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What’s it like to sit at the dinner table across
from an old and dear friend who just a few days ago raised you from the
dead?
Lazarus had been good and
dead. We don’t know how he died, but I imagine he remembers the
suffering, the illness that robbed him incrementally of his health and
life and I expect he remembers that Jesus didn’t come when his sisters
sent for him, but I guarantee you that he remembers suddenly being
jolted back to life, feeling energy rush into his stiff limbs, the shock
of the absence of pain,
smelling the stench of his own rotting body that had infused the damp
and nasty burial clothing and the dense dark closed air of the stony
tomb.
I guarantee you he remembered
hearing his friend’s voice, calling, “ Lazarus, come out,” and
he’ll never forget those first stumbling, unbelieving steps, the first
blinding crack of the light, and the sight of his sisters standing
there, weeping and in shock. And the loving eyes and arms of his friend.
What do you talk about as you pass a plate of figs a couple of days
later with that friend? Food never tasted so good, but all the
trivialities that you used to banter about, the old jokes, the
reminiscences of good times past, well, what do you talk about?
What do you talk about if
your friend didn’t come when you called, when you sent after him to
come quickly and save your brother from dying? You’d known all along
he was extraordinary. You called him Lord as well as friend and had
welcomed him into your home for more than one supper but had also sat at
his feet and learned his wisdom as a disciple learns. You had witnessed
his signs and healings and you knew he was God’s own son, the messiah
of God come to bring freedom from
the oppression of the Romans just as Moses had liberated the children of
Israel
from Pharaoh. It is the celebration of Passover, just a few days away,
that brings him to town in the first place. But what do you say to him
who let you down before he finally showed up in his own good time and
raised your brother from the dead?
Jesus has been in this home many times before. We don’t know what he
did with the disciples that night. Maybe they were all there and John
just doesn’t tell us, or maybe it was only Judas. The most important
thing for Jesus, though, was that
he was with this little family, Lazarus, Martha, Mary, his dearest
friends, on the night before he was going to walk into
Jerusalem
. What do you say to them when you know full well that at daylight
you’ll be stepping into a situation that one way or another is going
to kill you?
How do you tell them, or do you even try, that you will see them again
beyond the threshold of death? That you will be tortured and humiliated
and killed and buried but break bread with them again before the week is
out?
It had to have been the strangest dinner any of them ever had been to.
The air must have been as heavy with unspoken questions as it was with
the aroma of roasted meat and garlic, the taste of wine and fresh baked
bread, the memory of the aroma of death still so near.
For us it is the last Sunday of Lent. Next week we’ll come to church
and pin palm crosses on our clothes and sing All Glory, Laud, and Honor
as we recall Jesus’ triumphal entry into
Jerusalem
, the crowds shouting hopeful hosannas. Some of us will observe the ever
darkening days of Holy Week before we arrive at Easter.
The Sunday readings of Lent have kept pace with Jesus while
he and his disciples have journeyed towards
Jerusalem
, and last week we read the story we all know as the Prodigal Son.
There’s so much to say about that story, a preacher could go on for
months about it, but one
thing I don’t remember saying anything about last week is the meaning
of the word prodigal. It simply means outrageously extravagant or
wasteful, and of course we think of that younger son as the prodigal,
the one who went to town and threw his inheritance away in bars and
brothels and boutiques. But at its heart, the story is not so much about
this wastrel boy as it is about the father, and the parable might even
more appropriately be called the Prodigal Father. The father who holds
nothing back, not his riches, not his dignity. The point of the story is
not a tidy moral such as we might get from one of Aesop’s fables as it
is a shocking answer to the question, Who is God?
We don’t know at what point Mary steps away from the table. We know
Martha well enough to expect that she’s noticing who is eating, who
might need more meat, whose glass is empty, how the conversation is
going and whether Jesus seems pleased. Lazarus? Well, we can forgive him
for being not quite himself. But Mary slips out for a moment and when
she returns she has a jar of ointment fit for a king, literally. To
translate it to our economy we might estimate it to have cost $100,000.
Spikenard only grows in the foothills of the
Himalayas
. Whoever sold it to Mary would have told her that the only place it is
found is the Garden of Eden itself, and so she would have paid anything
for it to have it now, on this perilous evening.
When she pulls the stopper
out of the jar the fragrance overpowers everyone. There is no more aroma
of the delicious meal and no more stink of death, and yet it is the
fragrance of death, the very perfume that anoints dead bodies to mask
their rotting.
Jesus is reclined at the table. That is how people ate, no chairs,
stretched out on a rug, and she begins to smear the oil on his feet and
she rubs it into the calluses that
have grown as he’s walked the roads of
Galilee
, she strokes it over his horned toenails and
between his toes where it streaks with dust. She caresses his feet, and
if that were not enough, she pulls the pins out of her long hair and
wipes his feet with its silk. His feet are now soft and sweet and her
hair is now oily and dusty and sweet and nobody remembers anything about
the dinner or the conversation except Judas, who throws cold water on
the whole scene. “We should have sold it and given the money to the
poor.” Judas, the crook, who is not thinking of the poor.
Jesus brings death back to
the table. “She bought it for my burial.” Mary is a prophet. “She
has anointed me before my death. The poor will always be with you.”
His point is not that the poor should not be taken care of. That is
something we are called to do every single day of our lives. Jesus has
always been and will always be the champion of the poor. His point now
is that only Judas does not see that
the prodigality of Mary is the foreshadowing of the prodigality of
Jesus, who in just two days’ time will spend his life recklessly for
the life of humanity. It is the overture for the prodigality of God, who
became incarnate to show us that there is absolutely nothing that he
would ever hold back, the creator of the universe, of supernovas and
galaxies and the Himalayas and cumulonimbus clouds, of quanta and koala
bears and dandelion puffs and cranky old human beings, to show us the
endlessness of his love for us.
For a few more days that love will be contained in the human body of
Jesus,
the one that will host his
own dinner party for his friends in an upper room in
Jerusalem
where he will command them to be that love to the world. He’ll take
off his tunic and wrap a towel around his waist to the chorus of their
protesting voices, Love one another as
I have loved you, he tells them, and
like Mary he will kneel down and take their rough feet in his hands and
show them what that prodigal love looks like.
Amen.
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