FINDINGS IV By Harry T. Cook

 

 

Lent V - C - March 17, 2013
Isaiah 43: 16-21; Philippians 3:4b-14; John 12: 1-8
 

 


 

Harry T. Cook
Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook 

3/11/13



The Revised Common Lectionary is setting us up for the onset of Passiontide and Easter. We will be bidden by the second Isaiah to "perceive" a new thing that Yahweh claims to be doing, something springing forth in a wilderness, a river in a desert suggesting refreshment, even the reinstatement of life itself. What we may be hearing is the immediate post-exilic euphoria in which the returning remnant cites the god of its fathers as the agent of its redemption.
 
Paul is telling the Philippians that he wants "to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death ..." The crescendo is building for both Paul and those who would hear and read his words that were apparently dictated while he was in a venue of power, maybe Caesarea or Ephesus (see 1: 12-26) or maybe even from his Roman imprisonment, ca. 61-63 C.E.
 
It is reasonable to infer from the context that Paul thought the end was near for him and he, making the best of it, falls back on his vision of the risen Christ about which he exulted in the 15th chapter of the first Corinthian letter. He is warning his flock that conflict and death will, perhaps must, come before joy.
 
We're in for plenty of conflict as we make the last stop at Bethany before plunging with John's gospel on into Jerusalem.
 
John begins chapter 12 rather blandly, saying Jesus had come (actually returned) to the Bethany village and home of Lazarus, which in chapter 11 was called "the village of Mary and her sister Martha." John puts in apposition these words about Lazarus: "whom he (Jesus) had raised from the dead." The context of these eight brief verses is a dinner given for (probably also "to") Jesus in the sense that it was given in his honor. Martha, of course, is serving as we found her at Luke 10: 40-42. Mary is left to administer extreme unction to Jesus, leaving Judas, who is a chapter and a half from here to go out on his fateful errand, to object to the cost of the anointing agent.
 
Iscariot: From Issachar or Sychar? A
σικαριος (terrorist)? Or as Raymond Brown suggested "the ruddy-colored" or red-hair one -- based on the Semitic root "sqr" associated with the color red?* In one of the Last Supper mosaics in an apse of the Basilica of San Marco in Venice one can see Judas depicted with red-hair. But in the end the appellation "Iscariot" remains somewhat of a mystery. 

 
Some of us who have lived with these texts forever sometimes think Judas was an anti-Semitic invention to help move along the plot. In any event, at issue is the "costly perfume made of pure nard" -- nard being a fragrant oil from the root of a plant native to northern India, clearly expensive. Mary is depicted as anointing Jesus' feet with it.  This is not the first time we have heard of such a thing. An unnamed woman is depicted as doing it at Mark 14: 3-9 and in Luke 7, a woman "who was a sinner" does it also. Here, however, in the Johannine take on what must have been a familiar story gone the rounds, the act is connected to the anointing for burial -- an event that is understood to be in Jesus' near future. (Of course, the gospel writer knew the end of the story before he crafted his version of its beginning and middle.)
 
One unfortunate thing about this passage is Jesus' dismissal of Judas' concern about how the 300 denarii spent on the nard could more intelligently be spent on the poor. John intimates that Judas is "a thief." Jesus is made to object to Judas' feigned parsimony: "You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me." That implied egotism goes right along with John's picture of Jesus saying all those "I am" things. The Jesus of Mark's and Thomas' gospels would not have been thus quoted.
 
The reference to the persistent presence of the poor may be to Deuteronomy 15:11: "Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you to 'Open your hand to the poor and needy in your land.'" That, of course, puts a different spin on the "poor you always have with you" statement that has been taken out of context by plenty of "good Christians" who have objected to the church's involvement in works of mercy, perhaps preferring well-appointed altars and naves.
 
The church is about to embark upon its most self-consciously intense days. Attention must be paid, the religious authorities say, to the liturgies of Passiontide and Easter. Such liturgies must be made as grand as possible. Why?
 
One answer is that the church uses this passage of time to recall the willing and heroic martyrdom of its legendary central figure, much in the way that huge state funerals of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. recalled the substance of their lives. Such occasions take on a sober yet celebrative aspect of their own as a personage of incalculable significance is mourned even as his or her contribution to the world is lifted up for recognition and praise.
 
No poor person was known to have decried the solemn splendor of Lincoln's or Gandhi's or King's funerals. Only those who perceived a personal loss because the poor were lifted up would have dared to breathe so much as word of criticism.
 
So, yes, the larger-than-life figure of Jesus -- whoever he may have been in the imaginations of the first evangelists -- is eminently worthy of the great liturgies of the church as long as they stress in their splendor the ethical wisdom attributed to him, viz. turning other cheek and loving the enemy, the embrace and cultivation of poverty for the sake of being unencumbered in the single-minded aim of getting people to recognize that the holiness they seek in religious observance is already within them individually and among them collectively.
 
If it takes processions, litanies and much ritual business to turn people's attention to that simple but crucial message, then by all means fire up the thurible, lay on the incense, don the vestments, form the procession and let organ and trumpets sound. Have the book of the gospels borne in solemn honor. Let it be read from in authoritative tone. Let the homilist tell what is to be found in it, to wit: The essential wisdom of those who believed life would be better for all if individuals would treat others as they wished to be treated themselves.   

 

*Brown, Raymond E., The Death of the Messiah, 1994, Doubleday (Anchor Bible Reference Library), Vol. II, p. 1416

   


� Copyright 2013, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.


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