Mary Knew the Next Right Thing to Do

Reflection on John 12:1-8

I know exactly what day the markets crashed in 1987 because it was my sister’s third birthday and anything about my sister is important to me. Besides October 19, 1987, there have been four other times when the stock market crashed more than 20% — right before the Great Depression, the real estate debacle of 2008, right after the COVID lockdown, and this past week. Many of us have lived through four of the five crashes, and a few of us have lived through all five of them. I remember hearing one of my older friends saying after the 2008 meltdown, “It’s a catastrophe!” 

Catastrophe. We all know what this means. It’s a complete failure. A sudden disaster. Fiasco. A terrible thing from which there is no recovery. It’s a catastrophe. Our retirement is in the tanks, everything is going south, and I don’t mean in a spring break trip to Puerto Rico or Florida kind of way. It’s done, gone, and there is no hope. It’s the end. 

Yet there might be another way, because if I’m not wrong, all of us just lived through a catastrophe. COVID. Remember this? That was a once-in-a-century event and still all of us continued to exist through pandemic. Sure. We had anxiety. Sure. We struggled. Sure. It seemed like the world turned upside down. Sure. We didn’t know when it was going to end and it was really really annoying that it took so long before we could meet in person again. Sure. We were depressed and we struggled. Yet. 

We are all here. We lived through that catastrophe. We are still standing. 

Our story from the Gospel of John has all the makings of a catastrophe. Catastrophes actually. 

There are two of them that we meet right away. The scene-setting line at the very beginning of the text in our gospel tells one and hints at the other – “Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead.” Our story today is framed by death – the death and then the resuscitation of Lazarus and then the death and resurrection of Jesus. Two bookend catastrophes, two deaths. 

The prequel to the resurrection of Jesus in the gospel of John is the resuscitation of Lazarus — a resuscitation because Lazarus died again when it was his time. That was when Jesus called one of his besties out from the tomb, after he’d been dead four days. His death was a catastrophe for Lazarus and for his siblings. But then Jesus came to town and called him out and Lazarus came out. 

It’s no wonder Mary wanted to show her gratitude. 

Yet, Mary’s way of saying thank you is more than a little much. Is there a place or a time where this act would be socially acceptable? Maybe if it was done in the privacy of their relationship like in the bedroom? Or maybe if it was something we didn’t know about. There are just so many social faux pas here – the ridiculous expense of the nard – that bottle cost a year’s wages y’all, something like $60 grand today. Why spend that much? And then the way she did it? The commentaries say this – this kind of perfume wasn’t “reusable” – no stopper, you had to break the bottle and once you did, you couldn’t save it. 

A few years ago, I got some nard, or at least it was advertised as nard, so all of you can smell it on your way out. I’m not sure that’s what nard smells like because nard was said to be “woody” and this smell was not so woody. 

But let’s go back to Mary, pouring the nard on Jesus’ feet. Maybe she could get away with that act, but wiping it off with her hair? If I saw this today, there is no question. There is no way that I wouldn’t judge. Her hair? Really? 

And yet. This is the model for love. 

“Leave her alone,” Jesus said, “she bought it so that she might keep it for the day of burial.” 

What? 

Death comes before and comes after this story. 

Before our story comes the death of Lazarus. Afterwards comes the death of Jesus, six days, to be exact. 

Mary anoints Jesus’ feet the week before he dies. She shows her love through this excessive, overwhelming, and frankly way-too-intimate act. She behaves prophetically, anointing his body for his imminent death. 

Did she know? Did she know what was happening? Could she see the future? 

Writer Octavia Butler was the fist black woman to write science fiction. Born in California just before my parents in 1947, she lived through the discrimination of being black in the 50’s and 60’s, and yet. She looked forward. Her two most famous books are Kindred, a book which chronicles a woman who travels in time between the present and former times when folx are enslaved. But it’s The Parable of the Sower, that has everyone talking, especially these days. Butler seems like she's a seer, a prophet, telling the future. In her story, which takes place in Cali, there’s no water. Each neighborhood is gated; fires are happening in all of LA. You never know who will break in and steal. 

Butler would say that she was no prophet, no seer. She only anticipated. She only saw what was happening in the present which pointed to a future. 

Mary wasn’t either. But she knew. She knew what was happening, she knew. She knew that even though her brother was saved, Jesus wouldn’t be. 

She knew. 

The whole story of Mary anointing the feet of Jesus was sandwiched between two deaths, those two catastrophes, the death of her brother and the death of Jesus. 

It’s just been in the last few years where scholarship about Mary, Martha, and Mary Magdalene tells us something funny. Let me begin at the beginning. John’s Greek isn’t that great. It tries to be. It tries to be fancy, but just isn’t. Scribes, the ones who copied the texts of the gospels knew all about this. They believed Jesus to be the Son of God like we do, so they tried to make John look better; they tried to cover over some of the problems in John’s original text, but they just created the Mary problem. In the oldest texts, Mary, Martha, and Mary Magdalene are all the same person. 

We can talk about this later; I’ll give you the link to the sermon where I read all about this, but just for a moment stick with me. (Here is the link: https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/mary-the-tower) 

If Mary and Martha and Mary Mag were the same human – then she both served and loved. She was one who knew the very nature of Jesus. She was one like us who was both contemplative and active, a woman who loved Jesus with everything she had. 

And if they were all one person then Mary both anoints the feet of Jesus and meets him at the tomb after his resurrection. She is the one who loves him with all her heart, he is the one who raised her brother, who made it so that she wasn’t alone, and that’s why the perfume, the nard, the $60K, the hair.  And she is the one that he calls out to on the day. 

I learned a new word this week, one invented by J.R.R. Tolkein. It was based on the word “catastrophe.” But it wasn’t that. It is eucatastrophe. It means this: A moment, when it seemed like a catastrophe was happening, but then out of all of that comes life, and not just life, but the “unexpected and joyous resolution to a seemingly hopeless situation – a good catastrophe, or a sudden turn for the better, involving grace rather than heroic effort.” If you’ve read Tolkein, it would be the times that eagles rescued Bilbo, when Gandalf found his way back to the small band, or when Frodo got the ring and then it went into fire of Mount Doom. 

Mary’s gift to Jesus was a eucatastrophe. Any other time, any other place, the pouring of the nard on the feet of Jesus and the hair thing would have been a catastrophe. Any other time, it would have been an end, everyone embarrassed, if not by the scent, by her hair. 

But it wasn’t. 

It was a gift, an amazing gift, a prophetic gift, one that pointed both to the past and to future, back to Lazarus’ death, and forward to Jesus’ death. 

It could have been a catastrophe, a judgement, an embarrassment. Instead it was a eucatastrophe. 

But we needed the bookend stories to tell us this deeper truth. We need both the resuscitation of Lazarus and the resurrection of Jesus to help us see the whole picture, to help us glimpse another way of seeing, to help us see that Mary’s gift was exactly the right thing at the right time, the way to embody her thanksgiving and love of Jesus. She could see. And thus, she knew the next right thing to do, whether it be anointing Jesus’ feet or going to the tomb. And that is enough, both for Mary and for us.

So be encouraged today. God restores. God resuscitates. God resurrects. And God transforms our strange actions into eucatastrophies.