Lent 5C

Isaiah 43:16-21

Philippians 3:4-14

John 12:1-11

Sometimes it is hard to see new things in new ways. After all, we are conditioned to look for similarities, to tie up the new with old containers of expectation and experience. But Lent is a season when we are enjoined, encouraged to look at life, ourselves, our world; what matters and what lasts, in a new way. And that's hard work! So when Isaiah writes: "Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make," we might be forgiven if, just for a moment, we take a breath and pause and wish that there were not quite so many new things on the horizon; and now here's one more thing for the list,”a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert", one more item to remember, one more thing to worry when we wake in the night, to juggle in the daily Monday through Friday demands. Plus Christ calls us to follow him to the Cross! Lent is a demanding time if we do it right.

I remember an English priest who, when asked about the theology of safe sex, thundered out that there was "no such thing as safe sex if you do it right!" Lent is like that too. Because it mixes you up with life and love and loss and gain and glory and God and changes your life beyond imagining! For though many people would have trouble believing it; God is even bigger than sex! And even less safe, and even more demanding!

For Lent calls us to travel through the silent wilderness and noisy cities, walking arid trails and hearing strange stories. Lent aims to re-frame, renew, remind us to become new people with new eyes, new insight! This means to leave ourselves behind, to lose what we think we know and who we think we are in a pilgrimage process which costs “not less than everything” and will give us more than we ever dreamed.

It is walking along a knife edge, the sharp contrast between an old death and a new life. To even attempt the journey means we already carry a certain grace. We would not do it otherwise, for it requires a single-minded simplicity, as Paul puts it: "this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus." And when I hear this Pauline paradox I recall W.H Auden's fine phrase: “In the prison of his days/Teach the free man how to praise.”

And that's where the passion is, the unsafe but glorious glory where we are to be reformed in the cauldron of Christ's love! That's why we are here on the edge, where Golgotha and the Cross begin to shout their claims for our allegiance and where the silent promise of an empty grave calls us to review everything we thought we knew about passion, death and life with the hope of an unending love. Here we take the chance to see that what we accept as the end, the termination of life, might be in itself, the beginning of a new way to live beyond the duality of life and death.

This can be a blinding insight. It can and should shock us to see everything in a new way, for it is a scandal of the particular power and promise of love in the last place we would choose to look.

As John Donne wrote on Good Friday 1613:

But that Christ on His cross did rise and fall, /Sin had eternally benighted all.

Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see/That spectacle of too much weight for me.

Who sees Gods face, that is self-life, must die; /What a death were it then to see God die?

Each of the lessons of this season of Lent is a little dying. Take a look at them: The surprised steward at the wedding at Cana, where Jesus turns water into wine, finding that the best surprise comes last; The loving father who welcomes his wayward child home with a wildly extravagant party; even for today where Mary anoints the Lord’s feet of Jesus with an over the top expensive perfume. What wondrous love is this?

So look at this Mary; we know the story so well it ceases to shock, and it should! It would have deeply offended the people of Jesus' time. Consider this: it would be a normal custom of Palestinian hospitality for the household slave to wash the feet of guests with water, but Mary's taking this service on herself is on the edge of offense to the sensibilities of the time. A Palestinian woman would never touch a man except her husband and children, so to expose her hair to clean a man's feet is beyond expectation. But at this meal with friends Mary performs an extravagant act of homage to Jesus; not only by anointing him with enormously expensive perfume, but by demeaning herself to wipe his feet with her own hair. Why does she go to such extremes, what does this mean?

Bill Countryman's excellent book, The Mystical Way in the Fourth Gospel: Crossing Over into God makes this point:

In ancient Israel, kings, priest, and occasionally prophets entered upon their office through anointing; indeed, that is the sense of the title "messiah: or "christ" - "anointed one." Perhaps this is a kind of royal anointing; certainly, it is followed [at once by a royal entry into the capital. Such anointing, however, was normally on the head. [So] The anointing of Jesus' feet instead may remind us that Jesus is "from above." ... as recognition of this true status, not as bestowing that status. In any case we remember that the shepherd-king is one who lays down his life for his sheep; the oil of consecration may readily become that of burial as well.

For if we look ahead to the moment when Jesus will kneel to take the form a servant in order to wash the feet of his own disciples. then the actions of Mary appear prophetic, like Jesus' baptism by John. She welcomes the way of Jesus by performing an action that will prefigure his ministry. Can we do the same? Can we reach out our hands in love, bend forward like she did and as he will, spread out our arms in offering, as he will on the cross, and allow the Spirit a place to perform these priceless ablutions?

The resurrection of Jesus gives us the grace to embrace our freedom as beloved children of God. Set free from the tyranny of principalities which have been exposed as impostors, death itself being the greatest charlatan; we are now bid to meet the world with the same style, the love and largess of our Lord and Saviour. For in binding death by the grace of love, we find that Christ has set us free to love.

That’s the truth that is almost beyond belief: we are invited to serve, to make love, to make Eucharist; to eat and drink the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation on this side of the empty cave, recalling us to remember God’s costly outpouring of love. That’s what's on the farther horizon, just beyond belief!

There is still a journey to be taken, we still need witness the costly road that leads us beyond any dark grave's end to God's graceful sunrise, but even here with the dawning surprise of love not yet on the horizon, we can stretch out for the last of the homecoming journey, like the disciples bush-walking on the road to Emmaus feeling their hearts burning within them with new life, we can continue this new journey into the mystery, making us new people and new community, as we witness Christ's priceless outpouring of love. With this hope we walk forward to the city of contradictions, for as Gerard Manley Hopkins writes:

And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

May the risen Christ be found in your faithful journey as we journey as part of His redeemed community.