Lent 5 C
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Watts in a Story
John 12:1-8
The gospel is a highly charged scene. It cannot be summed up or settled down. It is not some byline covering a dinner party in the “socials.” The currents running though this passage flow right on through the grid to other destinations, so typical of John in his literary shaping of “signs.”
We can focus on any part of the scene and that part will do its work from its setting on the grid, flowing right through this cozy little dinner party in Bethany to places and things yet undetermined. No one really understands electricity.
You can scan the commentaries with citations to key the connections to some of the most obvious junctions:
- Mary's love;
- the place of the poor and the deutoronomic tradition;
- the ideological accommodations of Judaism in the Roman Empire and the rules of toleration; the players;
- Passover;
- Jesus, resurrection and the Lazarus incident;
- Judas Iscariot and betrayal;
- anointing at death.
These are highly charged, every one. Take Passover. In the Isaiah reading, the prophet switches on the language of the old Red Sea passage. It is now the Babylonian exile, so it is a Babylonian Red Sea passage. Electricity does strange things to geography. The prophet throws the switch and performs this “new” Passover as a done deal, in spite of the fact that, from the exiles' point of view, "We blew the first passage. That is why we are here! That Sinai stuff is a dead circuit." But the prophet is a driven man. He throws other switches: creation, wilderness transformations, vistas of the garden, covenant. The current cannot be contained. It is irresistible. Hence: in all of its years of exile and wandering, Israel never went off the grid.
The wattage of creation flows into our Bethany dinner party, virtually unchecked, right into the very first phrase of the story: “Six days before the Passover. . .” Just another dinner party? Whoa! The week before Passover is creation, soon to be written in the language of a new faith, and here we are, reclined on our couches after supper, at the very inception of the Creator's magnus opus. What is the expenditure of a pound of nard compared to the value of a new world? It is a question of scale, and poor Judas has no idea what he has walked into. Nor do we I imagine. We might as well admit that our motives for being here are mixed. There is always a betrayer, too. The politico. Checking polls. Calculating net returns. Will my being here [preach, teach, elect, endear, buy, sell, persuade, secure. . . ]?" He never lets his hair down. Totally off the grid.
Psalm 126 is another junction altogether. Here, Passover is a sweet memory, and the psalm is a tender prayer of thanksgiving that moves into a supplication which bends back to thanksgiving, but with a change: it concludes with a thanksgiving for the vision of Passover that is burned into our circuits. Hope does not necessarily depend on
those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, [they who] shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves. (126:6 NRSV)
- all the way to the cross. In John, at least, this triumphant vision is never far from the sorrow.
Mary is the lens for us to see the extravagance of a vision that spares no expense. A vision that senses enough of the wattage working its way in the room - enough of where the currents are coming from and where they are going, that all the conventional rules of propriety locked into the smallness of the present go out the window. She is on the same march as those whose tears will be the seeds of joy. The vision is her food and her life. She holds his feet in her hands at the very junction of flesh and blood. You can hear the current coursing in his veins.
Some people would call a dinner party in Bethany a minor blip on the radar. Iscariot, no doubt, is in that company. But then again, some people say similar things about the place you and I are right now. As if we had never opened these texts!
© 2010 Andy Gay