Sermon: “Share in Christ's Baptism”

This is a great story about Mary of Bethany. She anoints the feet of Jesus with a pound of perfume, and wipes them with her hair.  So, first of all, this is a story of extravagant love and extravagant generosity.  As I said last week, in the story of “The Foolish Father” – or “The Prodigal Son, as we most often name it – God’s love and generosity are poured out on us with great extravagance.  Perhaps that extravagance seems to us a little unnecessary, over-the-top, embarrassing – foolish even.  But Jesus affirms those of us who respond to God’s extravagant generosity with outpourings of praise, joy, and extravagant love and generosity in return.  And that’s exactly what he does here with Mary of Bethany – as he sides with her against the very pragmatic criticism that Judas offers.  Jesus praises Mary for giving her “all” to him.  And he challenges us to do the same, when we accept his invitation to share in his baptism.

So before we judge Judas too harshly – which is easy to do with our 20-20 Bible hindsight and our knowledge that he will be the one to betray Jesus – let’s try to see Mary and Judas through the eyes of the rest of the disciples that day. Jesus and his followers were gathering at their usual hideout in Bethany, in the hills of Judea an hour’s walk outside the walls of Jerusalem, where Jesus was preaching and teaching every day, and making more than a few enemies among the religious and political rulers of that city.  Jesus was stirring up ordinary people to see their world in a new way, through the eyes of God – and he was prepared to die for his beliefs.  Several of Jesus’s followers, like Judas, were young men ready for Jesus to lead a revolution to bring about the coming day of the Lord’s judgment.  They were men of action.  They were hard-working, practical men.

Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and their brother Lazarus, is perhaps best known as a listener to Jesus – in the famous story in Luke 10, Mary sits so long listening at the feet of Jesus, Martha complains that she isn’t getting up to help serve their guests.  But there too, Jesus comes to Mary’s defense, saying “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; ⁴²there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”  Just as in today’s lesson, Mary is criticized for some very practical reasons, but Jesus defends her. Why does Jesus keep holding Mary up to us as an example?  After all, Jesus often talks about feeding the poor, and being a servant in the service of others.  Why does he keep taking Mary’s side?

It’s easy to demonize Judas, as I said earlier.  But before we’re too hard on Judas, let’s remember that he was the group’s treasurer – and as you may remember, they held their money collectively.  It was his job to be practical and to think about how they were spending scarce funds, which is a hard job, as anyone who’s been worrying about our own church budget this time of year will tell you.  It probably was a later editor who added the part about Judas not caring about the poor, and being a thief.  The disciples obviously didn’t know Judas was a traitor or a thief, or they wouldn’t have let him be their treasurer.  In this story, they probably were as shocked as Judas at what Mary was doing.  They probably agreed with Judas about the unbelievable excess of female emotion and their resources wasted on Jesus’s feet. 

As you may know from the story of Jesus washing the disciples feet at the Last Supper, it was a point of hospitality to have a servant wash the feet of guests who came to dinner.  People walked around in sandals on dusty roads.  They had dirty feet.  But it would NOT have been typical to dry feet with a woman’s hair.  Remember, when Jesus washed the feet, he tied a towel at his waist – as servants would do.  Wiping feet with hair was an act of great intimacy and, in a culture where women’s heads are veiled because seeing their hair is supposed to be too sexually provocative, it would have seemed wildly inappropriate.  Also, a wealthy host might also provide a small amount of some creams or ointments for callused heels or to soothe blisters.  But to use one full POUND of pure nard on one man’s feet, was much more than “costly.”  It was excessive in the extreme. Plus, think about it – pure perfume!  The smell alone had to have been overpowering, sickly sweet.  And expensive?  When Judas says it should have been sold and the 300 denarii given to the poor, he’s not talking about $300 worth.  Since a denarius was a full day’s wage for a workman, we’re talking about almost a full year’s salary – something more like $30,000.

Besides that, nard was to them the smell of death, since this was being saved, as Jesus says, for his funeral.  It was enough to anoint a whole body, as it was wrapped in linen cloths for burial. So Mary’s premature grief meant she was giving in to the version of the future Jesus had been describing – that he would go, and go willingly, to be arrested and crucified – a horrific execution that typically denied the grieving family the chance to claim the body and anoint it properly for a decent burial.  She was doing in advance what she expected she would not have a chance to do later.  So she was not holding back anything, but giving her all – literally throwing herself, and her life’s savings, on Jesus’s feet, as for the last time.  To those of us who are holding back, like Judas, that public display of affection was inappropriate, excessive, and embarrassing.

It made me wonder: What are we holding back in our relationship with Christ?  Are we really willing to share in his baptism and to celebrate his victory on the cross?  What if that means taking a real risk, giving more of ourselves than we had expected?

I want to close with a story about a day when I realized I had been holding back in my own faith.  It was a sunny spring afternoon when I was in college, hanging out with one of my best friends, Sophie, on her back stoop.  We were trying our best to study for midterms, when really we were longing to jump up and roll with my friend’s dog and her adopted stray kitten in the new grass.  And of course, to make it worse, my friend’s brother Steve stopped by to distract us.  Sophie and Steve were raised in a Catholic family, but Steve was now an atheist and one of his favorite things was provoking arguments with me, because he knew I was a Christian.  Sophie was neo-pagan studying psychology, but she was my friend and a lot more open-minded.

And so, on this day, Steve plunked down next to me and fired off his question:  “There are just two kinds of people,” he said, “and you can tell which kind they are just by taking them to the beach.  Some can’t wait to run into the surf and get wet, and others want to just sit on the sand and read a book.  Which kind are you, Bryn?”  Knowing Steve, it had to be a trick question, so I said, “It depends.”  He had long hair and played in a rock band, and this was the ‘70s, so I figured he was about to offer me drugs.  “Depends on what?” he said.  And before he could answer, without even looking up from her book, Sophie said, “Oh give her a break, Steve, she can’t help it.  She’s not going in the water.  She’s a Christian.  And she’s right there in front of you, reading a book.” 

So, to make a long story short, that’s how I learned to water ski, in the Atlantic Ocean.  I did it for Jesus – to prove to a couple of atheists that Christians aren’t cowards.  But it’s also how I learned that if I had just a little more faith, I could – if not actually walk on water – then stand up on water and go really fast. It’s how I learned that being a Christian might actually require me to stop playing it so safe.  It’s when I realized that being a Christian might mean I’d have to fall down and get really wet, or be laughed at, or maybe even hurt or killed.  It’s when I learned what Jesus meant when he called us to share in his baptism.  I learned to open my mouth and risk sharing my faith story, which is something many of our members have been doing this Lent.  To share in Christ’s baptism means we might have to get more than our feet wet.  Like Mary of Bethany, we are called to pour our whole lives out for Christ and for the world God loves.

When Christ calls us to share in his baptism and to join him in his passion and victory – we are called to lose our lives in him, to give our lives in order to find life, to pour our lives out in the service of others –all of which may be a little scary and messy and expensive.  It comes with no small risk.  But it also means we get to be very close to Christ in the Kingdom of Heaven, and to share the joy of celebrating what Jesus called “fullness of life.”

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.