. What Mary does for Jesus is at once beautiful and true. On the other hand, this story has an undeniable political and ethical edge to it. Her extravagance is not for nothing, nor for Jesus’ pleasure. She is preparing the way for Jesus death by execution. She is doing the good and right thing, not merely out of cultural obligation but out of compassion, for Jesus and for all seek to follow him. By touching his feet, she prepares him and us for the moment of truth, the moment of ultimate vulnerability, ultimate loneliness, ultimate judgment, ultimate intimacy. As she touches his feet with her hair, she touches the truth of Jesus mortality and ours. She touches the truth of God’s willingness to be “with us on the journey” in all our living and in all our dying. She surely must touch upon her grief of her losing her teacher and saviour too but, incredibly, she keeps her vigil until the job is done, at least for the day. Needless to say, the other women who went to do the same thing, to honor the body of Christ in this way, the body of Christ, were too late, for the tomb was already empty.
The symbolic act of preparatory footwashing is in and of itself beautiful but its also compassionate and loving. Its the right thing to do, especially in light of Judas’ entirely ugly and bogus withdrawal. Just days later, just before the Passover, Jesus commands his disciples to love one another. He models this love for them by washing their feet. Was Jesus taking his cue from Mary here? Could he have been offering this to his friends as a sign God’s love for them in life and in death?
In the end, Jesus implores Judas and all deniers of death to leave Mary alone. The other gospels accounts of this story go one step further. They say that whereverthe gospel of God’s love is preached, this story should be told in memory of her. Amongst Jesus favored disciples, Mary of
Friends, this is the hardest thing to which we will all be called one week from this Friday, and the fact is that most of will end up finding some Judas-like justification before we will face up our own mortality, and touch it with our very hair. During this Holy Week, its ours to watch and wonder and bear witness. Let us do so in memory of her who has showed us how to get the job done.