Fragrant Offering or Stinking Mistake?
The Rev. Robert P. Travis
5th
Sunday Lent Sermon– 8:00am and 10:30am Church of the Ascension, Knoxville TN
RCL Year C 3/17/2013
Scripture Text:
Isaiah 43:16-21, Psalm 126, Philippians 3:4b-14, John 12:1-8
Sermon Text:
The story we just heard has a lot going on in it.
I'm pretty sure you heard the confrontation
between Jesus and Judas,
but you might have missed the background excitement.
Look at what happened.
Jesus has come to Jerusalem,
where he has been saying he had to go,
even though people warned him against it,
so there's fear in the air.
He's in Bethany, sharing in a dinner
that was given for him.
But this isn't any old,
dinner with friends,
or even a
“let's throw a dinner party for our teacher” dinner.
This is a
“Thank you for raising our brother from the dead!” Party.
Hard to imagine a more exciting party.
And there is the guy Jesus raised from the dead,
reclining at the table with Jesus.
Then Mary, the sister of the formerly dead
but now alive man,
comes in with a whole pound
of extremely expensive perfume,
maybe even worth as much as $20,000 in today's money.
And she pours it out on Jesus' feet,
and then wipes them off with her hair.
And what happens when you pour out that much perfume?
The whole house is filled with the scent.
This is a dramatic scene indeed.
And it gets a dramatic response from Judas.
Who gets a rebuke from Jesus.
A rebuke that has been turned into one of the most
misunderstood teachings of Jesus,
resulting in a great deal of unnecessary suffering
in the world.
More on that in a minute.
What struck me first about this scene,
may seem like a small detail,
but I think a lot can be understood from starting there.
Can you imagine what it must have smelled like,
to have a pound of perfume poured out in a small house?
The scripture says,
“The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”
I think that depends on your perception of it.
I think Judas Iscariot would have said
it stank to high heaven...
Smell is one of the most powerful senses we have,
in terms of emotional response,
and especially in terms of memory.
This scene is one of the only ones of Jesus' life
found in all four gospels.
I think there's good reason for that.
I bet whenever anyone who was there smelled
the scent of that kind of perfume
they were drawn back to that event.
You know what it's like,
you smell a subtle, or not so subtle odor,
and a memory comes rushing back to you.
A pleasant time, or a terrible one,
the comfort of a friend or loved one,
or the angry exchange with someone who betrayed you.
Smell brings it back to us,
and makes the memory it all the more powerful.
Even when memory is not triggered,
strong smells cause an emotional response.
For decades after my father lost his father as a boy,
he couldn't stand to be in a room with roses,
because of the smell of all the roses at his father's funeral.
Maybe because of it's power,
in our society we have both
distanced ourselves from odor,
and covered it all up with synthetic odors
that take all the life out of our sense of smell.
In the third world, and even in the second,
strong smells are a fact of life,
sometimes pleasant, often not pleasant at all.
I remember the descriptive scene in the book
the Poisonwood Bible where the protagonist
visits her mother in America, after serving in Africa,
and comments on how devoid of smell
American life has become.
But even that is not the main point I'm trying to make.
What I'm saying is that in this party with Jesus
what for some might have been
a beautiful and fragrant experience,
for Judas you could say it stank.
He was already disappointed in Jesus,
Jesus was apparently not the messiah he wanted,
one who would rise up in rebellion and overthrow
the Roman occupiers by force.
Instead, it was now clear,
He was going to go to a shameful death,
die for his people.
And with the scent of a perfume used in burial,
being poured out on Jesus at this dinner
this fact was literally was thrown in Judas' face.
So he complains that this perfume was wasted,
it could have been sold for a lot of money
and the money given to the poor.
Now if you can disregard the little commentary that the gospel writer puts in about how they found out later
about Judas' acts of betrayal and sin,
we could easily see that Judas has a point.
As so often happens when we're angry,
and we speak in self-righteous judgement,
there's some truth in it,
even if our outburst as a whole is ill-advised.
Jesus puts Judas in his place,
and teaches us an important lesson.
But that lesson is NOT that we don't need to give
to the poor because they will always be here.
If there's only one thing you hear today in my message,
please understand that even though Jesus said,
“you will always have the poor with you,”
that is not an excuse for us not giving to the poor,
or for any kind of argument that wants to give up
on helping the poor out of a sense of hopelessness,
that we somehow will never overcome this problem,
so why try?
I only say that because I have heard faithful Christians
arguing that in the past,
and using this line from Jesus to justify it.
I am quite certain that that is not what he meant here,
and I know that because of the other,
much longer and more involved teachings he gave us
for example, the one about anything we do for the least of these being done for him.
What Jesus is saying here, to Judas,
is that acts of love and worship are not to be condemned,
as if something better could have been done.
Especially spontaneous acts of love and worship.
What Mary did for Jesus was an act of love and worship.
If she had indeed bought that expensive perfume for Jesus'
burial, what else could have compelled her to use it
to anoint Jesus while he was still alive but love,
and gratitude.
This is the teacher, at whose feet she sat and learned,
and who defended her worship to her sister Martha,
when Martha was busy serving the Lord
in a much more active way.
And this is the Lord who just a short time ago,
had raised her beloved brother from death.
In this new world, even the inevitability of death
had taken on a new meaning.
So why save anointing,
that final loving act that one performed
for a loved one after they had died,
why save that for death?
Why not just anoint Jesus now?
We see the strength of that loving act so strongly here,
as she wiped his feet with her own hair.
And everyone was enveloped in the scent of love,
as the fragrance of the perfume filled the whole house.
But for Judas it just stank.
And that shows us the power of perception
and perspective,
even the power of our own attitudes,
in our relationship with the Lord.
Paul describes it in the letter to the Philippians
in one of his most challenging passages to understand.
He wrote, “whatever gains I had,
I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.
More than that,
I regard everything as loss
because of the surpassing value
of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”
For Paul, all of the achievements of his earlier life,
are stinking garbage,
compared to the sweet fragrance of relationship
with God in Jesus Christ.
And even harder to grasp, Paul would rather suffer,
rather share in the sufferings of Christ, for the sake of that relationship, than be safe and secure without him.
That is a different attitude,
certainly different from what most people
in our country would accept,
in our desire for security and happiness.
Here people talk about when life circumstances change, the pain of accepting a different standard of living
as if it were torture,
but Paul went from being well regarded and elite,
to being thrown out of his own society and physically punished for his new belief,
his new relationship with Christ.
Yet even that physical abuse was good to Paul,
because of this change in attitude,
because of the relationship with Jesus, who suffered too,
who suffered before him, and suffered for him.
I'm not saying that I like suffering.
I'm not a good sufferer at all.
I've got a long way to go before I get there.
But what I recognize is that the people who
have the most joy,
the greatest meaning in life,
the strongest relationships with Christ,
have sacrificed a great deal of success
even well-deserved rewards, to serve Him.
Like the man I knew a few years back,
who gave up a million-dollar-a-year job,
with an international consulting firm,
to take a $50,000 a year job leading
Alpha in this country.
Compare that to Judas,
and others who didn’t get the Messiah,
or the Jesus they wanted,
and so would rather betray him,
than suffer with him.
That is what happens when our attitudes,
are self-focussed,
and reliant on our own success,
rather than focussed primarily on Christ,
and offering our best to Him,
even when that means we’ll fail sometimes with Him.
It is hard to look at our own achievements,
as failures,
compared to the great gift of knowing Christ,
which has nothing to do with our worth or success.
It’s hard for me to get this, and I’m learning slowly
Yet as Paul said, I know I have not reached the goal,
but I press on to make it my own,
because Christ Jesus has already made me his own.
So how can we show that kind of love for our Lord,
that Mary showed here.
This is the part that may seem ironic
in the face of Judas' comment.
Certainly we can provide beautiful worship,
and give sacrificially to the church to help our worship
be full of lavish, and wonderful offerings for God.
We're already good at that here at Ascension.
But even better,
since Jesus did tell us that the most personal way
we can serve him, is to see him
in the neediest people around us,
in the vulnerable,
in the abused,
in the weak,
however we think of the least of these.
Whatever we do to the least of these,
we do to Jesus himself.
So if we want to be extravagant in our love for Jesus,
and pour out our offering in the way Mary anointed Jesus,
at that exciting party,
we can pour out extravagant offerings for the poor.
Not asking ourselves first if they’re worthy of our gifts,
if they deserve help because they’re working hard,
or because they meet some criteria we establish.
We do it because their inherent worth is because
Jesus lives in them,
and we love him enough to give him all we have
even our very lives.
That's the irony.
But the key is the attitude in which it is offered,
and when confronted with others who are giving
extravagantly to the Lord
we aren't to judge them for what we perceive as
an inability to use their gifts wisely, as Judas did,
but to concern ourselves with what we have to offer,
and offer our best, and greatest gifts
to the least of these.
We could fail,
fail to make everything better,
or to raise everyone out of poverty.
it could be that in spite of our best efforts
they'll always be with us anyway.
But the Jesus we love really is present
in the least of these,
So even if the poor are always with us
isn’t that just a reminder that Jesus is always with us too?
Thank God he is.
Amen
I'm pretty sure you heard the confrontation
between Jesus and Judas,
but you might have missed the background excitement.
Look at what happened.
Jesus has come to Jerusalem,
where he has been saying he had to go,
even though people warned him against it,
so there's fear in the air.
He's in Bethany, sharing in a dinner
that was given for him.
But this isn't any old,
dinner with friends,
or even a
“let's throw a dinner party for our teacher” dinner.
This is a
“Thank you for raising our brother from the dead!” Party.
Hard to imagine a more exciting party.
And there is the guy Jesus raised from the dead,
reclining at the table with Jesus.
Then Mary, the sister of the formerly dead
but now alive man,
comes in with a whole pound
of extremely expensive perfume,
maybe even worth as much as $20,000 in today's money.
And she pours it out on Jesus' feet,
and then wipes them off with her hair.
And what happens when you pour out that much perfume?
The whole house is filled with the scent.
This is a dramatic scene indeed.
And it gets a dramatic response from Judas.
Who gets a rebuke from Jesus.
A rebuke that has been turned into one of the most
misunderstood teachings of Jesus,
resulting in a great deal of unnecessary suffering
in the world.
More on that in a minute.
What struck me first about this scene,
may seem like a small detail,
but I think a lot can be understood from starting there.
Can you imagine what it must have smelled like,
to have a pound of perfume poured out in a small house?
The scripture says,
“The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”
I think that depends on your perception of it.
I think Judas Iscariot would have said
it stank to high heaven...
Smell is one of the most powerful senses we have,
in terms of emotional response,
and especially in terms of memory.
This scene is one of the only ones of Jesus' life
found in all four gospels.
I think there's good reason for that.
I bet whenever anyone who was there smelled
the scent of that kind of perfume
they were drawn back to that event.
You know what it's like,
you smell a subtle, or not so subtle odor,
and a memory comes rushing back to you.
A pleasant time, or a terrible one,
the comfort of a friend or loved one,
or the angry exchange with someone who betrayed you.
Smell brings it back to us,
and makes the memory it all the more powerful.
Even when memory is not triggered,
strong smells cause an emotional response.
For decades after my father lost his father as a boy,
he couldn't stand to be in a room with roses,
because of the smell of all the roses at his father's funeral.
Maybe because of it's power,
in our society we have both
distanced ourselves from odor,
and covered it all up with synthetic odors
that take all the life out of our sense of smell.
In the third world, and even in the second,
strong smells are a fact of life,
sometimes pleasant, often not pleasant at all.
I remember the descriptive scene in the book
the Poisonwood Bible where the protagonist
visits her mother in America, after serving in Africa,
and comments on how devoid of smell
American life has become.
But even that is not the main point I'm trying to make.
What I'm saying is that in this party with Jesus
what for some might have been
a beautiful and fragrant experience,
for Judas you could say it stank.
He was already disappointed in Jesus,
Jesus was apparently not the messiah he wanted,
one who would rise up in rebellion and overthrow
the Roman occupiers by force.
Instead, it was now clear,
He was going to go to a shameful death,
die for his people.
And with the scent of a perfume used in burial,
being poured out on Jesus at this dinner
this fact was literally was thrown in Judas' face.
So he complains that this perfume was wasted,
it could have been sold for a lot of money
and the money given to the poor.
Now if you can disregard the little commentary that the gospel writer puts in about how they found out later
about Judas' acts of betrayal and sin,
we could easily see that Judas has a point.
As so often happens when we're angry,
and we speak in self-righteous judgement,
there's some truth in it,
even if our outburst as a whole is ill-advised.
Jesus puts Judas in his place,
and teaches us an important lesson.
But that lesson is NOT that we don't need to give
to the poor because they will always be here.
If there's only one thing you hear today in my message,
please understand that even though Jesus said,
“you will always have the poor with you,”
that is not an excuse for us not giving to the poor,
or for any kind of argument that wants to give up
on helping the poor out of a sense of hopelessness,
that we somehow will never overcome this problem,
so why try?
I only say that because I have heard faithful Christians
arguing that in the past,
and using this line from Jesus to justify it.
I am quite certain that that is not what he meant here,
and I know that because of the other,
much longer and more involved teachings he gave us
for example, the one about anything we do for the least of these being done for him.
What Jesus is saying here, to Judas,
is that acts of love and worship are not to be condemned,
as if something better could have been done.
Especially spontaneous acts of love and worship.
What Mary did for Jesus was an act of love and worship.
If she had indeed bought that expensive perfume for Jesus'
burial, what else could have compelled her to use it
to anoint Jesus while he was still alive but love,
and gratitude.
This is the teacher, at whose feet she sat and learned,
and who defended her worship to her sister Martha,
when Martha was busy serving the Lord
in a much more active way.
And this is the Lord who just a short time ago,
had raised her beloved brother from death.
In this new world, even the inevitability of death
had taken on a new meaning.
So why save anointing,
that final loving act that one performed
for a loved one after they had died,
why save that for death?
Why not just anoint Jesus now?
We see the strength of that loving act so strongly here,
as she wiped his feet with her own hair.
And everyone was enveloped in the scent of love,
as the fragrance of the perfume filled the whole house.
But for Judas it just stank.
And that shows us the power of perception
and perspective,
even the power of our own attitudes,
in our relationship with the Lord.
Paul describes it in the letter to the Philippians
in one of his most challenging passages to understand.
He wrote, “whatever gains I had,
I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.
More than that,
I regard everything as loss
because of the surpassing value
of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”
For Paul, all of the achievements of his earlier life,
are stinking garbage,
compared to the sweet fragrance of relationship
with God in Jesus Christ.
And even harder to grasp, Paul would rather suffer,
rather share in the sufferings of Christ, for the sake of that relationship, than be safe and secure without him.
That is a different attitude,
certainly different from what most people
in our country would accept,
in our desire for security and happiness.
Here people talk about when life circumstances change, the pain of accepting a different standard of living
as if it were torture,
but Paul went from being well regarded and elite,
to being thrown out of his own society and physically punished for his new belief,
his new relationship with Christ.
Yet even that physical abuse was good to Paul,
because of this change in attitude,
because of the relationship with Jesus, who suffered too,
who suffered before him, and suffered for him.
I'm not saying that I like suffering.
I'm not a good sufferer at all.
I've got a long way to go before I get there.
But what I recognize is that the people who
have the most joy,
the greatest meaning in life,
the strongest relationships with Christ,
have sacrificed a great deal of success
even well-deserved rewards, to serve Him.
Like the man I knew a few years back,
who gave up a million-dollar-a-year job,
with an international consulting firm,
to take a $50,000 a year job leading
Alpha in this country.
Compare that to Judas,
and others who didn’t get the Messiah,
or the Jesus they wanted,
and so would rather betray him,
than suffer with him.
That is what happens when our attitudes,
are self-focussed,
and reliant on our own success,
rather than focussed primarily on Christ,
and offering our best to Him,
even when that means we’ll fail sometimes with Him.
It is hard to look at our own achievements,
as failures,
compared to the great gift of knowing Christ,
which has nothing to do with our worth or success.
It’s hard for me to get this, and I’m learning slowly
Yet as Paul said, I know I have not reached the goal,
but I press on to make it my own,
because Christ Jesus has already made me his own.
So how can we show that kind of love for our Lord,
that Mary showed here.
This is the part that may seem ironic
in the face of Judas' comment.
Certainly we can provide beautiful worship,
and give sacrificially to the church to help our worship
be full of lavish, and wonderful offerings for God.
We're already good at that here at Ascension.
But even better,
since Jesus did tell us that the most personal way
we can serve him, is to see him
in the neediest people around us,
in the vulnerable,
in the abused,
in the weak,
however we think of the least of these.
Whatever we do to the least of these,
we do to Jesus himself.
So if we want to be extravagant in our love for Jesus,
and pour out our offering in the way Mary anointed Jesus,
at that exciting party,
we can pour out extravagant offerings for the poor.
Not asking ourselves first if they’re worthy of our gifts,
if they deserve help because they’re working hard,
or because they meet some criteria we establish.
We do it because their inherent worth is because
Jesus lives in them,
and we love him enough to give him all we have
even our very lives.
That's the irony.
But the key is the attitude in which it is offered,
and when confronted with others who are giving
extravagantly to the Lord
we aren't to judge them for what we perceive as
an inability to use their gifts wisely, as Judas did,
but to concern ourselves with what we have to offer,
and offer our best, and greatest gifts
to the least of these.
We could fail,
fail to make everything better,
or to raise everyone out of poverty.
it could be that in spite of our best efforts
they'll always be with us anyway.
But the Jesus we love really is present
in the least of these,
So even if the poor are always with us
isn’t that just a reminder that Jesus is always with us too?
Thank God he is.
Amen
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