Year C

John 12:1-8

The Rev. Denise Vaughn

A New Thing

The readings today are very appropriate for this fifth Sunday in Lent, especially the Gospel. Holy Week begins next Sunday on Palm Sunday with the passion and death of Jesus immediately beyond and ahead for both the characters in John’s gospel and for us. John places the gospel story of Jesus’ visit to the home of Lazarus, just six days before the Passover as an introduction to Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and the beginning of his passion and death. Bethany, a village on the eastern slopes of the Mount of Olives is only a few miles from Jerusalem. On this day, Jesus is sharing a special meal with his friends. Friends that include Mary, a faithful disciple who gives herself and all she has to Jesus showing her extravagant love for him and Judas, the unfaithful disciple who steals from the common purse and will betray Jesus.

This story is not only about Mary’s preparation of Jesus for his death, but it is also a story about Judas Iscariot’s preparation of Jesus for his death. For we begin to see Judas’ priorities that will prove sinister as the week moves on with his betrayal and handing over of Jesus to those who would kill him. Both the faithful one, and the one who is not, are included in John’s story today because their inclusion tells us a great deal about the meaning of the cross and the nature of God’s grace. If Jesus came to save the lost, surely there is no one in the gospel story who is more lost than the one who betrays him. In the cross we see not only God’s greatest act of love for all people; but we see God’s greatest work of reconciliation in and through it for Mary and for Judas.

In the actions of Judas, in his betrayal and handing over of Jesus to those who would kill him, Judas serves God’s greatest purpose of saving the lost and in the actions of Mary as she anoints the feet of Jesus, in the proclamations of the Prophet Isaiah and the Apostle Paul, we hear the call for all people to look forward to the new thing God is about to do through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are challenged today to be open to the new thing God is doing, and to discover new depths of our relationship with and love for Christ. The focus of Isaiah 43 and Psalm 126 is on what God will do in the future. There will be a new Exodus even greater than the first. The Lord will make a road through the wilderness and will provide “rivers in the desert.” The Lord has renewed the fortunes of Zion…and those who had once sown with tears now “reap with shouts of joy.”

Paul, in his message to the Philippians looks to the future and goes so far as to commend “forgetting what lies behind in order to focus on what lies ahead because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ. This passage brings the season of Lent to its peak. This is the time to reassess and look at what shapes our identity and life. Do we count as “loss” all that we strive to achieve, because of the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ? How do we know Jesus Christ? It is clear that knowing Christ is more than simply gaining information. This knowing calls us to identify our lives so closely with Christ that we seek out where God is at work to bring life into places of death and to join in that resurrection. This privilege of identifying so closely with Jesus calls us to set aside everything we have valued, like Mary and Paul, to “press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”

Paul has a changed view of life through Christ and a renewed attitude toward the future because God is not yet finished. The God who acted in the past to save Israel, to usher Paul into a grace filled relationship with God, and sends Jesus to demonstrate God’s love for all people has more in store for us and all the world.  By looking to the promises God kept in the past, we gain confidence that God will keep promises about the future. We come together on Sunday because we need to hear these promises over and over again. It is not always easy to embrace that future, as the Christian life is rarely easy. Whether it is being faithful in our relationships and responsibilities or in our caring for the poor and needy in our community, the challenges of living into the future to which God has called us can be difficult.

Yet, because of the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ we can press on toward the goal. Jesus is God’s extravagant gift poured out for a world that for the most part did not want him and through his example we learn how to live a life of loving and serving God and our neighbor. In Christ, God was ushering in a new way of being. While Judas suffers from a failure of imagination in his ability to see God ushering in a new way of being in the world through Jesus, Mary is able to glimpse that the only way to be made new is through Christ. Her act of anointing anticipates that God in Christ is doing something new in the resurrection of Jesus and that sharing Christ’s way of life leads to the resurrection but only through the cross.

In Mary’s example of extravagant love we see that Christian discipleship is to be an act of adoration of and gratitude to the one who alone is holy. And because of Judas, his Christian discipleship is God’s making right all those who have rejected and betrayed Jesus. In the actions of Mary and of Judas, we see ourselves we see that we are a combination of both the faithful and the unfaithful. The grace of Jesus Christ includes both the faithful and the unfaithful in the act of the cross now and in the future.  All are included as we look forward to the new thing God is about to do through the resurrection. Jesus, the good shepherd gives his life for the sake of the sheep to show us God’s extravagant love for all God’s people.

As we look forward to the events of Holy Week, we pray that even in the midst of suffering we can glimpse the new thing God is doing in our midst. Armed with the promise that the future is God’s and assured that God loves us and is with us in the present, we can keep faith and go forward confidently into God’s future, pressing on toward the goal of living in the new life given to us in Christ. In the theme of Lent “Return to the Lord our God.