When my grandmother was 94 she had a very serious stroke. Her doctors said she only had days to live and my Mum took her home so she could die surrounded by people who loved her.
I asked if I should go to Germany to see her and my Mum said, “Well, there’s not much point, she’s effectively asleep the whole time. You may as well wait until the funeral.”
But my grandmother didn’t die then. So, after a while, I did go and visit. I visited her a few times. She didn’t die until just before her hundredth birthday.
It was hard work for my Mum especially. My Dad helped. My grandmother was asleep most of the time. She would have these brief moments of awakening and lucidity. She had to be fed. She had to be cleaned and washed. She couldn’t go to the toilet.
One time, so my Mum could have a break, my brother and I agreed to come and stay and look after her for a week. We knew what to do, we had helped my Mum do it.
The first time my brother and I had to clean my grandmother, she was awake. As we cleaned her she looked at me. She didn’t say anything but I had a strong feeling she wasn’t happy.
I wondered if she recognised me and was embarrassed by what was happening. Or maybe she didn’t recognise me and was frightened by what was happening. This made my brother and I feel uncomfortable. We wondered how we would cope emotionally with looking after our grandmother in such an intimate way.
It was the summer time and the weather was nice. I thought it might be a nice idea to put my grandmother into her wheelchair and wheel her out onto the balcony. My grandmother had always loved being outside, she loved plants and especially herbs and wild flowers with medicinal properties. I went into the garden and picked some rosemary and some wildflowers and put them in a jam jar on the table on front of her.
She woke up and looked at me and my brother. And then suddenly she reached forwards and she picked the rosemary and other flowers out of the jam jar and held them to her face and breathed in deeply. And then she spoke, which she hardly ever did. She said “Wunderschön! Lovely!”
That evening I thought she might like to get in the wheelchair again and come into the kitchen while we were preparing food, cutting up vegetables. She was awake again. I was peeling and cutting up carrots. The kitchen was filled with the sweet carroty smell. Suddenly she leaned forward, picked up the kitchen knife I had left on the table and started chopping up carrots into smaller pieces. She cut them using the ball of her thumb as a kind of chopping board. She always cut carrots that way. The ball of her thumb always had little cuts in it with skin hardened around it. Actually, that’s how I cut carrots because I do it the way she taught me.
These were her two most lucid moments for that whole week. Both moments were characterised by a distinctive and powerful scent. First the scent of rosemary. Then the smell of carrots.
Occasionally my grandmother would be awake when we changed her. But somehow her facial expression was different now. It wasn’t embarrassing anymore. There was no fear of exploitation. We all had an unspoken understanding that it was OK. This was love expressed through loving service.
The story of the anointing in Bethany is told by all four Gospel writers. But they tell the story, or what appears to be the same story, in different ways and it is important not to get them mixed up.
John’s Gospel says Jesus is anointed by Mary. But Matthew and Mark refer simply to a woman and Luke adds the vague biographical detail that the woman was a sinner.
In John’s Gospel Mary anoints the feet of Jesus. In Matthew and Mark it is his head which is anointed. Luke also has it that the feet were anointed but only after wetting them with her tears. So you wonder, if they were really talking about the same incident.
In John’s Gospel Judas Iscariot is named as the person who objects to the cost of the perfume. In Matthew it is the disciples, in Luke it is the Pharisees and in Mark it is just ‘some people’. In John, Matthew and Mark, the objection is the same; the money could have been used for the poor. In Luke, it is the Pharisees who object and they object because Jesus should not be associating with a woman who is a sinner.
Now if you put all those different versions together trying to keep in as many details as you can, you can end up with the idea that Mary (named in John’s Gospel) is a sinner because Luke calls the woman a sinner in his Gospel and then if you make the massive assumption that a sinning woman can only refer to a prostitute then you end up with the idea that Mary Magdalen was a fallen woman which is nonsense of course but I mention it because it is a nonsense that exists in the popular imagination and is often encountered in films and literature.
But back to what the Gospel actually says, and specifically John’s Gospel, John has one other detail that the others don’t have. He writes that ‘the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.’
This is a story telling technique that I used when I told you what it was like when I was cutting carrots with my grandmother. At one level it is a statement of the obvious. The whole point of perfume is to make a smell. But by drawing attention to this obvious fact, John engages our senses and helps us to be in the room, a room filled with a powerful fragrance, a fragrance that you can’t ignore.
And so now we can imagine the scene: Mary has done this thing, it’s happened and you can’t ignore it, because of the powerful scent in your nostrils; and now everybody is upset.
The other people are not happy that Mary has done this. Has she crossed a line with this act of intimacy? Has she found a way of drawing closer to Jesus than any of them could? Has she broken a taboo when her hair touches his feet and is the scent making it impossible to ignore?
Somebody has to object and in John’s Gospel it is Judas who does so. Judas: who later betrays Jesus. We could have given that money to the poor. John is at pains to let us know that Judas is insincere when he says that. The objection Judas makes is phoney. He is clutching at straws. That’s not his real objection.
So Jesus strikes back. ‘You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.’ The permanent state of having poverty in our midst is an accusation from Jesus and a way of saying that Judas really needs to pipe down. Judas needs to lay off Mary and leave her alone. Because this act of intimate worship, this drawing close, this connection that Mary seeks to have with Jesus, this is meant to be remembered and understood as an example for his followers. And it was understood. And it has been remembered.
Writing to the Philippians, Paul speaks of, ‘the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord’. Paul is saying that the most important thing is knowing Jesus; being in an intimate relationship with him.
Remember how John’s Gospel starts. How he describes how the word of God which has been present in the world since the beginning of time, became a man and came to live among us?
Why has the word of God become flesh to live among us? One reason is this: So that we can form the kind of intimate relationship with God that we can only form with a fellow human being.
Here is the word of God with feet you can pour costly perfume onto, feet you can wipe dry with your hair. And a short time later in John’s Gospel, we see that Jesus also uses feet to demonstrate the intimate relationship he wants to have with his followers by washing the disciples’ feet.
God desires an intimate relationship with us. A relationship which breaks open taboos. A relationship which overcomes the boundaries we erect between us to keep us from embarrassment and protect us from exploitation. He desires to know us and for us to know him. Knowing him surpasses everything else in value. That is why the nard that Mary uses is costly. It is costly so that we can fully appreciate how precious this intimate relationship that God offers us in Jesus Christ is.
It is a relationship of intimate details with no no-go areas. It’s a relationship where Jesus knows how my grandmother cut carrots. It’s a relationship where Jesus knows what it was like when I cleaned my grandmother’s body. It’s a relationship that lives in those parts of our lives. Actually, it is strongest in those parts of our lives.
We are going to say a prayer this morning for all the members of our church who play a role in the distribution of bread and wine: people who distribute the body and blood of Christ at our communion services, and also in care homes and in people’s private homes.
I just want to point out how intimate the contact between us is when we share the bread and wine. When else in my life do we see one person place a piece of food in another person’s outstretched hands? Only at the altar rail. In what other context do we see one person hold a cup in such a way that another person may sip from it?
If anything this level of intimacy is even higher when we take holy communion to care homes, hospitals and to people’s bedsides. Sometimes we celebrate communion amid the equipment you need to have around you when people are incontinent or liable to be sick and we share communion with people whose symptoms can be distressing to witness. And yet as we prepare to share the bread and wine, the body and blood, this doesn’t seem to matter. Nothing is embarrassing or disgusting or frightening any more. The relationship we are celebrating between ourselves and between ourselves and God cuts right through that with an intimacy that is more powerful than our phobias and our fears.
And we do all this because on the night before he died, Jesus washed the feet of his disciples and then he fed them with bread and wine and asked us to remember him just as, a few days before, Mary had anointed his feet with perfume and then dried them with her hair, so he would remember her.
Let us thank God for the intimate relationship he offers us through his Son, Jesus Christ. May we know the value of that intimate relationship always.