Fifth Sunday in Lent; 3 April 2022; Lent 5C (RCL); Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3:4b-14; John 12:1-8.
Deuteronomy 15:11 reads “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.'” Origen (I think) took this to mean that the wealthy held their wealth in trust for the poor, who provided for the rich the opportunity of redemption.
The last verse in the passage from John alludes to this verse in Deuteronomy, and we hear it often as a callous dismissal of the poor — there’s nothing we can do about them, anyway. But this passage can be read to show that Mary’s extravagance is the way we should deal with wealth in regard to the poor.
W. H. Auden wrote a very short poem: Let us honour if we can/the vertical man/though we value none/but the horizontal one. We lavish honors on the dead, but not on the living. Mary pours out her pound of pure nard worth 300 denarii on the living Jesus, not waiting until he is dead. Mashing up Gospels, if we take the parable of the sheep and goats in Matthew’s Gospel to heart, we will treat the poor as Mary has treated Jesus, lavishing honor upon them.
In Philippians, Paul shows us what we ought to do with the world’s honors. He recites his credentials to be a righteous person in the world’s eyes, and then tells us he counts all that as loss and rubbish (the Greek word is a good deal more colorful than rubbish, meaning something like dog sh*t). Instead, he wants to claim a righteousness based on the faithfulness of Christ.
Christ became obedient to God in a way that following torah could never achieve, offering his life to God on behalf of the world (talk about extravagance). Christ’s obedience fulfilled the purpose of torah, in creating a new humanity whose belonging to community is based on God’s grace rather than human accomplishment.
In that sense, we are all poor, if human accomplishment counts for rubbish. Christ’s death levels the playing field — no one can claim honor, rich or poor, if God has chosen such a humiliation. Human community (righteousness) depends upon God’s grace and nothing else. To base belonging on anything else necessarily includes some and excludes others. If God has chose the form of a slave, and obedience to death, the ultimate exclusion, as the basis for the community of grace, none of us can claim any right to belonging other than Christ’s faithfulness.
In Christ, all are equally honored.