I.

This basic story appears in different forms in each of the four gospels. In John’s gospel, for instance, the woman is Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus, and she anoints his feet, using her hair.

If you read these stories carefully, and picture in your mind the scene, you can easily see why many of those present were scandalized and offended. The scene is charged with sexual images and tension. This kind of intimate contact between an unmarried rabbi and a single woman was highly unusual in Jesus’ day. Indeed, it would even be rather remarkable in our permissive time! (Nothing like this has never happened to me, for instance.)

And it’s interesting how the indignance to this act breaks down in terms of the ideology of the people at the banquet. In Mark’s version they’re at Simon the Leper’s house; you had to be pretty openminded to eat with a leper. So he’s obviously in a room full of liberals who don’t t complain about the personal moral issues in this action. They don’t say that this looks licentious, or that the woman is a sinner, or that Jesus should avoid even the appearnace of sexual misconduct.

No. Their concern is for social justice. "Why was the ointment wasted in this way?" they say. "For this ointment could have been sold for more that three-hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor." It’s like they’re saying, "If you two want to do that, that’s fine; just don’t take the money out of the mission budget."

On the other hand, if we read Luke’s version of the story, Jesus is in the home of a Pharisee when a woman who was a notorious sinner came to Jesus and anointed his feet with the ointment, using her hair. In this case, the host in this case is offended, not by the waste, but by Jesus’ lax morality, and he thinks Jesus must not be much of a prophet if he lets this happen.

My point is that everyone might have a different reason to complain about what is going on in this incident, but the offense taken at this act is nearly universal, whatever the reason. Nobody is happy with what Jesus allows the woman to do. Whether they are conservatives who see it as shamefully sensual and personally immoral, or liberals who interpret it as financially wasteful and socially irresponsible, everybody has a problem with this incident. Just as we would today.

But to deal with this act on either of these levels, as a questionable sexual encounter or a profligate waste of charitable donations, is to miss the point. Those are surface considerations. They are really pretty irrelevant. They put the focus on the character of the woman or the value of the ointment.

II.

But Jesus interprets the woman’s action in a completely different way. He sees in what she does for him something very true and profound. He sees that what she is doing is about neither sex nor justice. He sees that her action has to do something more important and significant than both of these very important and significant themes. He sees that what whe is doing has to do with his death.

For of all the disciples and all the rest of Jesus’ entourage, she is the only one, aside from Jesus himself, who sees what is really going on here. She is the only one who knows that Jesus is on the road to his death. Indeed, he will be crucified within the coming few days.

And this knowledge focuses her attention so strongly that nothing else has the same significance. Compared to what she sees happening to Jesus in the next week, these other considerations, like sex and even justice, are secondary.

These issues that we exhaust so much energy and time and effort over, that consume us in unending debate, and interminable committee meetings, and mindless dreams and fantasies and desires and hopes... they pale and fade when you’re faced with the ultimate barrier in human existence: death.

Imagine the satisfaction and joy there is in the Lord’s heart to discover that at least one person in this crowd really understands where he is going and what he is about. The others are ready to anoint him king! But she is wise and perceptive enough to anoint him for burial. She prepares him for death. And so her soul is in the same place as his.

Those among us who have faced death, or any really severe crisis, might be able to relate to this new level of awareness that Jesus and this woman share. For when you are looking over the edge into that abyss, nothing else matters... and at the same time, because of it, everything else matters.

All the things we thought were so important, all the deadlines, all the goals and objectives, all the plans and dreams we had, even the shape of our personalities and the way we think... all these change, and the old ways lose their importance.

And some of the things we might have been putting off, or placing on the back burner, or taking for granted, or assigning to the periphery of our lives... these things often move to the center. And invariably the things that become so important are centered around our relationships, the places where we connect with other people. They are the places in which we find contact with others, with our world, with ourselves, and with God.

Jesus felt this kind of connection in the ministrations of this woman. That’s why he makes such a powerful pronouncement about her, saying, "Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her." Because she was the one who finally got it. She was the one who finally figured out that this whole thing is about the cross.

And here we are, two-thousand years later, still talking about her, still remembering her, still cherishing her perceptions and her actions, still trying to follow her example.

III.

That’s what we need to figure out too. Because our whole lives are also about the cross. And I don’t mean that in terms of any morbid obsession with death, doom, guilt, and sadness. But rather it is the knowledge that we grow in this life, we evolve, we develop by living through our relationships. We live in bodies of flesh blessed by God who created them and redeemed them in Christ. We grow in our connectedness with each other. We thrive when we touch, and admit and treasure and care for our broken places. Not when we run away from them or pretend we are too big, too sophisticated, too evolved, and too "spiritual" to address them.

The other disciples were the ones in denial. They were busy fleeing from the bodily Christ, the living and dying Jesus, in their fantasies of worldly glory. They were the ones who thought they knew what a Messiah was supposed to be, do, and look like. They are the ones who will abandon Jesus in the end because Messiahship isn’t supposed to involve getting your body nailed to two pieces of wood, not for Jesus and certainly not for them.

We need to use this time of Holy Week to help us to see in the passion of Jesus what is really important in this life. We need to learn to cherish what we have and where we are, because we don’t have all that much time on the Earth. We certainly don’t have time to waste scanning the horizon for imaginary Messiahs, or nursing anger about the way we think things ought to be. We have still less time for either policing each other’s morality or enforcing social abstractions like justice.

No. If we don’t recognize Christ with us here and now, in our crises, in our struggles, in our weaknesses, in our disappointments, in our failures, in our crosses, in our relationships and connections, even in our bodies, then we’re not going to find Christ anywhere else either. Running away into fantasy where the grass is supposedly greener isn’t going to work. For God’s Presence is with and within us in Jesus Christ everywhere and always. And if we don’t find happiness here, we won’t find it anywhere, because it’s within us all the time.

And the times we are most open to perceive and receive God’s Presence in our lives are not the times of our achievements, successes, triumphs, and satisfactions. But rather it is when we are most aware of our own mortality and, frankly, our own death, that we are closest to an appreciation of true life.

Because we know something that not even the woman at Bethany knew. We know that our destiny is not comprehended in death. We know that death is really not a termination but a new beginning, and that what we shall be is unimaginably greater than the puny existence we invest so much energy in trying to prolong and preserve. We know that in the end Jesus’ tomb is empty.

Ironically, to reflect upon our death is to open ourselves to new life. To live fully and consciously in our mortal bodies is to cultivate within us our spiritual nature. Unless a grain of wheat dies, it stays just a single, isolated, dissatisfied, cynical, frustrated, and sad grain of wheat. But if it dies, taking advantage of the resources in the soil upon which it has been sitting all along, it becomes a beautiful golden stalk rich with potential and progeny.

The better we are at "dying" in this life, figuratively, spiritually, morally, symbolically, ritually... and the more we live through and learn from our crises and challenges, then the more we realize that these are really times of tremendous growth and evolution, when we are most in touch with God’s saving Presence. Then we will know what the woman at Bethany perhaps knew unconsciously and intuitively, that only in preparing Jesus for death, was she preparing to receive his new life of resurrection.

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