I am not a fan of embalming. I’m not eager to talk about it or think about it or recall the graphic scene in “The Crown” where Princess Margaret stumbles into her dead father’s room at precisely the wrong moment. I am not a fan of the subject and certainly not ready to read about it in my morning devotions. Nevertheless, John 12 is exactly what turned up today, just two days into my community’s shelter-in-place order. Thank you, John.
The passage deals with embalming. To be sure, it is the first-century type we have before us — Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ feet points to something that hasn’t happened yet. At this point in John’s story it’s a figurative – not literal – embalming that is signaled. But for those of us with delicate sensibilities, that is not much help. Mary’s nard and her hair and her smearing Jesus’ feet with her life savings remind us that something is going to happen. Something ugly is going to happen to Jesus and John 12 is forcing us to think about it. In my case, before breakfast.
If I were writing the story I would have had Mary anoint Jesus’ head. Then the symbols would all be pointing to his kingly-ness, his exaltedness. That would have been a story about a high-flying savior, one who transcends the grittiness of the world. One who is focused on piety and heavenly choirs, perhaps. On the sweet by and by instead of what the great preacher J. Alfred Smith Sr. calls “the nasty now and now.” But no, that’s not John’s story. In John 12 Mary anoints Jesus’ feet. She treats them like any Judean woman of the time would treat a beloved body for burial. She smooths the beautiful and fragrant over the broken and the human.
John is right, of course. As usual my delicate sensibilities are trying to lead me in exactly the wrong direction. The earthy Jesus – the oh-so-human Jesus – it turns out, is the one we need. The one I need. The Jesus who died and whose body was anointed and entombed — that’s the Jesus who can rightly say he knows what I am fearing these days. What concerns I have for the physical well-being of my elderly mother. How it feels to be fighting off that which overwhelms. This is the Jesus who knows the worries I have for my students, for the future of the church. And this Jesus is a gift far better than any I could possibly have imagined, one who reminds us that God’s empathy is perfect.
The love God pours out on us is not based on abstract thinking. It’s informed by muscle memory and hands-on experience — by sensations and hormones as well as by the myriad mysteries of the human heart.
We have a God who not only understands but enters our fears and pain. This is a God who rides the roller coaster of grief with us. Who not only remembers that we are dust but knows the taste of dust in the mouth. Best of all, perhaps, ours is a God who empathizes with each and every one of us. Both the earthy among us and those of us with delicate sensibilities are loved and befriended by this God. No wonder the gospel hymn writer was moved to write, “what a friend … what a privilege to carry everything to him in prayer.”
JANA CHILDERS is dean and professor of homiletics at San Francisco Theological Seminary and University of Redlands’ Graduate School of Theology.
