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| dust and love |
ELEVENTH ORDINARY SUNDAY (June 11th) 1989
READINGS
1 Kings 17:8-16 [17-24]
Psalm 146
Galatians 1:11-24
Luke 7:11-17
[When I turned to prepare this 1989 sermon
for posting I noticed it was a bit helter-skelter.
Hmm.
The useful thing about keeping a diary is
that it sometimes provides explanations.
In the few days before this Sunday, 37
years ago, daughter # 3 was born, and I was sole parenting her two older
sisters and, presumably, running a parish. Though I did manage to note that Australia
declared at 601 for 7, not England’s finest hour in cricket. I wasn’t a happy traveller! I support England.
Here’s hoping there may be a thought or
two contained in it that is useful for you].
Jesus
accepted a dinner invitation to the house
of an influential Pharisee, despite his priority to proclaim good news to the poor,
despite his radical teaching that the poor are blessed because they reveal the
nature of God. These priorities did not prevent him from accepting and enjoying
the company of the rich and influential. The gospel is for them, too.
A
woman burst in. The “bad name” by which she was known around town suggests she was
a prostitute, though there is no firm evidence of this. She came with the
probable intention of anointing the head of Jesus with her oil. But as she
stood behind Jesus the emotion overcame her, and her overwhelming tears fell on
the dusty feet of this charismatic teacher.
Already
confused by her impetuosity, she was further embarrassed by wetting the teacher’s
feet. Forgetting herself she knelt down, released the long hair by which she
advertised her available sexuality on the streets of the town, and tried to dry
the tears.
Emotion
continued to overwhelm her, and she fervently kissed his feet, before anointing
them with the oil she had brought. It is probable after such a display of
confused emotion that she no longer felt able to stand and touch the head of
this man, as she had longed to do. She failed, anointed only his feet.
The
passage is saturate with sensuality, sexuality even. The woman brings to Jesus
expensive ointment, bought with the earnings of her trade. She embraced Jesus
with the hair and lips that had been embraced by countless men. She horrified her
onlookers.
The
rock-musical Superstar, while careless in its amalgamation of several
female characters in the gospels, nevertheless captures this woman’s emotions
well.
I don’t know how to love
him,
what to do, how to
please him.
He’s just a man,
and I’ve had so many men
before.
He moves me so.
He scares
me so.
The
Pharisees were horrified, embarrassed, cynical. Their cynicism was based on failed
logic: if Jesus were a prophet, he would know this woman to be a prostitute. He
would boot her out.
It disturbs
me that the popular image of Christianity in the West is one of middle class
niceness. It disturbed me further to discover this week, in The Age,
that Australian clergy in particular and churchpeople in general do not see their
vocation or ministry as being in the wider world beyond the church. Like the
Pharisees we see our ministry as being amongst the washed, the clean, the lovable.
It was
the clean who failed to wash the feet of Jesus.
The
Pharisee’s mistake – and ours – is to believe that a prophet must not get
dirty. To believe that a prophet’s role is that of a soothsayer, Jesus ought to
know “what this woman is.”
We Christians
often fall into that trap, ascribing to Christians a sort of superhuman insight.
Clairvoyance, perhaps. Jesus is not a clairvoyant. Ironically, he sees far more
than the clairvoyant. He sees not the woman’s occupation but the genuine pain
of her repentance. He does not seek to remain “clean.”
God is
the God who reveals his nature primarily not in the temples or on the high
mountains but in the squalor of a manger in a back street in a rural village.
And in
red light districts or a dusty town.
Jesus
does even more than forgive the woman, as if that were not enough. Before a
gathered crowd of chauvinistic Pharisees, who thanked God each morning in their
pious prayers, that they were not born a woman[1] – he
tells the woman that it is her faith, her actions that have saved
her. The step towards God’s love came from within her, not from the society of
men around her that had forced her to the streets.
There
is almost too much to learn from this brief passage in the life of Christ. But
at the heart of it once more is the contrast between the expectation of middle
class religiosity: that God will be best known in the clean places. The
actuality in this passage is that it is this epitome of poverty, the woman
forced to the streets, who best reveals the focussed love that God seeks in his
people. Jesus gave to the woman, amidst her squalor, in the face of her
brokenness, the best of God’s forgiving, loving, dignity-bestowing love.
[1] On
this prayer, and its revisions, see https://www.anschechesed.org/tefillah-tuesday-not-make-woman/.
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