If you can’t see Mary…
“Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” [John 12:1-8]
If you can’t see Mary, and you can’t see Jesus, how can you see someone who’s poor?
This event – one of the most thoroughly documented stories in the New Testament – explores one of the seminal themes of Jesus’ ministry: the distinction between love and guilt; between obligation and commitment; between noblesse oblige and servanthood.
If you can’t see Mary, and you can’t see Jesus, how can you see someone who’s poor?
The Poor you will always have with you. Jesus embraces a new beginning of radical commitment. He hurls himself into the structure of poverty and oppression. To build a structure of resurrectionfull of anointing.
1. The Poor you will always have with you.
The event is, presumably, not calculated. But it is remembered – remembered so frequently that it is one of the few stories told in some form in all four of the Gospels.
You know how much it is remembered, because it is remembered in America today – if not the whole story, then at least one of its punch lines: “The poor you always have with you.” It is remembered in that fashion because it addresses – one might even say attacks – the established, pious, seemingly essential and perhaps virtuous practice of charitable giving to the poor.
But here we have Jesus, whom we revere as Lord, apparently expressing indifference to the plight of the poor.
The disciples – Judas in this case, other disciples in other versions of the story – criticize Mary for anointing Jesus with costly oil of Nard and say that instead the ointment should have been sold and the money given to the poor. In this situation, as in several other situations where women are engaged with Jesus, they want to chase them off and challenge what they are doing.
But Jesus embraces and appreciates Mary’s ministry, countermands the criticism of the disciples, and says that the poor will always be there.
These words have been music to the ears of persons who wish to stop their concern for the poor at charitable giving. They are willing to feed the hungry, but that is, so far as they are concerned, enough. Even if their own avaricious behavior is responsible for the poverty of those persons, it is not their responsibility to restrain their acquisition or – even more – to work for amelioration of the situation. The poor will always be there, Jesus said.
Why charitable giving, then? Is it guilt? Is it protection against criticism either from outside or from oneself? Or is it genuine concern?
Instead of this giving of cash to the abstract poor, Mary proposes an act of great kindness – an extravagant act, specifically aimed at one man whom she loves and to whose needs she wishes to minister.
The feminine act of love versus the act of generic guilt. An act of unrestrained extravagance instead of a carefully calculated act of limited charity. An act of self-giving versus an act of giving without self. The poor you will always have with you.
2. Jesus embraces a new beginning of radical commitment.
In John’s Gospel, the person criticizing Mary’s action is Judas. John discounts Judas’ criticism by saying that Judas wanted the money for himself. But in the other three versions of the story the outrage comes from other disciples. This woman has broken the rules of charity and wasted wealth – as if wealth were not being used self-indulgently all of the time.
Jesus chooses not to affirm the disciples’ generic parroting of the need for charity – and incidentally, their constant harping at the insights of women – and instead affirms the unlimited loving action of the woman anointing him. It is on this action – not the apparent belief in a charity which assumes permanent poverty and alleviation of guilt by donation – it is on this action of Mary that he will build his church.
Not limit but extravagance; not obligation but total commitment; not guilt but love will be the radical foundation for what must happen for the kingdom to come in.
God places himself in need. Everyman is in need of anointing.
Is it not possible that Jesus was in great agony at what he knew was building in his life? Is it not possible that Mary loved him? Is it not possible that she saw what no one else saw – the duress, the all-but-despair, the exquisite loneliness of Jesus in this moment – and gave him everything she could properly give him to minister to his need and assure him of God’s love?
This was no abstract commitment. This was no limited alleviation of guilt. This was a self-giving as determined, as unrestrained, as his own. This was true discipleship. Love, not guilt. The redemption of the human enterprise, the revelation of true humanity, the exercise of the power of God and the banishment of darkness had to begin at the true beginning: full, unrestrained, unqualified love and self-giving. Jesus embraces a new beginning of radical commitment.
3. He hurls himself into the structure of poverty and oppression.
To those whose lives are lived in guilt and shame that they are haves while others are have-nots, Jesus’ words could not be more true: You will always have the poor with you. You will never, so long as you live your life in this combination of wealth and guilt, be able to escape the poor. Every time you spend money or give a gift, if your conscience is to remain at all alive, you will have to know that the poor are with you. You will repress them. You will hate them. You will move away from them as far as possible and then watch them, mesmerized, on television. And you will even create a mission to them to exercise your charity.
But the total commitment of this day, or the next day, or the one after this – the sense that life has meaning and something can be done with it – the kind of commitment of love that seeks to break out of the cycle of guilt and charity – this is something that awaits you. It is a desperation, and a love, that takes you out of patterns and draws you into deep unexplored possibilities. None of us is worthy of this love, none of us knows how to live it, but it draws us forward and brings us to the flame of eternal life.
The idea that Jesus was unconcerned about alleviating poverty is so crazy that one can hardly explain its falsehood. His answer to poverty was not a contribution, not guilt-money, not even a whopping charitable gift. His answer was to hurl himself – his whole life, his whole enterprise – into the structured machine of evil and oppression – religious, political, and economic – so that its evil could be exposed and its falsehood revealed. He attacked the structures of indifference and oppression by the weapon of truth, and he attacked them so decisively that they had to kill him.
His model for relating to persons who were poor was not the guilty charity recommended by the disciples, but the unrestrained loving self-commitment of Mary. He hurls himself into the structure of poverty and oppression.
4. To build a structure of resurrection full of anointing.
Mary’s style and Jesus’ gift were not to give a little bit of food money for the day, to prevent a revolution and alleviate guilt. This was total commitment to the cause – a cause bigger than they were, longer lasting, more elemental. Everyman was in need of anointing, deep in the spirit, soothing, caring, warming, loving.
Jesus could not by himself provide that anointing, but he could expose and crash through the structures that inhibited it, and open a way of love for all that Mary had already understood. It would be a structure of resurrection love, full of anointing, — a structure not based on guilt but on forgiveness. Guilt forces giving, but it also insures that that giving will be limited. Because when one acts, or gives, out of guilt one is in fact acting against oneself. You are pulling in one direction, toward your own self-interest, and trying to offset the bad feelings that creates by giving in the other direction.
But forgiveness and love create a different kind of climate. There is nothing left to lose, and you are so well cared for by the one who loves and forgives you that you can only respond by living that love and care to others.
In one of the versions of Mary’s story – the one told in Luke’s Gospel – Jesus describes her as a woman who loves much because she has been forgiven much.
She knows more about the poor than all of the disciples combined. There is no difference between rich and poor – all need the anointing of love and of God for the healing of their sins. But no one who receives this anointing himself or herself can ever support the oppression of the poor
If you can’t see Mary, and you can’t see Jesus, how can you see someone who’s poor?
On the other hand, if we have Mary’s eyes, if we have Mary’s love, if we have been forgiven like Mary, we’ll pour out our lives with joy to God, who joins us in celebrating our common love and our common life.
AMEN.
