Sermon for the Episcopal Church of St John the Baptist, Capitola,

given by Rev. Eliza Linley/March 25, 2007 (St. Paul's, Salinas)

  The Episcopal Church of Saint John the Baptist welcomes all to worship God and to share

Christ's love in the world.  We are a parish family committed to provide liturgy, Bible study, music, counseling, and Christian education for children, youth, and adults, and to equip all our members for life and for service to other

“Mary took a pound of perfume made of pure nard.”

I have here a bottle of nard, or spikenard oil. This is the real deal, the stuff Mary used to anoint Jesus before his passion. Even today a tiny bottle like this costs $26, so you can imagine how much a pound would run you (about $2,600, give or take). I’m going to pass it around so you can open it and smell it. It doesn’t smell like any perfume that we’re used to. It’s very intense, and I think it smells very exotic. Nard comes from the valerian family, so it reduces stress, and it’s good for insomnia. Helps dry skin, too. It would be good on your feet. And Jesus’ feet must have needed it, those feet that had carried him hundreds of miles as he taught, and preached, and healed the sick, and raised the dead, like Lazarus, and were soon to carry him to death in Jerusalem. 

Smell is far and away the most evocative of our senses. If you dare, dab a drop on your wrist or on the bulletin, and you can, for the rest of the day, be immersed in first century Palestine, in the way it was at Mary and Martha and Lazarus’ house that night before Palm Sunday when Mary rubbed Jesus’ feet with her hair and everyone was shocked. Many years ago I went on a cruise to the island of Grenada in the Caribbean, where spices are grown. You can buy little carved soapstone boxes of perfume that is not liquid, but solid and waxy. I bought one, and it was so intense that it lasted for years. Whenever I used it I thought of Mary rubbing Jesus’ feet. It would have made the whole house reek for days. I guess maybe that was Mary’s point – she didn’t want anyone to dare forget what would be going on in Jerusalem that holy week that was just beginning. 

We remember Mary for her extravagant devotion, but the truly exorbitant gift, the crazy, reckless generosity was Jesus’ own death. Mary was an artist, one who draws our attention to this truth in a feast of touch and smell, a parable of the senses deeper than words could ever convey. The other piece of Mary’s parable is its echo on Maundy Thursday, when Jesus strips and washes the disciples’ feet, itself a parable of servanthood. 

The disciples didn’t get it then, either. “This could have been sold and the money given to the poor!” “Lord, you will never wash my feet!” Both of these comments betray an attitude that clothes self-regard in the robe of false humility and concern for others. But Judas, despite the editorial comment, and Simon Peter both meant well. What does it take for us modern-day disciples, like them, to realize that it’s not all about us, or that we cannot control poverty into submission? Jesus’ ideas, his transformational message, his gift of himself are so much bigger than we, most of the time, can even comprehend!

In Isaiah, God says, “I am about to do a new thing...I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches, for I giver water in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert”. Of all the beings in creation, Jackals and ostriches seem like about the last rag on the bush. Jackals are scavengers, stealing the food of other animals. They take what they haven’t worked for by stealth and cunning. Ostriches, on the other hand, are not known for their brains. They stick their heads in the sand when they are frightened. If these were people we were describing, we might sum them up as cynics and those in denial. And these are the ones who will honor God when the New Thing comes; when water springs out of the desert. Well, if jackals and ostriches can come to the party, surely we can, too. The New Thing for us is the transforming power of Christ – not 2,000 years ago, but now; new in our lives every day. When fear turns us into cynics and causes us to deny reality, when we despair for our old church and its future, when our nation and our overheated world seem to be going to hell in a handbasket, that is the time to remember. Remember the extravagant gift that Mary points us toward; remember the smell of anointing oil, remember Jesus in a loincloth, washing the feet of all who suffer, remember that God thinks bigger than we do.

St. Paul tells us that he’s no jackal. He’s no ostrich. Whatever credentials you’ve got, his are better. But none of that, he says, matters. Playing by the rules is not what it’s about, either. Selling the ointment was not a good idea. All he wants is to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and to share in his sufferings. And why? So he can live in the resurrection. That’s really what we want, too. What a relief to realize that the way to get there is not to follow all the rules, not to trudge out a life of obligation, but to spend ourselves for love.

They say that people who have smell associations with material they’ve learned remember those facts more clearly. Maybe that was what Mary had in mind, too, as she wiped Jesus’ feet with her hair. Sadly, Judas never did get it. But we can. We can let Jesus wash our feet. And, in washing the feet of others; in taking care of the poor and suffering, we are joining with Mary and anointing Jesus’ feet as well.