“The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”

There is no one like a sister, no one like a brother, you’ve all grown up together.

I remember the day each of my siblings came home to our house, carried in by our Dad.

My second sister moved into a crib in the room I shared with my first sister.

When our brother was born, he slept in a nook carved off from the room where my parents slept.

We snuggled, we roughhoused, we taunted and teased and tussled.

We shared a lot of skin.

We shared – or tried to share our parents.

We didn’t need each other for care the way we needed our mother and our father, but were we to be separated by illness, or ultimately by death, the loss would feel unsurvivable.

In John’s gospel there are four people who are described as being loved by Jesus – one is the anonymous beloved disciple, from whose memory the gospel derives.

The others are the sisters, Mary and Martha, and their brother, Lazarus.

In this supper with the siblings of Mary, Martha, Lazarus, and (their honorary brother, Jesus) we bring the spectacular, climactic sign of the raising of Lazarus down to a human scale.

After the sound and fury of Palm Sunday on the Monday of Holy Week, the long goodbye begins with what the gospel of John knows as Jesus’ “hour.”

In this hour we turn the questions over and over and over again.

What kind of king is this? How will he be enthroned?

How will we bear the grief that is coming?

Where is God?

Each of  the gospels recounts a time when a woman anoints the body of Jesus. Some criticize her, while others understand. All these stories echo in my ears when I read this one, but I care most today about this one here in its place in John chapter 12.

The evangelist of the Fourth Gospel cared that the woman who recognized Jesus before his passion be remembered not only with a name, but with an important name, a significant name amont the original core family of the friends of Jesus. Unlike in the other accounts, Mary’s not a stranger or an outsider or an uninvited intruder at the party.  She and Martha and Lazarus are giving the party.

These are the siblings, Jesus’ family, his miniature community. They have been ravaged by the illness and death of the brother with whom they shared childhood and parents and history. Whose skin they knew as well as their own.

They are gathered in joyous reunion with their brother and with their friend, Jesus, who called him into life.

These are not Luke’s rivalrous sisters. But their ministries complement each other. Martha had confessed faith in Jesus, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” She’s the Peter of this gospel, the Rock, the representative of the faith of the Johannine community. She took the larger role in the scene before. It’s right that she should be serving, a deacon at the saved-from-death, eucharistic table.

Mary, her sister, is the protagonist here, doing in action what her sister confessed with words.

“Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped his feet with her hair.”

Her gesture is rich with meaning, full of emotion, open to multiple interpretations — Over the ages, scholars, mystics, poets have played with its resonances and allusions.

Notice on what the text lingers:

The substance is precious, expensive, pure. “Nard” whispers of the garden in the Song of Songs where the lovers search for one another… it partakes of the flowers of the garden.

She touches Jesus’ body with hers, his feet. And wipes his feet with her hair. So close, so intimate, it has embarrassed readers, this stress on their bodies. The shared skin.

What she does conveys her knowledge, that her friend, a perplexing Messiah, will not be with them for long.

What she does expresses her gratitude. Her grief. Her love.

What she does anticipates what Jesus will do in the larger company of his friends, washing and wiping their feet.

She acts as Christ will act. Here at this table she is the priest.

As in the other gospel stories, her anointing is misunderstood. Here it is Judas, who personifies evile and the rejection of Jesus, who objects.

He says what she does as pointless. Meaningless because it is not a transaction. A scandal because the pound of costly oil of pure nard is a commodity, worth only what it can be sold for on the market. An illogical sacrifice with an unworthy recipient. Judas reduces her liturgical gesture to cold hard cash and what it can buy.

He does not understand what Mary understands and conveys with her touch, her hands, the precious substance in her embodied sermon.

Jesus says, no, what she did has to do with my death. She’s saved it for my burial, not literally… He says, I won’t be with you for long. “You will not always have me.”

It is the sharpest of contrasts: forever/not forever… all the time in the world/a very short time.

Supper on a human scale. Brothers and sisters who have been parted by death. Their lifegiving friend with them only a brief time longer. Able to eat together and to hold each other. Fragile bodies, vulnerable to illness, threatened by violence.

The whole paradox of Holy Week is crystalized in this one poignant penultimate supper.

And the ravishing magic of Mary’s act of anointing, is concentrated in a most memorable, olfactory memory:

“The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”

It pervaded the dwelling where the family that Jesus loved lived.

All who were there at table shared in it.  Martha, Mary, Lazarus. Judas breathed it.

Only Jesus was touched with the oil, but all partook of its fragrance.

Perhaps it left through the open windows and filled the whole world.

Here is the beautiful fragrance of Easter, of eternal life.

Here is the scent of love, of lover’s gardens, the scent of home, of shared family bedrooms.

The scent shared with the fig tree and the blossoming vine.

A fragrance that anticipates the garden where Jesus will be buried.

In the days to come we will journey through darkness and encounter the ugly odor of pain.

For those with eyes to see, the truth of resurrection is always side by side with the fact of death.

We can recall the fragrance of Mary’s perfume, touching us, filling the house, spreading in the entire world.

A foretaste of the joy to come, the love to come, and the reunion that awaits us.

Amen.