Unbelievable Yet Unforgettable

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on April 3 2022 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: John 12: 1-8

A couple of weekends ago, on the last day of the Six Nations Rugby Championship, Wales were playing Italy. Wales, the defending champions, hadn’t had a great season, but were glad to finish up by playing lowly Italy, the also-rans of the tournament, who’d lost their previous 35 games in a row. Italy put up a fight, but with two tries, the Welsh left wing, Josh Adams, single-handedly dragged Wales into the lead. Maintaining a rather foolish tradition, with two minutes to go, the commentator announced the man of the match, awarding it to Adams. The co-commentator said, ‘Hang on, this game isn’t over yet, you might have spoken too soon.’ Sure enough, the Italians rampaged close to the Welsh line. Then the Welsh hoofed the ball far beyond the half-way line, and the co-commentator said, ‘No worries, looks like you’re off the hook.’ Whereupon, in one of the great moments in recent rugby history, the young, sylph-like Italian fullback, in his first international start, weaved past Josh Adams’ flailing tackle and all the way to the line where his killer pass enabled his wing to score and sensationally win the match for the Italians in the dying seconds. The Wales players were distraught; the Italians, ecstatic. Unbelievable. Yet unforgettable.

But the best was yet to come. In a quiet moment a few minutes later, while still on the pitch, the disconsolate Josh Adams walked over to his young Italian opponent, whose brilliance had brought about the winning try, and handed him his man-of-the-match medal, saying, ‘This needs to come to you.’ Somehow Adams rose above the disappointment of losing, the wretchedness of having missed the crucial tackle, the recognition that his great performance had been in vain, and the competitive spirit that befits an athlete, and made a gesture that will stay in the memory long after his career is over and the result of the game forgotten – a gesture that transcends sport, and speaks of humility, generosity, and appreciation for another human being. To employ an over-used sporting expression, it was an iconic moment. It was like a sign – a sign pointing to a bigger world of true reverence and genuine respect. Unbelievable. Yet unforgettable.

John’s gospel is made up of signs. Jesus makes his way around Galilee and back and forth to Jerusalem, and in every place, he performs signs – turning water into wine, giving sight to the man born blind, raising Lazarus from the dead. The most significant sign of all is the sign of the cross. Each of these signs is a depiction of who Jesus is, and what kind of life he’s inviting us into. But there’s one sign that’s different from all the others. The difference is that, whereas Jesus performs one sign after another, this sign isn’t performed by Jesus. It’s performed by Mary, the sister of Martha and of Lazarus, whom Jesus has just raised from the dead. Rather like Josh Adams handing over his man-of-the-match award, Mary’s sign transcended its setting in a meal, maybe a meal to celebrate Lazarus’ return: no one remembers what they ate that night; but what Mary did has never been forgotten.

So what did Mary do? She did three things, all of which in different ways were both extraordinarily beautiful and utterly outrageous. First, she wasted a huge sum of money. If you go by the figure Judas quotes, you’re talking about the average annual wage of a person in first-century Palestine, or £30,000 in today’s money. That’s a lot of money to spend on perfume, and it’s even more money if what you’re going to do is pour the whole lot over someone’s feet. You can see the open mouths. It’s shocking, but mesmerising. Unbelievable. Yet unforgettable.

The second thing she did was to break social taboos on a grand scale. Feet more or less correspond to the nether regions in the first-century imagination. They need washing, because this is not a culture that has a fully developed appreciation for woollen socks: but that washing was generally the job of a non-Jewish slave. What feet weren’t used to receiving was the touch by an equal; touching by a woman, horror of horrors – this is intimacy to a spectacular degree – and not just touching by hands, but rubbing, and caressing and surrounding by hair. Hair! Can you imagine? Let’s not pretend our so-called permissive society doesn’t have sexual taboos. But can you imagine a culture, in which for a woman even to be seen in public with a man outside her family was pretty racy, goggling at what’s going on here? You can hear the cartoon eyes popping out on stalks. Everyone’s horrified: but they can’t look away. It’s erotic – but it’s something more powerful even than that – it’s a sign of utter devotion. Unbelievable. Yet unforgettable.

The third thing Mary did was to prepare Jesus’ body for burial. This kind of perfume was what you put on a dead body to stop it rotting before you put it in a tomb. Presumably she’d put a cheaper version on Lazarus not long before. But if pouring away a huge amount of money was reckless, and washing the oil off with her hair was salacious, this was either morbid – or inexplicable. Here’s a man in the prime of life, with a host of followers and doing miracles for toffee; and you start preparing his body for the grave. What on earth does she think she’s doing? Unbelievable. Yet unforgettable.

Why does it matter? Why is this more than a faraway story of faraway people in a land long ago? Because this isn’t fundamentally about £30,000 of perfume, or a woman having the courage to cross a few boundaries out of sheer devotion, or about being the only one in the room to realise the person you all love is about to die. This is about God. This is about a God who crossed a thousand boundaries to kneel at our feet. This is about a God who was so devoted to us as to face death for us. This is, fundamentally about a God whose life is so poured out in love for us that the odour of devotion doesn’t just fill the whole room – it fills the whole universe. The reason this sign is so important is that a disregarded woman portrays for us the truth at the heart of all things. God’s reckless, transgressive, death-defying pouring-out of all the wealth and glory of the universe into the embodiment of love for us in Jesus. And Mary, pondering the wonder and the mystery of her brother’s being raised to life, is the first person in John’s gospel not just to realise who Jesus is, not just to appreciate the enormity of what her represents, but to set about imitating him in all his overflowing and superabundant extravagance. Mary realises Jesus doesn’t just want our worship, he wants us to follow his path. The best form of worship is to do just as he does. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Mary turns her life into an icon of God’s love. It’s ridiculous, embarrassing, criminal, dangerous, wasteful. But she doesn’t care. Because so is God.

Judas is having none of it. He does the maths. He’s using what philosophers call the utilitarian calculus – he’s working out what will bring about the greatest happiness for the greatest number. He wants to sell the perfume, parcel out the proceeds into little bundles, and make sure the benefit goes in some degree of relief for those experiencing food poverty. He’s trying to manage the unmanageable. The question for Judas is, ‘Is your scheme a way of imitating God’s extravagant love, or is it a way of so managing a problem that it no longer requires extravagant love?’ Judas and Mary represent contrasting ways to respond to Jesus. Judas fixes problems with rational answers so passionate displays of extravagant love are unnecessary, and all human challenges can find suitable solutions. Mary jeopardises her economic security, sexual reputation, and social standing by imitating the wondrous love of God.

Today we have before us young baby George and young baby Estella. We’ve just performed a sign, by which we’ve reenacted the Hebrews’ crossing-over from slavery to freedom, and our own crossing-over from death to life. The question for George and Estella is, how are you going to use that freedom; how are you going to live that life?

I wonder how you think about your life. We don’t get long: threescore years and ten, maybe fourscore; sometimes a lot less. Is our life fundamentally a shrewd calculation of how to squeeze the most out of scarce resources, a sober estimate of days to be lived, materials to be consumed, impact to be measured, mark to be left? Or is our life to be like Mary’s: an icon of God’s desire for and devotion to us? Imagine your whole life crystallised into one portrait: wouldn’t you want it to be a portrait that embodied God’s extravagant love? There comes a moment for each of us where all our striving, studying, searching, surviving is stilled into one iconic gesture: Mary shows us a gesture that fills a whole room, a gesture of a love whose fragrance pervades the whole universe. Mary was no one special: someone’s sister. But we’re still talking about her, because she made a gesture that embodied a thousand prayers, a sign that pointed to the heart of God.

Baby George and baby Estella, may you have parents who love you with the extravagant love of God. May you grow up in a community of faith that embodies divine abundance, and isn’t caught up in parcelling out and managing human scarcity. May you be a person of whom people say, ‘That’s taking it a bit far!’ or ‘Watch it! You’re wasting all those resources on something as useless as devotion and passion and beauty.’ May you be a person of whom others are embarrassed because you’re uncomfortably like Jesus, a person whose gestures are remembered in 2000 years’ time because they depict heaven, a person whose life is an icon of God’s wondrous love. And may you grow to be a person who, like Mary, does something unbelievable. Yet unforgettable. As unbelievable and unforgettable as the revelation of God’s extravagant desire for us.