We never truly appreciate “home-grown,” or “home-style”,” “home-spun” or “down home” until “home” is in our rear view mirror. For college students, Mom’s meatloaf suddenly take on a whole new luster after a semester of college cafeteria food. A burger from McDonald’s, a Pizza Hut pie, or some KFC, tastes like heaven after an extended tour of duty in Afghanistan. It is the simple tastes, the simple things, the most simple and most familiar people, that make a particular place on this planet “home.”
According to the gospels, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, spent a few years in Egypt, then relocated to Nazareth. Once Jesus began preaching and teaching he was constantly on the road. His very own “home-town” threatened to throw him off a cliff for his words of wisdom. Not surprisingly, Jesus stayed away from Nazareth and spent time in other regions — Capernaeum, Samaria, Jerusalem, the outer regions of Galilee. While “foxes had their dens,” Jesus really had no place to rest his head, no “home land.”
Except. Jesus had one special place he liked to go when he wanted the companionship of friends and the absence of crowds. When Jesus wanted to be alone to pray and communicate with the Father he sought out the wilderness. When Jesus felt the need to be among his closest friends and earthly companions, he traveled to Bethany. Frank Viola calls Bethany “Jesus’ favorite place on Earth.”
A scant two miles outside of Jerusalem, Bethany was still far enough away to be “far enough away.” Jesus’ best friends — Lazarus, Martha, Mary — kept their home open for him and for his disciples, always welcoming, always open armed. Bethany was not where Jesus went to preach or preside. Bethany was where Jesus went to hang out with his “buddies.”
After the hometown community of Nazareth ran Jesus out on a rail, even threatened to do an “honors killing” because Jesus’ claim to be the Messiah had so embarrassed everyone, Bethany was Jesus’ “home.” It was the place where he felt safe. It was the place where he felt loved. It was the place where he had a close connection to friends who were not “professional” disciples. Martha, Mary, and Lazarus were simply followers. More than that, they were simply friends. Significant, they were not part of the “official” group of twelve Jesus had called. It is enormously revealing that Jesus’ best friends were NOT part of The Twelve.
Instead they were part of the supportive structure that Jesus leaned on throughout his ministry to buck him up and buoy him onward, as he approached the roughest waters in his life. Before Jesus entered into Jerusalem he did not need followers. He needed friends.
Where is your favorite place on earth?
Where do you go — physically, mentally, or spiritually — to find the strength and support you need to travel though your days?
Have you cultivated a “Bethany,” a place where you can feel safe, a place where you can be you, whoever that is?
Jesus loved Bethany. He loved his friends, those whom he cared for so much that he undertook a huge reclamation project for that community. Bethany had been polluted and putrefied by the untimely death of Jesus’ great friend Lazarus. When Jesus raised Lazarus from the tomb that curse was lifted. It was only a few days later that Lazarus and his sisters held a Sabbath meal in Jesus’ honor. Mary’s gift of the spendy and scented perfume added yet another layer to the celebrity feeling of the evening. Food. Family. Friends. Fragrance.
The nose knows. There is no human sensibility that awakens deeper feelings and memories than the sense of smell. Jesus stayed in Bethany to engage with and enjoy the company of his great friends. Jesus accepted the gift of Mary’s anointing, of the fragrance that dispelled all the miasma of Lazarus’ death (remember how the KJV put it: “He stinketh”?), to celebrate his life with his friends and disciples.
Jesus sought out Bethany as a place of friendship and acceptance. As we go into these final days of Lent we need to ask ourselves, not if we have “given up” enough for Jesus, but if we have “given enough” for Jesus. Have we given Jesus a place in our lives? Have we welcomed Jesus like a friend whom we love and embrace? Have we been a twenty-first “Bethany” for Jesus’ presence, even as the world continues to want to crucify all that Jesus preaches and represents?
Bethany is more than a popular children’s name. Bethany is more than a popular name for a church. Every follower of Jesus strives to be a Bethany.
Are you a Bethany? Is your life a place where Jesus loves to hang out and dine?
The world’s only museum of perfume is the Osmotheque in Versailles. It preserves and archives scents and re‑creates lost ones, including the aromatic ambergris that fueled England’s craze for perfumed gloves. It used to be that pleasure gardens were stocked with fragrant jasmine. It used to be that incense in church was meant to materialize the presence of the divine. You used to know when God was present when you smelled the burnt sacrifice. Jesus changed all that. You know when he is present when you smell the fragrance.
Are you a Bethany where people can smell Jesus in you? Are you a Bethany where the smell of death has been changed into the smell of new life and health?
COMMENTARY
Police investigators know that sometimes there is such a thing as too many witnesses. If a dozen different people witness an incident, chances are there are going to be a dozen different versions of just what happened. Some basic tenants might remain constant. But the details, discerned by a dozen separate pairs of eyes, will be perceived differently.
This week’s gospel text tells of Jesus being anointed. It is a scene that is described in all four gospels, yet each rendition has a separate set of details. Matthew and Mark’s versions (Mark 14:3-9; Matthew 26:6-13) have the most in common. John’s description is very similar. Luke’s description (Luke 7:36-50) has more differences, yet shares details with John, such as the wiping off of Jesus’ feet with the woman’s hair. While it may be impossible to definitively discern whether there was more than one public anointing of Jesus during his ministry, it is evident that all the gospel writers knew of, and found significance in, such an act.
In John’s gospel this anointing takes place at the conclusion of Jesus’ public ministry, just before he enters into Jerusalem for his final Passover celebration. Jesus’ last discourses, his private teachings to his disciples, follow this public meal that is described in this week’s text. In John’s gospel, as Jesus approaches Jerusalem there is an increasing scent and sense of death. In chapter 11 John tells the extended story of Lazarus — his illness, his death, and his miraculous resurrection accomplished through the power of Jesus, the one who is “the resurrection and the life” (11:25). But it is also the restoration of life to Lazarus that leads the chief priests and Pharisees to begin actively plotting Jesus’ death (11:53).
Before entering into Jerusalem and the final phase of his earthly mission, Jesus pauses and takes some breaths. Jesus lingers in what was one of his favorite places, Bethany. This small settlement, just two miles outside of Jerusalem, was the home of his great friends Lazarus, Martha, and Mary. Jesus had wept over Lazarus before calling him forth from his tomb. Now he takes the time to celebrate a joyful, special meal with his restored companion. The one who had been laid in his tomb was now reclining at the table alongside Jesus. One can only imagine how pleased Martha, the consummate conscientious hostess (see Luke 10:38-42), was to be able to “serve” her brother and the one she had witnessed calling Lazarus out of his tomb.
Mary offers a different kind of “service” to Jesus — an anointing with the conspicuously costly “pure nard.” John’s text does not elaborate upon Mary’s motivation for this action. Some commentators have suggested that Mary perceived better than others the events that were about to transpire and so with this act symbolically “prepared” Jesus’ body for burial by anointing him with this costly perfume. But it is Jesus’ words in v.7 that offer that interpretation of Mary’s actions. Rather than assuming Mary was some sort of spiritual savant, it probably makes more sense to read her action as one of extreme gratefulness for the restoration of Lazarus and her utter humility and servitude to Jesus because of that miraculous act.
In near-Eastern tradition the head, not the feet, of an honored guest would be anointed at a banquet as a symbol of the elevated importance of that individual. In Mark and Matthew’s anointing stories they are focused on Jesus’ “kingship.” Hence the luxurious unguent is applied to Jesus’ head. But here in John’s gospel, Mary’s gesture not only highlights her humility before Jesus’ presence and power. It also foreshadows the foot-washing Jesus himself will offer to each of his own disciples in John’s next chapter. John’s focus is on servitude and sacrifice, not kingship and glory, at this point in his gospel.
With what sounds like a first-hand recollection, John describes how Mary’s actions transformed the table. Lazarus’ body, and his whole home, which so recently had been desecrated with what Martha had so bluntly described as the “stench” of death (11:39), is now “filled with the fragrance of the perfume.” Jesus’ presence had not just beat back death. It had transformed life bringing an unexpected richness and sweetness.
But even into this fragrant environment John wafts a whiff of what is to come. John identifies Judas as a sour note within this atmosphere of sweetness. As in 6:71 John specifically identifies Judas as “Iscariot” and as “the one who was about to betray him” (v.4). Judas objects to Mary’s anointing of Jesus on what appears to be humanitarian grounds. The costly nard could have been sold and “the money given to the poor” (v.5). Judas’ estimated value of the nard is “three hundred denarii” — a sum that was equal to an entire year’s wages (one denari/day, no work on Sabbaths) of a common laborer — a truly vast amount.
But John’s text adds a revealing disclosure. According to the fourth gospel writer, Judas, as the “treasurer,” not only kept the common purse (or more accurately, “money box”) for Jesus and his disciples. He was also a “thief” — embezzling from those donated funds for his own use. Although John is the only gospel writer to level this accusation against Judas, it is telling that almost immediately after being denied access to the funds the nard might have provided Judas goes on his own fund-raising mission to the chief priests — offering them Jesus in exchange for thirty pieces of silver.
Jesus quashes Judas’s objection and defends Mary’s extravagant action. Jesus demands Judas “leave her alone.” Despite the festive circumstances — Lazarus’ return from the tomb, a communal Sabbath meal, the anticipation of Passover — Jesus himself brings up the topic of death. The nard money that had anointed him had been “kept for the day of my burial.” There are several grammatical problems with the translation of Jesus’ description here. Literally the text reads that Mary kept the nard “so that she might keep it for the preparation of my burial.”
Of course, Mary had not “kept” the nard. She had just now opened it and spilled it out upon Jesus. But Mary had clearly “kept” this costly perfume for some great occasion. And it is probably this kind of “keeping” to which the text alludes. What Mary poured out in humble gratefulness Jesus reinterprets as an anointing for his own burial, for he already feels the weight of the cross upon his shoulders.
Jesus’ reminder that “you always have the poor with you” repeats the lesson of Deuteronomy 15:11. The Jewish traditions of tithes and almsgiving had long accepted that truth and had tried to compassionately address that reality. It is a new, once-and-for-all reality to which Jesus calls attention: “you do not always have me.” As he prepares to enter Jerusalem Jesus feels the commencement of the countdown. His time on earth is limited, his final gift is about to be opened.