Sermon — April 20, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Alleluia! Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

So I have good news for you, this Easter morning, and I have bad news. Which one do you want to hear first? […] Okay, well, the bad news this morning is that when the disciples head home on Easter afternoon, the story of the Resurrection isn’t finished yet; it’s only just beginning. But there’s good news, too—and this may ring a bell. Because the good news is that when the disciples head home on Easter afternoon, the story of the Resurrection isn’t finished yet; it’s only just beginning.

Mary and Joanna and Mary, these three most faithful followers of Christ, go to the tomb at the crack of dawn on Easter day. They go expecting to find Jesus’ body in the tomb, and to use the spices they bring to prepare his body for burial.

But the story of Easter is not the story of a body in a tomb. Because when they go to the tomb, they find that the stone that’s covering it has been rolled away, and when they go inside, they find that there is no body there; the tomb is empty.

But the story of Easter is not the story of an empty tomb. Because while they’re standing there confused about what’s happened, they see two men, in dazzling clothes, and they’re afraid. These men must be angels, messengers from God. And they have a question for these disciples. While Mary and Joanna and Mary bow their faces in awe, the two men ask them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.” (Luke 24:5)

“Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

The story of Easter is not the story of a stone rolled away, or the story of an empty tomb. It’s the story of a living Christ. Not the story of a Messiah who came back to life back then, but the story of a Messiah who lives, even now. On Easter morning, Jesus burst forth from the tomb, and went out into the world, and he never went back. We say that he ascended into heaven, but he didn’t die again, he lives, and so the work of love that God began in Jesus’ life on earth continues even now.

“Why do you look for the living among the dead?” the two men ask. Because the story of Easter is a living story. We don’t just live in the world after the Resurrection of Christ. We live in the world of the Resurrected Christ who leads and guides us even now, in the present. And that’s what I mean when I say that when the disciples go home on Easter afternoon, the story of the Resurrection isn’t finished yet, it’s only just beginning.

There’s a very real sense in which that is bad news. We believe that the story has a really happy ending; but we’re not there yet. The final chapter of the story God is writing for our world is what we heard described in our reading from Isaiah this morning. God promises us a new creation, “new heavens and a new earth,” (Isaiah 65:17) a world in which we will “no more” hear “the sound of weeping,” or “the cry of distress,” (65:19) a world in which no one will die before her time. It’s a world in which “they shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain,” says the Lord; a world of peace so complete that “the wolf and the lamb” will graze together, and the lion will munch straw next to the ox. (65:25) It is a world in which all our sorrows will be ended and all our divisions cease. I wish that we already lived in this world. But we don’t. Because the story of the Resurrection isn’t finished yet.

I say that’s bad news. But of course, if you’ve lived in this world for long enough to graduate from the Egg Hunt, you know that it isn’t really news at all. You can hear that our world is still full of weeping and distress. You can see that wolves literal and metaphorical do not lie down next to their prey in peace. You can go visit God’s “holy mountain.” It’s Mount Zion, in Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, where you’ll find the Western Wall (sometimes called the “Wailing Wall”) and al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock. You tell me if that holy mountain is free of pain and destruction yet.

The final chapter that Isaiah foretells has not yet become reality, because the story of the Resurrection isn’t finished yet. But that’s good news, too. The Resurrection of Jesus long ago is only the “first fruits” of a greater harvest, the apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians. (1 Cor. 15:20) On Easter Day, the story of the Resurrection is only just begun, and it’s a story that will build and build until God’s love has triumphed over “every ruler and every authority and power,” (15:24) until finally the last enemy is defeated, which is death itself. (15:26)

And that may sound abstract, but Christ lives among us now in the most concrete ways, in places where he said we’d find him, long ago. In every act of love you see in this world—in every stranger we welcome to a new land, in every hungry person who is fed, in every child or elder who receives love or compassion or care—the living Christ who rose two thousand years ago is there, and just as you do to the least of his children, so also you do to him. We don’t see Jesus now, but—trusting in the promise that he is leading us toward the end of the story—we live in the hope of the Resurrection.

Sometimes that hope is hard to feel. But hope isn’t really a feeling. It’s a choice about how to live. And on this Easter Sunday, that may be the best news of all.

The Canadian Anglican priest Jesse Zink writes about the difference between hope, optimism, and despair. Despair, he says, is to live life thinking, “if this is what the present is like, the future is nothing to look forward to.” Optimism is “the naïve view that the future will be bright, happy, and prosperous.” But hope is something else. Hope, he says, is “to live now in the expectation of what is coming in the future.”

This hope is a choice. It’s the choice to look at the unfinished stories of our lives, and our nation, and our world—the chapters of pain and regret, of sorrow and of grief, of struggle and of strife—to look at them honestly, to see them as they really are, and then to choose to live as though the story of the Resurrection isn’t over yet, as if it’s only just begun; to live as if Jesus really were leading us toward a world of grace and mercy, justice and peace, a world in God’s love will triumph over all, even over the power of death itself. And living this way will look different from living as if this were all there was. It should look like Christ’s self-sacrificing love. And we can numb ourselves with optimism or give in to despair; or we can choose to live in hope, to follow in the way of love that Jesus walked, living in the expectation that the story of the Resurrection isn’t over yet, but has only just begun.

Sermon — April 19, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Believe it or not, I was kind of a shy kid growing up. And so, while I was a total church rat—while I was at church every Sunday morning, and at youth group on Sunday nights, while I went on every mission trip and every church overnight, I also turned down every opportunity to preach, on Youth Sunday, or after a mission trip, or whenever it was. I wouldn’t even take a speaking part in the Christmas Pageant. My friend Tom and I sat up in the balcony and worked the lights.

During college, though, I became a little more outgoing, and so it was that I found myself giving what I now realize was my first ever sermon, I think, on this day, Holy Saturday, thirteen years ago, at Appleton Chapel in Memorial Church in Harvard Yard.

Every morning, Monday through Saturday, Appleton Chapel had a Morning Prayer service at 8:45am. It was about fifteen minutes long: a psalm, a reading, a hymn, and a homily that was five minutes long or so. Sometimes faculty would speak, or one of the Harvard chaplains; Divinity School students took their turn, and college seniors often chose to speak. That year, our Episcopal chaplain asked me if I might like to speak at Morning Prayers on Holy Saturday; it turned out, mysteriously, they were having trouble filling the spot.

It’s not so mysterious to me now. Of all the days in any given year, Holy Saturday is probably the day on which you are least likely to find a preacher who’s willing and able to work.

And I think there are two reasons for this: one very obvious, one much less so.

The obvious reason, of course, is that, on Holy Saturday, the church rats of the world are desperately trying to catch their breath. The Episcopalians and Catholics have already been at church for hours over the past few days, and they may have hours more at the Vigil that night. Even plain Protestants are preparing for a big Easter Sunday the next day. No one in their right mind would volunteer to preach on the morning of Holy Saturday unless they were both very enthusiastic about church and had no other church commitments that week, and that’s how they ended up with me.

But there’s another reason for the utter uninterest in Holy Saturday. A less obvious, more important one.

We live in a hyper-active, hyper-productive culture. We are obsessed with getting things done. We measure our lives, at work and at home, by progress on our to-do lists. We live in a world in which busyness is a measurement of our importance, perhaps even our competence. As the Presbyterian minister Eugene Peterson once wrote, if you go to a doctor’s office where the waiting room is empty and when you walk in, you see the doctor sitting in a chair, reading a book, you’re probably more worried than impressed; why am the only one with an appointment today?

The disease of busyness afflicts the church, as well. One of my mentors was married to another priest, and when they went to clergy events they’d always play a secret game: replacing the word “busy” with “important” in what their colleagues said. “How’s your Holy Week going?” they’d ask another priest at the Holy Tuesday Renewal of Vows we have, down at the Cathedral. “Oh,” they’d reply with a sigh, “I’m just so busy this time of year.” And they would laugh, translating in their heads, “I’m just so important this time of year.”

It’s a fun game to play, but it’s a real spiritual disease. The busy mind has no time for rest, let alone the kind of “deep work” that only comes in large blocks of silence. The busy society is one in which rest is suspect, in which, if you aren’t doing, doing, doing, then you must be missing out. We live in a world in which every moment can be full of noise, if you like; in which you never have to be alone with your thoughts, or the people around you, or with God; because, hey! there’s social media, and radio, and 24-hour cable news.

And let me just say, to be clear—I am so bad at this. It takes me a week to settle in to being on vacation. I get antsy when I try to relax. I have side projects that I work on in the evenings just so I always have something to do. I will confess that I spend a lot of time with one headphone in, half-listening to music and half-listening to whatever tale my beautiful, beloved child is spinning me for the fourth hour straight about Sammy and Turkey and the spectral host of the Ghost Queen.

I even come up against this every year, when planning for this service. It’s just a few readings, and some prayers. No communion. No music. And I find myself thinking—Isn’t there some way we could make this Holy Saturday service do more? Couldn’t it be a little more busy? I feel embarrassed that I waste your time, inviting you down here for a twenty-minute thing.

And I wonder if this is the other reason that it can be hard to find a preacher for Holy Saturday. Because we are Holy Saturday denialists. We’re want a God who does things: who calls the ancient Israelites out of their wanderings, and leads them out of slavery in Egypt; who speaks through the prophets and becomes flesh in Jesus; who teaches, and heals, and suffers, and dies; who rises again and then sends the Holy Spirit to continue the work. We want a church that does things: that loves God and loves its neighbor, that makes disciples and cares for the poor, that worships and studies and prays and serves. We’re not used to a God who rests. We’re not used to being a church with nothing to do. And so we go from the suffering of Good Friday to the Resurrection of the vigil, and we skip over the rest.

But after six long days of working hard to create all things, on the seventh day, God rested; and on the eighth day, on Sunday, on the first day of the week, the life of the new creation began.

And so too, after many long years of living in the world, and after a very long and very Holy week, on the seventh day of the week—on Saturday, the Sabbath day—Jesus rested in the tomb. On the eighth day, on Sunday, he would rise—and the life of a new creation would begin again.

But on the seventh day, on Saturday, he rests. And we are left with nothing to do.

We can make all the excuses that we want. We can say that it’s worth being here right now because afterwards, we’ll get set up for the Vigil. We can say that more is more, and so another Holy Week service from the Prayer Book? Why not!

But Jesus doesn’t need our busyness today. The Sabbath is a day of rest.

Pontius Pilate and the chief priests, are busy today. They’re holding meetings and sending soldiers, they’re imagining conspiracies and scurrying around doing what they can to secure the tomb.

 But Mary and Mary just sit, and watch, and rest. There’s nothing they can do but remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. And while the buzz of activity to try to keep Jesus’ body in the tomb will be completely useless in the end—the Marys will become “the apostles to the apostles,” the first to see and tell these wonderful things that have occurred.

So now it’s our turn to lay down our excuses. To set aside our busyness. To take a few moments, just a few, to be still, and keep watch. To do nothing but wait. To sit before the tomb, and pray. To dare to do a useless thing, and to rest, knowing that the God who needs nothing from us will do everything for us.

Sermon — April 18, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Then Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him,
came forward and asked them, “Whom are you looking for?”

Jesus is surrounded by pathetic people.

His disciples are failures, almost to the man. Judas betrays him for thirty silver coins, handing him over to people who want him dead. Nine of the other eleven disciples simply flee at his arrest. Peter had said that he would lay down his life for Jesus. But now, when he’s merely asked if he’s one of Jesus’ disciples, he vociferously denies it, three times: “I am not!”

His disciples are a failure. His accusers are a disgrace. When Pontius Pilate asks them, “What accusation do you bring against this man?” they answer, “If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you.” This is a favorite fallacy of tyrants: that criminals or terrorists or enemies of the state don’t deserve due process, that by the horror of their crimes they’ve forfeited their rights. In a just society, the only way to prove that someone has committed a crime is for them to stand trial; to say that “if this man were not a criminal, we wouldn’t have arrested him” is perhaps the most despicable example of the logical fallacy that called “begging the question.” His accusers have the courage to convict him without a trial for a crime they refuse to name, but they’re too cowardly to punish him themselves; “We’re not allowed to put anyone to death.” They’ll break the law of their own people, but they don’t dare break the law of Roman rule, and so they come to try to push a Roman execution through.

Pontius Pilate takes his part with an abdication of his role that rings through history. You can tell he’d rather be anywhere else, doing anything else, enjoying all of the benefits of power without having to handle the responsibilities. He dabbles in philosophy—“What is truth?” He feigns ignorance—“I’m not a Jew, am I?” How am I supposed to know what’s going on? Again and again, he tries to pass the buck—”Look, I find no case again him.” He suggests they ought to break his own laws. “Take him yourselves and crucify him,” he says, when they’ve already said what he knows to be true: only the Roman governor can put someone to death. And then, his final words of throwing in the towel, “What I have written, I have written.” Pontius Pilate, in this story, makes me sick.

The Beloved Disciple and the Marys, the mother of Jesus and Joseph of Arimathea, these characters are noble and good. But they are bystanders here. They no real part in the story until it’s much too late to do anything but bear witness to the suffering of the one they love.

And then there’s us. All of us, who bear witness with them, here. This small nucleus of the church, that stands at the foot of the cross, unable to do anything to change what’s going on.

And it’s easy to point our fingers today, at Peter or Pilate, at the chief priests or Judas Iscariot, at the disciples who run or stand by impotently while a horrifying injustice is done.

But we’re no different from the rest. And even as Lent draws to an end, my mind drifts back to its beginning, to our Ash Wednesday prayers, to the Litany of Penitence in which we confess not big, earth-shaking sins, but the small ones that afflict us every day: “all our past unfaithfulness: the pride, hypocrisy, and impatience of our lives… our anger at our own frustration, and our envy of those more fortunate than ourselves… our negligence in prayer… and our failure to commend the faith that is in us… uncharitable thoughts toward our neighbors… [and] prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us.” I don’t know about you, but I am an imperfect person, and these small ins from which we repent year after year are still my daily bread. And so I stand here, listening to this story, and I don’t find myself up there on the cross with Christ—I’m in the crowd of imperfection standing all around him. (That’s why I always claim the privilege of playing Pontius Pilate in the Passion gospel.)

But in a story of cowardice and helplessness, of betrayal and abandonment, of injustice and irresponsibility, Jesus still takes my breath away. Think again about those opening words: “Then Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him, came forward and asked them, ‘Whom are you looking for?’”

This is the Son of God. He could disappear without a trace. He could flee into the night, like his disciples do. This is the eternal Word of God made flesh, through whom all things were made. He simply says, “I AM” and the police go tumbling to the ground. I’m pretty sure that he could fight them off.

But that isn’t what he does. Knowing that they’re looking for him, he comes forward and asks, “Whom are you looking for?” And John the narrator adds that this was to fulfill the promise he had made, not to lose a “single one” of those whom God had given him.

This is the courage of Christ: to step forward, knowing full well what that means; to sacrifice himself to save people he already knows will not live up to his love; to give his life to protect the very people who will let him down, people who are imperfect at best, and downright disgraceful at worst.

He looks at the people around him, imperfect as they are. He looks at Judas, who has already betrayed him, and Peter, who is going to deny him; he looks at the disciples who will abandon him and the close friends who do nothing to help him; he looks at the soldiers who arrest him and at you and me, who still remember him—at all these people living human lives, sometimes good but not never perfect, not by any means—and he takes a step forward, to die to for us.

It’s easy to understand what that meant on that night. He was arrested, they went free. It’s harder, sometimes, to make sense of what it means for us. There are a dozen different ways to understand the meaning of the crucifixion, and the sense in which Jesus dies for us; you may have read four or five different options written down on Michael’s purple cards, this Lent.

But tonight, we don’t have to understand the effects of that act. Tonight, we can simply feel the love behind it. Tonight, we can simply stand at the foot of the cross, looking on the courage of Christ, who chose to die for each one of us, and we can think about what the choir sang during communion last night—one of my all-time favorite hymns:

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss
to lay aside his crown for my soul, for my soul,
to lay aside his crown for my soul!

Sermon — April 13, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Every year, when we reach this moment, I’m struck again by the emotional weight. It’s one thing to sit down and write a Palm Sunday sermon at my desk, knowing in theory that we will have just read the story of Jesus’ suffering and death. But it’s another thing entirely to hear that story read aloud, and then to open my mouth to speak. Palm Sunday has an extraordinary emotional range: it plummets all the way down into the depths of human suffering from the heights of a parade.

A parade. Or a procession. Or maybe a protest. What Jesus and the disciples did on Palm Sunday contains elements of all three. Each of these things is different from the others, and yet there’s something that’s the same: processions and protests and parades all do something to form us into a people who have a shared past and belong to a certain place, and for one reason or another, human beings love a good parade.

So this spring, for example, our neighborhood will host an extra-exuberant Bunker Hill Day parade, commemorating the 250^th anniversary of the battle. Like any patriotic march, Bunker Hill Day remembers the past, but it’s really about the present. It’s forms a shared identity, for the people who live in the neighborhood today. It maintains a connection for people who grew up here and come back for the day. It connects us all to the events of the past in a way that speaks to the present: this is the home of a people who fight against tyranny.

Religious processions work in a similar way. In the English countryside, on a “Rogation Day,” the whole community would gather to process around the borders of the parish, asking God’s blessings on the land, and tying the people to the land. In August you can attend processions three days in a row, in honor of Saints Lucia and Leonard and Anthony, in which their societies process around the streets of the North End, connecting the stories of the saints of the past to the identity of their people in the present and, maybe more important, laying claim to the neighborhood in which they or their ancestors lived. And just this morning, you joined in a procession around this very church, a reenactment, in a way, of that day on which Jesus entered Jerusalem as he prepared to face his death.

Jesus’ Palm Sunday ride has the celebratory feel of a parade. It has the religious elements of a procession. But really, it was more like a protest. After all, a parade is an official celebration. A procession gathers a whole community. But Palm Sunday was a divisive, political act.

The Gospel of Luke tells us that it’s not the crowds or the people as a whole who cry out and chant along the way, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” It’s the disciples in particular, Jesus’ own supporters. And they’re making a political claim. Blessed is the king, they say. But Jesus isn’t on the throne. Only Rome could appoint a king within the bounds of its empire. And for a crowd of Galileans to declare Jesus a king was a political act, a rebellion against the rule of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor. Not everyone is on board. There are counter-protestors! The Pharisees tell Jesus, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop!” (Luke 19:39) They know how the Romans will react.

But Jesus doesn’t stop them. Nothing can stop them. They’re saying what they say because they believe it to the core. And if they were silent, the very stones would shout out. (19:40)

The disciples’ rally may seem pointless. Protests often do, especially in a one-party state like ours, where liberals and conservatives alike often sense there’s no use trying to persuade politicians. And that’s in our society, where “the right of the people peaceably to assemble” is constitutionally guaranteed. How much more pointless would protest seem in an empire like Rome, where the only guarantee is that the powers that be will come down hard on anyone who dares oppose the empire?

But protest isn’t pointless. It wasn’t pointless then, and it isn’t pointless now. Because an act of protest, like a parade, or a procession, isn’t only about what it does out there. It’s also about what it does in here. It’s not only about changing the world, it’s about changing the people who participate.

In the short term, you might say the disciples’ protest doesn’t do much. It’s counter-productive, really. The disciples’ claim that Jesus is King leads directly to his death. It’s the very charge that the Romans put over his cross. And the group of people brought together by this movement seems to fall apart. Their peaceful protest on the road leads to violence in the Garden. The people who gather with Jesus around the Table abandon and betray him by the next day. He faces his last moments alone, except for the bandits hanging on either side and the faithful women who have followed him to the end. And it seems that all that energy and momentum, all those chants and songs and cloaks laid on the road, have gone nowhere. Jesus dies on the cross, and the movement ends, and on the Sabbath they rest.

But the story doesn’t actually end there. I’m not going to jump ahead to next Sunday’s events; I don’t want to spoil them for you. But even when Jesus is dead, the movement isn’t gone. On the day after the Sabbath, the women return to the tomb together. They hear remarkable news and they go and find the apostles, who are together. The community that they built out on the road hasn’t scattered to the four winds. They came all the way from Galilee to Jerusalem together, and they are together still, even though Jesus is gone. The group of individuals who walked, and sang, and chanted all that way have become a people. A people who will go on, even after their darkest days, to do incredible things.

Those individuals who laid their cloaks down on the road have become a people, and this is the place in which the memories of the past will become a new reality in the present. And we, who processed around this church, have become a people, and this is our place. So may the same Spirit who drew them together on the road and sent them out into the world draw us together today, and send us out as well, to love God with all our hearts and souls and strengths and minds; and to love our neighbors as ourselves; through Jesus Christ. Amen.

Sermon — April 6, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples… said,
‘Why was this perfume not sold…and the money given to the poor?’” (John 12:5)

I have to say, I’m pretty sympathetic to this question. Leave aside, for a minute, the parenthetical remark about Judas, and imagine yourself in the room.

Jesus and his disciples have come to dinner with Mary and Martha and Lazarus. They’re reclining around the dinner table, as ancient people did for formal meals. It was a normal thing to do to offer water for your guests to wash their feet before the meal, or to have a servant wash them, or even to offer to wash them yourself. In a dusty place where people wear sandals, this is a basic way of making people comfortable as a host, the local equivalent of asking “Can I take your coat?”

In a place and time without commercial soap production, oil was often used to wash or bathe. washing the feet with oil might be a step above washing with plain water, but it was probably a normal thing. Using perfumed oil would be even more luxurious, but not bizarre.

Mary does do something a little strange. Rather than scraping off the oil with a metal scraper like you might see in a museum, or with a cloth or a towel, she wipes the oil from Jesus’ feet with her hair. Which is odd. But in another way, it’s perfectly in character, because this is Mary we’re talking about, and this Mary—not the mother of Jesus, but the sister of Martha and Lazarus—this Mary is known for her single-minded, almost over-the-top devotion to Jesus, which sometimes comes at the expense of the practicalities of life. You might recall the other story of Mary and Martha, in which Mary leaves Martha alone to do all the work of hosting Jesus and his other disciples, while Mary sits attentively at his feet. (Luke 10:38–42)

And so perhaps it comes as no surprise that Mary acts this way. She doesn’t offer a bowl of water to Jesus to wash his feet. She doesn’t have a servant carry out the task. No, Mary’s going to wash his feet herself, and to wipe them off with her own hair; this kind of whole-hearted attention has Mary written all over it.

And she does it lavishly. And that’s where the grumbling begins. Mary doesn’t dry Jesus’ feet with her hair because she can’t afford a cloth. She doesn’t offer him a bowl of plain water with apologies for her frugality. No! She anoints his feet with perfume, she washes his feet with a whole pound of oil infused with nard, an exotic aromatic plant. Try to picture a pound of perfumed oil. 16 ounces or so, about a pint. That’s a very high perfume-to-foot ratio. By Judas’s reckoning, this is 300 denarii worth of foot cream—ten months’ wages for a laborer like one of the disciples—and there it is, poured out on Jesus’ feet, and dripping onto the floor.

People often criticize churches for spending money less than immediate needs. Rather than feed the hungry, we repair bells, and refurbish organs, and restore stained glass. There’s an answer for this: These things last for decades, and they enrich our community with beauty. There are neighbors who never walk through these doors who’ve told me that they love to hear our bell ring again. There’s a caretaker who visits a parishioner who likes to stop and look at the stained glass, even from the outside. Anyone can come and hear a brilliant organist play a beautiful instrument any time, free of charge.

But this perfume? It’s poured out on Jesus’ feet, and the fragrance fills the house for a night, and then it’s gone. 300 denarii down the drain, never to be smelled again; that’s ten months’ wages of operating money, not a capital expense. (If you’re laughing and you haven’t served on the Vestry yet, I’ve got a great opportunity for you.)

So I’m sympathetic to what Judas has to say: ‘Why was this perfume not sold…and the money given to the poor?’” Some of you might be sympathetic as well. This isn’t good stewardship of the gifts that Mary has been given. Having heard everything that Jesus has to say, wouldn’t you think that he would want that money to help someone else, rather than be poured out on his feet? But no, Jesus says, “Leave her alone… You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” (John 12:7–8) And thereby he provides an easy quote, which the Church has used for two thousand years to justify spending money on itself, in sometimes frivolous ways. It leaves me with a little bit of an ick.

I’m pretty sure that John the Evangelist felt that ick as well. Because while stories like this appear in all the Gospels, it’s only in John that we get the details about Judas’s motives. In Matthew and in Mark, the disciples in general criticize the waste. And Jesus responds in the same way: “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” But I get the sense that John isn’t totally convinced. And so he notes that it was Judas who asked this question, and, oh, by the way, it wasn’t in good faith—Judas is just going to steal the cash. Jesus gives a theological response, and it reads as if John thinks it’s a little weak, so he bolsters it with an ad hominem attack.

But I don’t think Jesus is giving us an excuse. It just doesn’t make sense that the Jesus who begins his ministry in the Gospel of Luke by saying that “the Spirit of the Lord has anointed [him] to bring good news to the poor” would end it by being anointed by Mary in order to deliver the dismissive bad news that “you’ll always have the poor with you,” so you don’t need to lend a helping hand. But if that’s not what it means—then what’s going on instead?

Something like a thousand years before, the rise of the great King David had begun with his anointing by the prophet Samuel. Samuel goes to try to figure out which of the seven sons of Jesse God has chosen to be king, and one by one the Spirit rules them out, until the youngest is called in from where he’s been keeping the sheep. Samuel takes a horn of oil, and pours it on his head. He anoints him. In Hebrew, he yimshah him; and this is where we get the word “Messiah,” “anointed one.” In Greek, he echrisen him, and this is where we get “Christ,” “anointed one.” David is the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed King. And ] people in Jesus’ day were hoping for a new Messiah, a new Christ, a new Anointed King.

And now, six days before the Passover, before the great national feast, which celebrates the people’s liberation from an oppressive Pharaoh’s rule, Mary anoints Jesus. And the very next day, what we call Palm Sunday, Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem takes place. It’s as if Mary is Samuel, and this anointing is the beginning of Jesus’ rise to power.

Except… it’s an anointing turned upside down, the anointing of a king who will turn the whole idea of kingship upside down. Samuel sought out David, but Jesus comes to Mary instead. Samuel needed the Spirit’s guidance to recognize the future king, but Mary is full of single-minded devotion. Samuel anoints David’s head, Mary anoints Jesus’ feet. David’s anointing begins his ascent to the throne, Jesus’ anointing begins his ascent to the Cross. David’s is a royal ritual; Jesus’ is a preparation for burial.

“I am about to do a new thing,” God says. (Isaiah 43:18–19) And Jesus is a new thing indeed. He’s going to be a new kind of king, he’s going to make the people around him a new kind of people.

We often think, in our democracy, that people hold certain ethical beliefs, and these lead them to political views, that then lead them to support certain leaders. I’d suggest to you that it really works the other way around: people choose to follow a charismatic leader, a person they come to trust, whose own priorities can reshape their views about policy or morality. And I often worry that the church sounds too much like Judas or the other disciples who scold, who tell people, with good intentions, what they ought to do in the name of Christianity; and too little like Mary, who lets her whole life be transformed and restructured by the choice to follow Christ.

Mary doesn’t sell the perfume to feed the hungry or clothe the naked. It’s true. She wastes it all to express her devotion to a king who bends the knee to wash his people’s feet; who tells her that she’ll meet him when she feeds people who are hungry, and visits people in prison; whose followers, in the Book of Acts, would sell not only a jar of perfume but everything they had and distribute the money to those who were in need. (Acts 2:44) It’s an anointing turned upside down for a man who turns kingship upside down, and whose people the Romans would one day accuse of turning the world upside down. (Acts 17:6) May God give us the strength so to pour out the perfume of our hearts in service to God’s love, that we may one day stand accused of turning the world upside down. Amen.