The Holy Gospel According to John 12:1-8…
Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. 2There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. 3Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus' feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. 4But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, 5Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor? 6(He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) 7Jesus said, "Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. 8You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me."
The Gospel of the Lord…
Have you ever stood on a threshold? I remember when I ate my breakfast on the very first day I was going to be in the office here at IPLC. I was completely terrified, and at the very same time, so excited I was barely able to make it through an entire meal sitting down. I was ready to do the work I had been training for years to do, I wanted to stretch my legs and run right into the work of ministry, and at the same time, I was pretty sure I was going to fall all over myself at every turn.
How many of us have waited for that first day- the first day of a new job, a new marriage, a new move. How many of us have stood on the threshold of retirement, a brand new ministry, or a calling to work that seems beyond our capabilities? These thresholds carry every emotion you can imagine with them- excitement, but fear, hope, but sadness, dreams and visions, but perhaps a nightmare as well.
Today, we stand on a threshold, and we stand here with our ancestors of faith through time. This is the last Sunday of our Lenten season, and so on this day, we say goodbye to the season of repentance and renewal, and look forward to journey to the cross. It is both exciting and scary, standing here. But we don’t stand here alone.
We hear the story of our ancestors as they waited in exile in Babylon. They were not home, and yearned for a new thing- and the prophet Isaiah reminded them of their history- of their journey through the red sea, as they stood at the edge of water, seeing its depth spread before them and heard at their heels the gallop of pharaoh’s army. God brought them through that sea, rescued them from their oppression, led them to the Promised Land- led them home. But now, many years later, they wait in exile, captured by and army and brought out to a place that is not their own. So they stand on the threshold of a new future, a new thing that God is doing, a thing that they can barely perceive, let alone trust. A path is going to be made in the wilderness, a river is about to flow in the desert. And they stand on the threshold of a future so unbelievable that it is almost a dream.
But it isn’t just these wandering Israelites who stand on a threshold, our very Savior waits in that place before the wheels begin turning and death comes closer than any of his friends ever could have imagined. We find him this day at his friends’ house, dining with Martha and Mary. We know these sisters, and we most certainly know their brother. Lazarus dines at the table with them, lest we imagine that death does not fill the room. Lazarus, the friend Jesus wept over, shares this meal with him, Lazarus who is barely out of the tomb in which he was buried, Lazarus who lives because Jesus called him out of death, sits at the table with Jesus, the one who will soon be in his own tomb. The air must have been heavy.
Standing a threshold can make you do crazy things. Sometimes when I find myself in this palce, see something opening in front of me, everything makes me cry. I’ll hear a song, sing a hymn, get an email or hear a kind word, and I just start crying. The edginess of a threshold makes us so vulnerable, so open to feeling the in-breaking of the kingdom that we often find ourselves tearing up. Martha, the sister who plans, finds herself on this threshold preparing another meal. She’s done this before, and she’s complained about it. My guess is, she serves by feeding. But her sister, well, Mary has always been the wild card, in our text for today, she is how she always has been. The meal is interrupted, because this sister Mary comes into the dining room, carrying with her a bottle of perfume that would have cost a year’s wages from an average person, and she breaks it open, uncorks it and pours it on the feet of Jesus. We don’t know if she does it because she is so thankful her brother is alive again, we don’t know if she can see a death that is already being planned for Jesus in Jerusalem, we don’t know if she is just so amazed at who Jesus is that she decides to go all the way down the road of vulnerability and show her love for him the most extravagant of ways. But, in that room with her brother only one foot of out of the grave, Mary pours a year’s worth of wages on the feet of her savior, undoes her long hair, and wipes his feet tenderly with each strand. And the entire house is filled with the fragrance of Mary’s sacrifice.
Standing on the threshold of what is unfolding before them, Mary does what Jesus will soon do over a meal with his friends, tying a towel around his waist and washing their feet. He will remind them that when we love each other, we serve each other. We’ve been told to love one another, because Jesus loved us.
There is a profound weightiness to both of these texts, and a choice. In Isaiah we hear the story of what God has already done, how God has already set the people free, led them through the wilderness, saved them from the oppression and the army of Pharaoh. God has made a path for these wanderers where there never was a path before, and now, as they struggle in exile in Babylon, God says that they ain’t seen nothing yet. You ain’t seen nothing yet. Because a new thing is unfolding, and standing on that threshold, these faithful people can decide to cling desperately to the past, remembering only what God has done, or they can walk boldly into the future, trusting that this new thing is so far beyond their wildest dreams that they can’t even imagine what God has in store for them.
And at the dinner table with a man who is hardly back from the grave, with his two sisters, Jesus says the very same thing. As oil is poured over his feet, and his feet are caressed by the hair of a woman who loved him and whom he loved, Jesus reminds us that we ain’t seen nothing yet. Death is coming, Jesus’ burial is coming, faster than we can imagine, but we ain’t seen nothing yet. Because this is going to be a different kind of death. A death that is beyond our wildest dreams, because God is doing a new thing.
We confront these thresholds all the time. And we get to see the past- the stories of the people of faith who have gone before us, the stories of Mary and Martha and Lazarus, the stories of the Israelites, but also, the stories of the people who used to sit next to us in this very sanctuary, the faithful departed- our mothers and fathers, sisters, brothers and friends. We get to hold on to that past, to the way we have seen God’s hand moving among us and through us, and we stare faithfully into the future, a future that we can barely dream of because God is doing a new thing, here among us, in the midst of us, making ways in the wilderness, making streams in the desert.
Sometimes it seems to get worse before it gets better, and in the next weeks we’ll experience that together. We’ll hear the cries of Hosanna as Jesus comes into Jerusalem, but we’ll also hear the cries of crucify him. We’ll see the joy and the hope and feel the fear and the anger.
And in all of it, in the unfolding on Jesus’ passion, in the unfolding of spring, in the movement of our lives, we remember that the threshold of a new season, a new place, a new future, is grounded firmly in what God has already done. In God’s unfailing love and grace. We are grounded in a past faithfulness and look toward a future that is so full of life it is like a dream. A future where paths become clear, even in the wilderness. A future where water flows like rivers, even in a desert. The past, the future, the faithfulness and the promises of our God all find us in this present moment. Right here, people with a past and people with a future, who have the gift to live in the midst of both of these things today. And as the psalmist says, then, on the thresholds of this life, then was our mouth filled with laughter and our tongue with shouts of joy, they said among the nations, the Lord has done, is doing and will do great things for them. Amen, and thanks be to God.
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