radical hospitality.

i know i just preached, but since i didn't preach at all january and february, i guess i have some making up to do :) what actually happened was the rector was coordinating a diocesan retreat yesterday and they had a drama at the later, more popular service, so i volunteered to write a sermon for the small early service, which is where i've been preaching about once a month for the past year.

and the passage was John 12:1-8 which is one of my favourite gospel passages out of all of them.

Radical Hospitality

Did everyone see the media frenzy back in the fall about the whole “Jesus’ wife” thing? A scholar at Harvard discovered an ancient papyrus fragment from Egypt that had the words “Jesus said, ‘my wife...’” written on it. The whole thing was hard to miss... It was on CNN, ABC, NBC, all the news stations. People were speculating and commenting. Even the Vatican came out with a strong statement accusing it of being a modern forgery.

The whole thing got me thinking, you know, why is this such a frenzy? Why are the mass media, companies with budgets in the millions of dollars, spending so much time and energy on a little fragment of papyrus, a couple inches square, and an obscure researcher at Harvard working in the incredibly obscure field known as “papyrology”? You know, the down-to-brass-tacks practical question of what makes them think they’re going to get their money back from this story?

Let’s face it: Christianity is big news. And not only things that appear to question orthodox Christian belief like this papyrus. The media frenzy and circus around the election of the new Pope is pretty much identical. Pope Francis gave an audience just yesterday to 6900 reporters and media staff. Almost seven thousand men and women came to hear the Pope, not to receive spiritual guidance or wisdom, but because it’s their job, and they are getting paid to send news of this man all over the world.

But what struck me as almost funny about the coverage of that little papyrus was the superficiality of it. As I said, papyrology is a pretty obscure field, and you really can’t expect journalists to dig into the nuances and details of this field that they report on maybe once or twice in five years. But it wasn’t only papyrology that got a superficial coverage, it was Christianity itself. No one, at least that I saw, bothered to talk about early Coptic Christianity in Egypt, the community that probably created the papyrus. Is it because this is also an obscure branch of Christianity, or is it because this community is currently being threatened by the new Islamist government in Egypt, and contemporary politics are too much of a hot potato to be in a story about Jesus and his wife?

And no one, again, at least that I saw, ever commented about one of the names for the church in the Bible itself. Do you know what the church is called in the New Testament? Yeah, it’s called Christ’s bride. The author of Ephesians compares the relationship of a husband and wife with Jesus and the church. In fact, he gets so enraptured with his metaphor that he actually has to stop halfway through this exalted rhetoric to comment “oh wait, but I am talking about Christ and the church.” At the end of the visions in the book of Revelation, “The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’” They invite everyone to “take the water of life as a gift.” This image seems to parallel the visions in Isaiah of Israel welcoming the nations to Jerusalem to worship the one God of Israel, with the church as the inviting bride.

Is it so surprising, then, that we might find an ancient writing from a tradition that scholars know was heavily mystical, where Jesus refers to his wife? A professor last semester, who has his Ph.D. in papyrology suggested just that: that this fragment might not be written about a human wife for Jesus, but it might have been written to encourage the church as the bride of Christ. Especially considering that the rest of the sentence has been torn off the papyrus fragment, we really have no idea. Even the Harvard researcher who made the discovery was cautious, commenting that this proves nothing one way or the other about the historical, human Jesus. Her voice did tend to be downed out, however, by the excitement!

But the other thing that struck me in the coverage is that whenever anyone goes searching the gospels fro a wife for Jesus, the inevitably latch on to Mary Magdalene. And it makes me wonder, why not this Mary in our gospel passage today? She is not Mary Magdalene, but Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus.

Imagine the scene. There is a banquet. People are reclining on couches. They are probably all getting ready for the Passover which will start in a few days. Maybe they are talking about the trip to Jerusalem, tensions with the Roman military occupiers, gossiping about the priests in Jerusalem. Maybe Martha is encouraging them to eat up all the bread, because you cannot have anything with yeast in the house during Passover. Lazarus and his family may have been giving the banquet to thank Jesus for raising him from the dead. And in the middle of the dinner, Mary, the sister of the host, in fact probably one of the hosts herself, comes in, breaks a stone jar of perfume over Jesus’ feet, and then unveils her hair and wipes his feet with it.

Do you know how intimate an act that is? She is touching, caressing him. She has unveiled her hair in the presence of all the guests, especially all the unrelated men in her house, and she is wiping the feet of her rabbi with it. A woman’s hair in the Middle East is a symbol of her sexuality. It is no coincidence that, even at its most minimal, the Islamic hijab covers a woman’s hair, or that observant orthodox Jewish women cover their hair so that after they are married, no man sees their hair but their husband.

And what is the objection to her act? It is not, as it is in a slightly different version in Luke, that the woman is sexually impure. There is no comment on her sexuality at all. And it is not the objection about status which Peter gives in the very next chapter when Jesus washes his disciples’ feet. Much has been made in commentaries about Jesus washing feet that it was a slave’s job. But that is not the objection here. Instead what Judas objects to is the financial impropriety of her act. Not even Mary’s brother comments at the way she is opening herself and her family up for accusations of dishonor. No, all anyone seems to care about is the waste of money.

The financial equivalent is actually quite hard to work out in this case. A denarius was a silver coin of the Roman Empire, and it was what a daily laborer would get paid. These are like the people who are hired to work in the vineyards, in Jesus’ parables. There was no middle class as we think of it in the Roman Empire, so to call something like this “minimum wage” would be misleading. It would be enough to keep a family on. So something more like a construction contractor’s yearly income, maybe. According to the U.S. government, that would be something around $35,000. Mary pours $35,000 worth of perfume on Jesus’ feet.

So when I think about the intimacy and the extravagance of this event, not just the financial extravagance but also the personal risk involved, do I think this Mary was Jesus’ wife?

No, not really. For one, this is the only hint of any kind of relationship between these two. For another, we don’t know if her brother and sister berated her in private afterwards. For a third reason, I think this extravagance can be explained by the fact that just in the previous chapter, Jesus raised her brother from the dead. This does not seem an unrealistic response of gratitude to me. Her family is already giving a dinner for Jesus and all his disciples. We can surmise both from the apparent size of the party to the fact that the family owned a jar of perfume worth that much money that they were very wealthy. It is even possible that the nard had been meant for Lazarus, and when Jesus raised him from the dead, the siblings decided to anoint Jesus with it out of gratitude. I think, though, that we can rule out that they expected Mary to wipe Jesus’ feet with her hair. That was her own offering, her own sacrifice of her dignity and honor for Jesus’ sake.

And what is Jesus’ response? Does he protect her sexual honor? No again. He simply accepts her sacrifice and protects her from criticism of her financial decision. “Jesus said, ‘Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.’”

Many scholars see an echo of Deuteronomy 15:11 in Jesus’ reply here, so like a good seminary student, like a good preacher, I went and looked it up. And indeed, the two comments are remarkably similar. But what was even more interesting was the context of Deuteronomy 15. Deuteronomy 15:11 comments that there will always be poor in the land, but the chapter is not about the poor, but it is about the Sabbath year. Every seventh year, ancient Israel was supposed to cancel everyone’s debts. Deuteronomy chapter 15 is mostly concerned with laying down the procedure for loans to be cancelled from repayment. 15:11 comes at the end of an instruction not to take the proximity of the Sabbath year into account when making a loan. “Be careful that you do not entertain a mean thought, thinking, 'The seventh year, the year of remission, is near,' and therefore view your needy neighbor with hostility and give nothing.”

God turns our economic practices on their heads. The Israelites are instructed to give loans, not only without consideration of interest income, but even without consideration of ever being paid back! Mary’s personal risk in this story takes it even further. Not only does she give extravagantly financially, but she also gives extravagantly of her own dignity, personal status, and sexual reputation.

Every week, when the gospel passage is read here, we affirm that it is the gospel of the Lord. And we praise Christ for giving us his gospel. This is a gospel that calls us to an uncomfortable, a radically uncomfortable re-ordering of the way things work. The gospel of Jesus Christ calls us to extravagant hospitality and extravagant personal and financial risk without any consideration of what we might “get back,” or even, in some cases, what consequences we might suffer. Mary could not know that Jesus would defend her, although she surely knew that someone would object to her actions. And she did it anyway.

May our own risks and gifts be made, not with the risk-reward, “how am I going to make my money back” calculations, but with obedience to the gospel and such love of our rabbi and our Lord.

Amen.