Lent 4 March 10th
Bishop Stephen Cotterell
He ate with tax collectors and sinners. Part 1
In the end, this was his undoing. He just wasn’t respectable enough. He mixed with the wrong sort of people. He wasn’t one of us. There was too much God in him, and not the ‘God-fearing sort of God’ the God professionals liked to peddle. His was a very down-to-earth God: a compassionate ‘on your side’ God; a completely understanding and ‘why not start again’ God. And it drove them mad, the God professionals, the scribes and Pharisees, the ones whose job it was to tell people who God was and who God wasn’t, and what following God looked like. They had the certificates to prove it. And the breeding. And he didn’t.
And he ate with all the wrong sort of people. He kept very bad company. He got in with a rum lot.
In that week, as one thing led to the next, he would withdraw to Bethany to his friends; and one day, eating in the home of Simon the Leper, his disciples with him and others laughing and jesting, a woman came in from the street carrying an alabaster jar of costly ointment, pure nard. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She had about her an air of quiet determination and a devotion that had already passed beyond the cares of what others may say. She knelt at Jesus’ feet. She broke the seal on the jar, and gently, lovingly, poured the oil on to his head.
Everyone stared in disbelief. Was he really going to let this woman do this to him? Wouldn’t he stop her?
So this woman, whoever she was and whatever she had done, and in spite of the prohibitions of his religion saying women, and for that matter lepers and small children, are not people to mix with, that they are unclean, he goes to them and he lets them come to him. He enjoys their company. He sees in them the very humanity he has taken to himself. He loves them.
So she pours the oil upon his head. It is warm, and its fragrance fills the air, musky and sweet. It gently trickles down his neck and on to his beard. He smiles at her, full of simple gratitude for the gift of this anointing. There is a joy between them.
But the others around the table – his disciples and all the rest – are agitated and angry. This is an expensive ointment. And this is a woman of possible ill repute, and anyway, a woman. What right does she have to do this? And where did this oil come from? It must have cost a fortune. Did she steal it? And if there is money to throw around on oil, wouldn’t it be better to give it to the poor? Yes, that is the line they take. A sudden concern for others bolsters their effrontery. After all, the best way to protect your own bank balance is to offer the very best advice to others about what they should do with theirs. It is as if talking about giving is itself enough.
But what she does is just give, and she goes on giving. And what he does is receive, and he goes on receiving. It is almost as if Jesus is not listening to the puffed-up yammer of their indignation. He has screened out the good advice and the implied good intentions of the extravagantly self-righteous who actually intend to do nothing, and is, instead, focused on the one who gives and is able to receive. He is undefended. And it is the shocking beauty of this generous vulnerability that draws all those who also long to receive and are able to offer themselves.
This is what he loved about the poor.
They were so generous. He called it ‘poor in spirit’, which was more (or is it less?) than the actual amount you possess, but an attitude to what you have, a sense that everything is gift, and that it comes unearned and undeserved. We enter this life with nothing. We leave with nothing, and in between it is a proper poverty of spirit that enables us to live with joyful gratitude and generosity, thankful for whatever we have and for the good God who gave it to us (as he gives everything) and, therefore, how could we not share it and go on sharing?
Now this woman with the oil. The only thing those around him could think of was its cost; not the cost to this woman who had purchased the oil and sought him out and braved their reproach and done this thing of kindness, but the money itself.
They were still rehearsing the lines of their indignation, each one more piqued than the other, when their voices reached him. All voices do eventually. So he turned to them and said, ‘Why do you trouble the woman? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me. By pouring this ointment on my body she has prepared me for burial. Truly I tell you, wherever this good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.’