This story actually belongs back in Lent. Jesus is visiting friends in Bethany on his way to Jerusalem. And we know that will be the last journey of his earthly life.
The Bible includes four different versions of the story. They disagree on who hosted the party, where it was, who objected to the waste of money, or even who the woman was, although her name was probably Mary. But the core story is consistent across the Gospels, and that story was important enough that all four writers included it. The general outline of it goes like this.
Jesus and his disciples have been invited to dinner at a friend’s house. The men are gathered around a low table, reclining on low couches or pillows, as was the custom. The only woman in the room is the one who is serving, quietly and discreetly. The food is good and the conversation is lively.
Suddenly, another woman bursts into the house, and she’s not bringing dessert or a refill of wine. She is carrying a jar of extremely expensive perfume, worth about $25,000 in today’s money. She approaches Jesus and pours the entire contents of the jar over his feet—or his head—and the aroma fills the house. And then she unbinds her hair and dries his head or feet with it, weeping all the while.
Outrage ensues, both at her very presence in the room and at her waste of precious materials. The guests are also shocked that she would take down her hair in front of men who are not her husband. And of course, her extravagant display of emotion has embarrassed almost everyone.
But instead of throwing her out of the house, Jesus defends her and actually thanks and praises her for her demonstration of grief and love.
Jesus has been trying for weeks to help the disciples grasp that he will not be coming back from Jerusalem. But they are still deeply in denial about what will happen there. Even during tomorrow’s walk to the city, they will be squabbling like toddlers over who gets to sit by Jesus in his new throne room.
Mary invades their comfortable denial. She forces the disciples to face the coming tragedy, even for just a moment. But they don’t understand that she has brought them a powerful gift—not just the luxury of a priceless perfume, but the message of the power of emotion.
Emotions, feelings, are too often still considered to be a feminine weakness. Big boys don’t cry. Emotions are not supposed to have any place in serious, adult discourse. We’re taught to set our feelings aside and concentrate on rational answers. In some churches, empathy—feeling other people’s feelings—is actually considered a sin.
But our emotions are a God-given tool for both men and women. When we suppress them or let someone else stifle them, the world goes flat and gray, and it’s impossible to get anything done. Emotions are the energy that drives action.
Positive emotions such as joy, gratitude, serenity, love, courage, and empathy are actually good for our physical and mental health, and they help us bond with each other and with the rest of creation. They create community.
And negative emotions are also useful. Fear motivates us to protect ourselves, and anger alerts us to violations of our boundaries. Disgust keeps us from eating food that has gone bad, or from getting too close to people who are contagious. Sorrow helps us process events like rejection, guilt, or death, and it can produce empathy and compassion. All of these feelings, positive or negative, can motivate us to make changes in our lives.
Mary has already faced the worst of what she knows is coming, and she doesn’t run from the truth or from her grief. The perfume she carries is used specifically to calm and comfort dying people, and when she opens the jar, she is inviting all of the men to acknowledge what they have so far refused to admit.
We are in a situation where we are faced every day with new fears and new shocks and new reasons for grief at what America has become in a few months. Every aspect of our lives as Americans or immigrants is under attack. And the shock escalates daily.
There have been so many outrages, that many of us have reacted with a sense of helplessness, and that is precisely the purpose of the blizzard of Executive Orders and wholesale destruction and stalling lawsuits. When we are grieving and afraid, and feel unable to do anything, we can fall into hopelessness and depression, and we try to ignore the harm that is happening, cover our eyes, turn off the news.
Fear can also turn into hate, if we let it. Many Americans have felt left behind by social and economic changes. For many of those, their fear of losing out, of being replaced by immigrants or computers, has turned into hatred of people they believe are receiving advantages from those changes without having earned their benefits. They’ve cut in line! The events of January 6, 2021 demonstrated what hate can goad people to do.
And it’s so easy for us, too, to let ourselves hate what’s being done to our nation, and the people responsible for it. Hatred feels almost like a positive emotion when it’s used to deny fear or grief.
But! I once met a man from the Suquamish Nation, across Puget Sound. His community acknowledged him as a holy person and described him as one who had “given up the luxury of hate.” This was a daily discipline. He had learned to replace fear with love instead of succumbing to hate.
Another holy man, Dr Martin Luther King Jr., wrote, from a jail cell, “Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”
And in her book called Almost Everything, the pragmatic, honest, and often hilarious holy woman Ann Lamott titles one of her chapters “Don’t Let Them Get You to Hate Them.” She writes, “Hate weighed me down and muddled my thinking. It isolated me and caused my shoulders to hunch, the opposite of sticking together and lifting our hands and eyes to the sky. The hunch changes our posture, because our shoulders slump, and it changes our vision, as we scowl and paw the ground. So as a radical act we give up the hate and the hunch the best we can. We square our shoulders and lift our gaze.”
These three wise people know that hate and helpless rage corrode and corrupt the hater. But love heals and unites and purifies us. Love replaces fear and moves us to constructive action. Our task, for our own health and that of our nation consists of acknowledging and transforming our fear and grief into active love.
And it feels lately as if we have awakened from our collective helplessness and we’re taking on that task as a people. The energy has shifted. We witnessed a magnificent lesson in “making Good Trouble,” when Senator Cory Booker stood for 25 hours and five minutes and talked about what he cherishes about this nation and about the dangers we face. In San Diego, a few weeks ago, diners did not sit quietly when armed ICE agents burst into a restaurant and began dragging workers out of the kitchen. The diners turned out into the street, where neighbors and passersby joined them in blocking the ICE vans. In spite of ICE’s smoke bombs and flashbang grenades, that demonstration of solidarity grew to include GoFundMes for the kidnapped workers and their families, an angry declaration from the Mayor, and a nationally broadcast story on NPR.
The following week, ICE raided workplaces in Los Angeles and sparked a demonstration that is still ongoing. Angelinos turned out to show their solidarity and love for their neighbors, friends, co-workers, fellow students. And last weekend, we saw millions of individuals across the nation come together to show our reawakening commitment to what has always been the best of the American Dream. We learned that it takes only 3.5% of a nation’s population to turn things around, and we reached that percentage, and higher, last week. What we saw on the streets of America was a colorful, noisy, peaceful, communal display of the best of America—people who gathered together in large cities and tiny rural towns to say no to the work of empire and cruelty and yes to the many varieties of humanity that America is big enough to embrace. We saw fear transformed into love.
Pope Leo appeared on Zoom in Chicago that day to give his message of peace, love, and hope, in direct contrast to the president’s attempt to look fierce and tough and menacing.
The day ended with a parade that was intended to show the power of one angry and hateful man. But it consisted instead of soldiers strolling and waving, not marching, past the reviewing stand, accompanied by a protest song from the Vietnam War about a rich draft-dodger.
Now, we continue the work of love–even angry love, like that of Jesus in the Temple. The Internet is full of ways we can engage in positive, supportive action. We are rebuilding community on the ashes of mutual distrust and fear and hatred.
In the Bible, the story of the Woman Who Crashed the Party leads directly into Holy Week. In that week we remember how Jesus transforms love—not hate—into anger to fight corruption and injustice in the Temple. How Peter’s fear corrupts his loyalty to his dearest friend. How hate literally destroys Judas. How a dictatorship uses terror and brute force to try to destroy love. And how those who are powerless to do anything else still show up for Jesus along his final walk and at his death. And finally, how love triumphs even over death
So let us practice resisting the temptations of hate and hopelessness. Let us allow love and compassion and empathy and joy! to help us find ways we can make a difference, protect those who are endangered, stop the progress of state-sponsored terrorism, and begin to rebuild the better, wiser, more compassionate society that we have always believed in.
AMEN