Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, April 6, 2025

Isaiah 43:16-21+Psalm 126+Philippians 3:4b-14+John 12:1-8

I want to ask you to set aside, for the moment, anything you think you know about this story we have just heard in John's gospel. It's a familiar story, but if I were a betting woman, I would lay a wager on you thinking that some kind of "fallen woman," a stranger, came in during suppertime and scandalized everyone by pouring a bottle of expensive perfume over Jesus's head and washing his feet with her tears, drying them with her hair. Because historically, we have been led to believe that this woman was disreputable, and Jesus might have been too oblivious to recognize that.

The anointing shows up in varying forms in all four gospels. Three of them have the setting in Bethany. Luke has it in Galilee. Some have his head being anointed, some his feet. They all differ on who it was that complained about it. Two say that a "woman" did this, and one says that a "sinful woman" did the act. Only John gives her a name: Mary.

There are lots of Marys in scripture, and through the years, this Mary has been conflated with Mary Magdalene, mostly because in the late 6th century, Gregory the Great could not bring himself to believe that Mary Magdalene, the Apostle to the Apostles, could possibly have been the one to whom Jesus identified himself after the resurrection, and that she had to have been a prostitute. God forbid that a woman was chosen to bear the Good News to the men.

This Mary that we heard about this morning, this Mary, is obviously the sister of Lazarus and Martha. Jesus is in their house. It says it right there. "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" (John 12:1-2a). And it may sound like any old dinner party, but I hope you have learned by now that God does not do just any old dinner party, that God always does what we least expect.

"Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead."

It is astonishing that we can just read right over this sentence as if it is an everyday occurrence. But in John's narrative of Jesus's life, this miraculous resurrection of his friend was the last straw for those in power. They simply couldn't leave someone walking around with that kind of power. In fact, they plotted to kill Lazarus as well as Jesus to eliminate the evidence (John 12:9).

It was customary to have servants or enslaved persons in a household wash the feet of guests. I mean, everyone's walking around on dusty roads wearing sandals, so it was the right thing to do, but it was usually men who washed men's feet. So that Mary would not just wash but anoint the feet of Jesus will perfumed oil was, let's just say, out of the ordinary. It is really no wonder why the early Church Fathers got themselves into such a twist over this. It was intimate. It was provocative. It was unexpected. It simply isn't done.

Judas cannot abide this; he has to break the spell. John is the only one who accuses Judas of sticking his hand in the till, but he wants us to know that they knew what a snake Judas was. And Jesus's response about the poor always being with us was not said to absolve us of our duty to care for the poor. It was an acknowledgement of the fallenness of humankind. As long as people want to build bigger barns for their grain and bigger bank accounts for their earnings instead of sharing with their neighbors, people will continue to be hungry. It was true then, and it is certainly true now.

It's important to note that Chapter 12 of John opens by saying that it was six days before the Passover. Yes, that Passover, the one where Jesus will wash his disciples’ feet, just as his feet were washed by Mary. This Mary who had screamed at him a chapter before, "if you had been here my brother wouldn't have died!" (11:32), is now, out of gratitude, shamelessly and recklessly pouring out her offering on Jesus, letting down her hair, literally, and anointing him with oil in anticipation of the anointing he would receive when he was wrapped in the burial shroud, the perfume covering the stench of death. If I were a filmmaker, I would imagine the background fading as the camera focuses on just these two, tender music swelling as she wipes his feet with her hair. I would call this movie Prelude to a Crucifixion, because everything from the raising of Lazarus to Mary pouring burial oil on Jesus's feet is pointing toward the days ahead, when Jesus will be arrested and whipped and executed.

But if we remember that our God is a God of the unexpected, what comes next should not surprise us. Everyone thought that the messiah would come in power to overthrow Rome, but instead they got a carpenter's son who ended up on a cross. His followers thought that the stone over the tomb was the end of the story, but they didn't know that Sunday was coming.

God always uses the most unlikely among us to accomplish the most unlikely of things. Abraham and Sarah were too darn old to have kids yet became the ancestors of nations. Moses was a timid stutterer who couldn’t possibly go to mighty Pharoah on behalf of the enslaved Hebrew people, but he did. David was a shepherd boy who grew up to be a murderer and a rapist, and yet God chose him as the great king of Israel, ancestor of Jesus.

And God chooses us, too, to accomplish things we never asked or imagined. Feed the hungry, house the houseless, speak truth to power, pour into the streets to protest the dismantling of democracy? Yes, we do those things. In his record-breaking speech in the Senate this week, Cory Booker said, "I'm not going to allow my inability to do everything undermine my ability to do something." Maybe we don't get to see the whole picture. Abraham never saw his descendants as numerous as the stars. Moses did not get into the Promised Land. David was not allowed to build the temple. They did the work given them and look what happened then. Because we have a God who always does the unexpected.

We heard words of inspiration from the prophet Isaiah this morning:

          Do not remember the former things,
              or consider the things of old.

          I am about to do a new thing;
              now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? (Isaiah 43:18-19)

These words spoken by God through Isaiah were said when the people were lost and broken in exile, longing for home. They could not see, could not imagine that this might happen. But God saw, and God made it happen. "I'm about to do a new thing," God says.

So, don't be discouraged by whatever weighs on your heart this morning, whatever exile it is that you are stuck in, whatever sorrow you bear. Pour yourself out in gratitude to a God who always shows up in the most unexpected ways at the most unexpected times. The stories we encounter week after week in this place teach us to expect the unexpected when it comes to God.

for I give water in the wilderness,
rivers in the desert,

to give drink to my chosen people,
the people whom I formed for myself

so that they might declare my praise. (Isaiah 43:20-21)