Lent 5: Over-the-top love

Mary takes an expensive, sweet-smelling perfume and pours it all over Jesus’s feet. Then, because there is so much of it, because it is running everywhere and filling the whole house with a wonderful, intense smell, she mops it up, with her hair. With her hair.

It’s a wild and sensual story, and it’s no surprise that the whole thing made some people feel uncomfortable. Judas can’t handle it and he condemns it, grumbling about the waste, and how the money could have gone to the poor. Not that he really cared about the poor. That wasn’t why Judas was upset. What rattled him, I think, is this display of undying love for Jesus, expressed in the most intimate, the most sensual of ways. It’s embarrassing. Won’t someone create some order here?

My son asked me recently what the word ‘faith’ means. A lot of the time we imagine faith to be something about ascribing to a set of beliefs. In the Protestant church, there has often been a focus on getting these beliefs right. Making sure they are correct. If we believe correctly, many of us have been led to believe, we will be saved.

But the word ‘faith’ is actually less about correct belief, and more about being part of a wonderful relationship. The Greek word that gets translated as ‘faith’ or sometimes ‘belief’ is pistis. Pistis, and its related words, is connected to concepts like faithfulness, loyalty, obedience and trustworthiness. Faith, or pistis, in other words, isn’t about something you do just with your head, but something you do with your whole being, in relationship with another being.

I told my son that faith was about trust and love. I told him this as we were cuddling in bed, his warm body pressed against mine as we read and chatted and got ready for sleep. The way we are to have faith in God, I wanted him to know, was the way he has faith in me. And I in him. Faith, really, is about love.

And so this story of Mary, with her perfume, with her hair, with her over-the-top love, is a story of faith. She gives us a picture of what it looks like to have faith in Jesus. It is bold, it is sensual, it is over-the-top. And it is also a picture, I believe, of how we are called to inhabit the world. Boldly, sensually, with our whole beings.

Others will grumble. They will tell you that it’s not right, that it’s untoward, that it’s embarrassing. But when they do, look to Mary. Look to Mary and her over-the-top love.

Words by Rev Andreana

Image by picjumbo.com picjumbo.com