Hilton Head Island, SC - March 26, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 10:38-42, Mark 14:3-9
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burying. - Mark 14:8 (RSV)
THE PLACES OF THE PASSION 2) BETHANY
The village of Bethany was – and still is – located on the southeast shoulder of the Mount of Olives. Since the Six Day War in 1967, Bethany has been in the occupied territory of the Palestinians. Prior to that time many of the village residents were Christians, because a few important episodes in the life of Jesus occurred there. There is a large and impressive church in the center of the town. Close to the church is the tomb of Lazarus, to which I shall refer later.
Bethany was where several important events took place within days of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Bethany was therefore a place in which pivotal actions were accomplished. Bethany is mentioned eight times in the four Gospels, and in seven instances what happened there was a prelude to Good Friday and Easter. In the eighth citation (only in the last chapter of Luke), it was the place from which Jesus ascended into heaven.
Bethany also was Jesus' home away from home. Jesus lived in Capernaum on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee during his three-year ministry, to the degree that he lived in any particular place. Whenever he went to Jerusalem, which he probably did at least three times a year, he stayed in the home of the sisters Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus, and we hear about them in half of the biblical accounts about Bethany.
Although Luke doesn’t actually say it, it was in Bethany where the memorable incident regarding Mary and Martha took place. Remember it (Lk. 10:38-42)? It's the story where Mary wanted to listen to Jesus talk, and that irked Martha. She was fixing dinner, and she expected her sister to help. "Lord," she said, "do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Please tell her to help me." But Jesus said, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which shall not be taken away from her."
Remember? Christians are divided into two parts: those who side with Mary, and those who side with Martha. Nobody stands in the middle; everyone leans one way or the other. The Martha-ists are pragmatists. They know certain things must be done, and eating is one of those things. "To keep the engine running, you have to provide some fuel," and all that. Mary-ists, on the other hand, want to be where the intellectual and spiritual action is. For them food is a secondary or tertiary consideration of what is important in life. It may be that Martha-ists live to eat, and Mary-ists eat to live. My mother always sided with Martha, but my father sided with Mary. Genetically I think I got a good genetic dose of both parents with each of those positions.
The home of the two sisters and Lazarus was where Jesus and the disciples stayed whenever he came to Jerusalem. Bethany is only about two miles from the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. So Bethany had a special place in Jesus' heart, because His three friends had a special place in his heart.
It was in Bethany where Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, according to the Fourth Gospel. Remember that story (John 11)? Somebody came to tell Jesus that Lazarus was seriously ill, and that he should come right away. Instead, Jesus deliberately stayed longer where he was, for reasons I will not take time here to explain. And thus Lazarus died before Jesus arrived in Bethany.
When Jesus came to Bethany, Lazarus had already been dead four days. The sisters were told Jesus was coming, and Martha ran to meet Him, but Mary stayed at home. The woman of action, Martha, had to do something, but the woman of contemplation and reflection, Mary, needed the quiet of her home to continue to sort through her feelings and her grief. Different strokes for different folks. The world is divided into two kinds of people....
There followed the famous conversation which resulted in Jesus telling Martha, "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die." And then, standing beside Lazarus' tomb, Jesus shouted, "Lazarus, come forth!", and from the sepulcher, carved out of solid rock, the deceased Lazarus emerged, miraculously alive once again. In the movies King of Kings and Jesus of Nazareth, it is a singularly powerful moment, and in one of them, maybe King of Kings, an off-screen choir immediately breaks into a spine-tingling, hair-raising, hundred-decibel rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus.
Bethany was the place where Jesus began the Palm Sunday procession. He left the home of His three friends, riding on a strong donkey. Jesus rode through Bethphage, the next village closer in toward Jerusalem, and then down the side of the Mount of Olives into the Kidron Valley, and up onto the Temple Mount.
According to Mark's Gospel, two days after Palm Sunday, Jesus was in Bethany on what we now call Holy Tuesday, that is, the Tuesday of Holy Week. He was in the home of a man identified only as Simon the leper. Mark never mentioned this man before. There are other Simons, several of them, but not Simon the leper.
First of all, it is worth noting that Jesus went to a leper's home. In today's context, it would be like going to the home of someone suffering from Covid or the new lethal fungus we just heard about in the last week. Many people in Jesus' time believed every illness was a curse from God because of a sin or sins which the person must have committed, and leprosy was considered one of the most loathsome of diseases. It was not contagious, but apparently most people thought it was.
Jesus did not let super-fastidiousness regarding sickness stand in the way of showing kindness or concern for a person in need. He went to the home of Simon the leper because nobody else would go there. He showed love toward a man whom no one else would come near. Jesus never forgets any of us in our need, any of us! When we are in trouble, he is there. When we are lonely or grief-stricken or bereft, he is there. When others have forgotten us or neglected us or ignored us, Jesus is there.
And it was there, three days before his crucifixion, at the home of Simon the leper in Bethany, that a woman came into the house, carrying an alabaster jar of nard. This story is found almost verbatim in both Matthew and Mark. Nard was a very expensive ointment, imported all the way from northern India. It was a kind of perfume, but it also was used to prepare bodies for burial. In John it was Martha who anointed Jesus with the ointment on Holy Tuesday, not an anonymous woman. The stories were remembered long after they happened, but the details got lost in the telling.
The woman took the nard and poured it on Jesus' head. Some of the people standing there were angry. "Why this waste?" they grumbled. "That ointment cost a great deal of money! The money should have been given to the poor!" In one Gospel it was the disciples who berated the woman, and in the other it was some unidentified onlookers whose noses were put out of joint. Great story: sketchy details.
Here is a detail none of the Gospel writers mentioned, but I think it is the key to understanding the underlying importance of this incident. When Jesus got to the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, I believe he had to have been physically, mentally, and psychologically exhausted. Furthermore, he knew he was about to be killed. If you doubt that, it is well to recall several historic deaths which suggest that Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X all knew they too were going to be killed before it happened. I have visited hundreds of people in the hospital or in their homes over the past six decades. Some of them told me they were about to die, and they were correct
Furthermore, when Jesus came to Bethany for the last time, he may have been concerned that his whole life and ministry had come to naught, and he may have been very depressed. There are two incidents in the Gospels which suggest that. In all four accounts of the Last Supper, Jesus seems very sad and subdued. Further, in the crucifixion accounts of both Mark and Matthew, on the cross Jesus recited the opening verse of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”
So it may have been that Jesus was very morose about his ministry at its end, and perhaps he was afraid it might have been a complete failure. When whoever it was who castigated the woman for anointing Jesus with the expensive nard (a group of people in the Synoptic Gospels but Judas Iscariot in the Gospel of John), Jesus strongly castigated them. "Let her alone," Jesus shouted. "Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you will, you can do good to them; but you will not always have me" (Mark 14:6-7).
The episode with the anointing was just two days before Jesus' arrest, and three days before His crucifixion --- and he knew his time was short. Perhaps he did not know exactly when it was coming, but come it would, and soon. Nonetheless, this lady, whether she was Mary as it says in John or someone unknown to anyone else as it is in the Synoptics, she sensed in her deepest being that the man she may have perceived to be God’s Messiah was in the bleakest moment he had ever known, and she took it upon herself to enact an extravagant gesture to indicate to everyone who was there but especially to Jesus that he was worthy to be buried as an anointed king.
Remember Memphis? April 3, 1968? A black preacher was making an impromptu sermon in the Mason Street Temple, a church in the black community of the old river town in West Tennessee. With a kind of wistful, prescient awareness he said, "I don't know what will happen now. We have got difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter to me because I have been to the mountaintop. Like anyone else, I would like to live a long life. But I'm not concerned with that. I just want to do God's will, and He has allowed me to go up the mountain. I see the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land." Then the young preacher seemed to resolve his own inner turmoil, and with a visible new confidence he declared, "I am happy tonight that I am not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory" --- he intended to say "of the coming of the Lord" --- but the agitated voices of the crowd drowned out his voice. And his sermon was finished. On the next day, April 4, 1968, the Thursday before Palm Sunday, his life was finished. That afternoon, James Earl Ray peered through a telescopic sight as Martin Luther King stood on a motel balcony, and in a couple of cruel seconds it was all over.
Sometimes, when enemies are persistent enough and hatred is strong enough, people who become martyred know it is coming. They can feel death in the air, they can sense it, they can taste its bitter threat.
A woman in Bethany helped ease that awareness for Jesus of Nazareth. In the home of Simon the leper or in the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus she poured some very expensive ointment over the head of Jesus, and to him her selfless act of love was the one necessary thing which enabled him to go forth in confidence to his death. Maybe she didn't know how important it was that she did what she did, but he knew. "She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burying. And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she had done will told in memory of her.”
The woman in Bethany expected nothing in return from Jesus for what she did; she just did it. She felt compelled to do it. And for the next two days, it gave Jesus sufficient encouragement to go on. It also gave him enough inner strength to die, and for two more days that's how he needed to live.
We can be certain that some kind of anointing occurred, probably in Bethany, and it involved either Mary or some other woman using costly ointment to anoint Jesus. Whether any or all three events happened exactly as we are told is beside the point; the point is that in the mind of Jesus, what happened in Bethany was a beautiful prelude to a monstrous injustice.
Did the woman do what she did out of love? If so, what kind of love? The love of all all humanity (agape)? Erotic love (eros), the love of a woman for a man? The love of a disciple for her teacher? Whatever prompted it, Jesus was overcome with gratitude for it, and that lady may have given him the necessary strength to go through the next three days with renewed confidence, knowing that his life had not been in vain. Mahalia Jackson:
If I can help somebody as I travel along,
If I can help somebody with a word or song,
If I can keep somebody from doing wrong,
Then my living will not be in vain.
Bethany became important not because of what it was in itself but because of who once passed through there. In a world with far too much ambivalence and meaninglessness and far too much hatred and violence, a woman in Bethany anointed Jesus with some costly nard, and it gave him enough courage to go on to what he knew was waiting for him: a starkly cruel cross on a strangely holy hill.
The woman of Bethany gave Jesus what he most needed: the assurance that he, like everyone else, was worthy of lavish love, even when others were seeking to engineer his death. Jesus told those who grumbled at her extravagance, "She has done what she could."
Did you catch that, Christian people? She did what she could! She couldn't do what she couldn't do! She couldn't stop Jesus' enemies, she couldn't turn back the terrible tide running against him, she could not lift him on angels' wings out of his calamitous struggle with theological and political enemies, but she could enable Jesus to emerge triumphant for the last scene. She could be kind to him; she could show her love for him; she could prepare him for his burial when he was still alive, when he could know of her devotion and her concern. She did what she could.
That was enough. It happened in Bethany, where several important actions were accomplished. "She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burying. Truly I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her."