Podcast 2.09 The Perfume of Trusting the Story

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Resources mentioned in today’s episode:
The Bema Podcast

You can find the song I shared in today’s episode here.

 

Transcript

Episode 2.09
The Perfume of Trusting the Story

(Musical intro)

Intro: Welcome to the Encounter Jesus podcast, also known as the ‘feel like Jesus is hugging you today’ podcast. I’m Elizabeth Ellynshaw, and today we will be talking about the third scene in the story of Mary of Bethany, my favorite part of the story. In the first scene, she was sitting at Jesus’ feet listening to His teaching, in the second scene, she was weeping at His feet over the death of her brother, and Jesus wept with her and then raised him from the dead. But in the third and final scene, Jesus comes back to Bethany just a week before His own death, and the whole family throws a celebration. Lazarus, alive and well, is sitting beside Jesus at the table, just the way Jesus Himself will sit at His Father’s right hand after His own resurrection, a living picture promise of all that is to come. Martha is in her element, serving Jesus the most fabulous thank you dinner a grateful heart can make. She no longer shows any anxiety or resentment, she no longer is demanding that Mary serve in the same way that she loves to serve. She’s using her own gifts with joy. Martha incidentally, is one of my heroes, because as my father pointed out when I was a child, Martha is a role model in taking a correction from Jesus well. So many of us might respond in hurt pride and say, ‘Fine Jesus, if that’s how You feel about it, I’m never cooking dinner for You again!’ But Martha is still serving Jesus dinners, without the anger and blame and anxiety. She’s a success story. She got it. Jesus won in her life.

So now Mary sees Martha loving Jesus with her love language, acts of service, and she sees Lazarus loving Jesus as they sit and eat together, deep in conversation like two best friends, and she hesitates, thinking, what can I do to show my love to Him? What can I do to show Him how grateful I am for this, how sorry I am that I ever doubted His love for me, how much I want to worship Him? How can I respond to knowing that the Son of God is in my living room right now? What can I possibly do to honor Him in a moment as special as this?

And then Mary has an idea. She’s going to do the craziest, most extravagant, most ‘I don’t care about anything but You and I am ready to give You everything’ act of devotion she can imagine. She’s seen Jesus undo death and no loss is scary anymore. And she has a sneaking suspicion that Jesus isn’t going to be in their living room much longer, maybe never again, and if she’s going to give Him something, she’s got to do it now, before it’s too late.

(Musical transition)

Prayer: Lord, I pray that You would bring us all out through our stories of life, death and resurrection to the place of worship that Mary reached, the place where we realize Who you are and what You are doing and we accept it, the place where no cost is too great and no sacrifice is too wasteful to pour out in loving You, the place where all that we are and all that we have is an offering we pour out at Your feet. Receive our worship the way You received hers I pray. In Jesus’ name, amen.

(Musical transition)

Content: Mary had a jar. It was a jar of perfume, the kind you could use to anoint a dead body for burial, and it was worth a year’s salary. There are so many backstories I can imagine as to why Mary had this jar. Maybe it was her dowry, her hope of getting married. Maybe she was pouring that out on Jesus’ feet. Maybe it was her inheritance, her financial security from her parents who seem to have passed away before these stories take place, her security fund in case she ever lost Lazarus and Martha too. Maybe it was anointing oil for burial that she was supposed to have poured out on Lazarus when he died, but she held it back just in case, because there was a small sliver of hope left inside her that Jesus would come back and do exactly what He did. Maybe she had traded in another treasure to buy this perfume for this moment, because this was what she wanted to give to Jesus.

Whatever the backstory, it’s an enormous gift. Mary is trusting Jesus with her future. It’s the gift of time. It would take a year of labor to buy that jar, and she’s going to waste her life on Jesus, pour out a year’s labor on Him in a moment with no results to show for it except that she loved and honored Him. It’s the gift of finances. In a world before digital banking, all wealth was held in a physical asset like the pearl of great price or the treasure in the field. This is some kind of savings account, and Mary is emptying it on her favorite place in the world, the feet of Jesus. The process of death and resurrection seems to have set Mary free from a fear that we all know well, the fear of not having enough. Not having enough time, not having enough money, and not being worth anything if we don’t produce.

Her gift is also a gift of extravagant worship and humility. Mary doesn’t just anoint His feet with the perfume, she then wipes them with her hair. Social convention, out the window. The highest part of her, her hair, what they called the glory of a woman, applied to the lowest part of Him, His feet, the part that got so dirty on the sandy roads that only the lowest servant should wash them. Mary hasn’t seen Jesus wash His disciples feet yet, but she has already learned the lesson. Mary is on her face on the floor before Jesus now. The resurrection of Lazarus has taught her who is sitting in her living room. She is treating Jesus like the Son of God. All the lessons she learned from Jesus are coming to fruition here. That it doesn’t matter what others think, only what He thinks. If He is honored, that’s enough.

And so Mary kisses the heel that the serpent is about to strike. The part of her offering that it seems to me that Jesus appreciates the most is the way that she gets Him, the hint that in some way, she has an inkling of what He is about to go through, and she is blessing it. She isn’t trying to stop Him or stand in His way. She isn’t saying, like Peter said, “Lord, stop talking about dying and don’t go to the cross!” She’s saying, “I realize now that You write death and resurrection stories and if, in order to save us, You have to go through what my brother just went through, I bless You and I want to anoint You for it.” Mary is one step ahead of the story, says Jesus. She’s anointing Him for His burial before He dies!

John writes that the whole house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. I heard someone once say that this perfume was so strong and lingering, Jesus would still have smelled like Mary’s perfume when He was killed the following week. Mary really did anoint Him for His death. I love to think of that smell lingering on Him as He went through the anguish and torture, maybe reminding Him that His people loved Him, perhaps reminding Him in a dark moment that it would be worth it. Mary knew she couldn’t save Him, couldn’t stop Him, and couldn’t keep Him from the pain. Just like she’d had to go through hers, He would have to go through His. The only thing she could do was bless Him, worship Him, anoint Him, thank Him, and let Him die, trusting that He too would come back to her in resurrection.

And that picture, of the smell of Mary’s perfume going with Jesus through the dark hours in Gethsemane, His arrest, torture, fake court case and hours on the cross, and then into the tomb with Him, feels to me like a beautiful metaphor of the way that that you and I were there in Him when He died. We didn’t feel the pain of it, but we were in Him when He died and rose, and we died with Him. He took us with Him, down into death and up into resurrection, united with Christ, so we could reign with Him forever. Mary had suffered with Jesus in her own death and resurrection story, she had known Him in the fellowship of His sufferings, and she was ready to trust the story His Father was writing, ready to accept that the story of God, the good news, the gospel, is a story of excruciating death and victorious resurrection. And she accepted, to whatever shadowy extent she understood it, the truth that Jesus would wrestle into acceptance of in the silence of Gethsemane after each of His prayers: that there was no other way.

The only reason Mary was more deeply clued in to what Jesus was doing than the other disciples were was that she’d just been through it. The other disciples were still hoping Jesus would kill the Romans and give them an earthly kingdom of life, life, and more life, without the need for death and resurrection. And Mary had wanted that kind of story too, she had been just as confused as anyone else when Jesus disappointed her expectations that He would solve her pain and problem on earth now. But all that was different now. Mary had received a gift of resurrection beyond her wildest dreams, and she had experienced that there is no loss too great for God to reverse. She was ready to surrender. Whatever the rest of her earthly life looked like, married or single, rich or poor, dead or alive, she would be a worshipper of God through Jesus and give Him everything.

And so, because of her suffering, Mary made it in time, she anointed Jesus in time. She was the only woman who did. After Jesus died, all the other women who loved and followed and believed in Him rushed to prepare spices to anoint His body. They all wanted to love Him in this way. But Jesus didn’t stay dead long enough for them to try! By the time they had shown up first thing in the morning after the sabbath, even though they got up before the sun rose and hurried to the Tomb, the Tomb was already empty and Jesus was already ready to give hugs and be normal again. Only Mary of Bethany anointed Jesus for burial in time!

From this I draw two lessons that Mary and everybody else in the story learned the hard way. The first is to expect death. And the second is to expect resurrection. Mary had expected neither. She did not expect Lazarus’ death; she did not expect Jesus to allow him to die. And then she also did not expect resurrection. She wept in despair because she did not expect Jesus to bring Lazarus right back again. Mary learned the hard way both to expect death and to expect resurrection.

Jesus’ other followers and disciples were also not expecting death or resurrection. They didn’t believe Jesus when He tried to tell them He would die. They just kept squabbling over being great in His kingdom, and when His death finally happened, they were devastated and terrified, because they had not expected it. And they also didn’t expect resurrection. The women prepared burial spices for Him instead of breakfast, because they didn’t expect Him to come right back.

Mary wasn’t any smarter or better than anybody else, her family had just learned the hard way a few weeks earlier than the others that Jesus was writing death and resurrection stories, and to both expect the death and expect the resurrection. So Mary anointed Jesus like it might be her last chance before He died and her last chance before He rose from the dead. And she was right, it was.

One of my favorite podcasts to listen to myself is called Bema, B-E-M-A, about the ancient Hebrew and Jewish cultural background to the Scriptures. They teach that the Big Main Idea God is trying to communicate through the whole Hebrew Scriptures can be summed in the words, ‘trust the story.’ Just trust the story God is writing. Just trust the story, trust the story, trust the story. If the story takes you down into death, it will bring you up again into resurrection. Expect Death. Expect Resurrection. And trust the story.

So I have one more Mary of Bethany song for you, a song about this moment when she anointed Jesus’ feet and all that it means to stop fighting the story God is writing and trust the story, to worship instead of resist when He writes stories of both death and resurrection.

I know Who You are
I know, the God who hears my prayers
Is in my dining room downstairs
My hand is shaking
And I know what You must do
And how I wish I could save You
From having to save me
My heart is breaking…
As this jar is breaking…

When You die
You’ll be wearing my perfume
Because my heart’s last cry was
“Take me with You!”
And when You lie,
Like my brother, in the tomb,
You still will smell like me
Because I loved You
So let the whole world know I love You

And when You rise
You’ll be wearing my perfume
Because my heart’s last cry was
“Lord I trust You!”
And when You walk alive,
Like my brother, from the tomb,
You still will smell like me
Because I loved You
So let the whole world know I love You

So I’ll bless You
And I’ll let You
For I love You