About Mary

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from here: John Mark Reynolds


The Women of Holy Week: She Annointed Jesus and Created Beauty

John Mark Reynolds
Culture, Theology
04.03.2007
We don’t even know her identity for sure. Some Christians in the West believe that she was Mary Magdalene, but Christians in the East simply call her Mary of Bethany.

Days before Good Friday she poured out precious oil and anointed the feet of Jesus. She wiped those Sacred Feet with her own hair.

Mary loved Jesus. Of that passion we can be sure and she showed love by preparing His body for burial. Did she know the significance of what she was doing when she poured out the expensive oil on his feet and wiped it with her hair? As the odor filled the house was she covering the smell of death that had disturbed her sensitive soul?

The great women in my life have often been this way. They could not tell you exactly why a thing should be done in such and such a way . . . my grandmother could make mouth-achingly delicious meat loaf, but could not produce a recipe, only meatloaf. . . but they know that it must be done.

Is it possible that God tells some people (men as well as women) who are sensitive when to act through reasons not known to what men call reason? Perhaps. I do know that I have learned to listen to mothers, to artists, to people who act beautifully and do not just think beautifully.

As always when someone loves God in an extravagant act of beauty there was someone around to try to ruin it. In this case, the someone also had a big role to play in Holy Week: Judas Iscariot. He condescended from his disciple status to point out that Mary could have given the money to the poor. Judas, the only disciple from the south of Palestine, was given to worrying about other people’s money. In our age he would have had run a Hollywood charity urging the government to give other people’s money to the poor.

Mary of Bethany was not poor and she used her money as God prompted her. She used her money to honor God.

In another gospel story about a woman anointing the Lord’s feet (perhaps the same woman, perhaps not), a pharisee muttered that she was a sinful woman. Contact with the physical, so necessary for beauty and art, often repels the pharisee. He would prefer that his theology avoid the messiness of physicality, the hard corners of science, and the eroticism of creation.

Mothers are fecund and no young woman is allowed to forget that she could be a mother . . . even if that is not a role she chooses. Mary of Bethany brought the reality of the Lord’s death . . . which would not just be an idea or “spiritual” . . . to the room. She did not do so in words alone, but in deed!

Puritanical types draw back from the sheer physicality Mary’s act. Such folk want their religion with theoretical, not real, tears on the inside which hit no pillow, love expressed only in greeting cards and not in the hug of an actual greeting.

Mary would have understood the greeting of the “holy kiss” of the Middle East. We live in a religious culture that talks about family and friendship, but then is afraid (sometimes for good reason) of touch.

Love knows nothing of care . . .though it is prudent. It is prudent enough to extravagant when the Beloved is worth that cost.

Mary loved Jesus so much that she rightly valued Him. She took an expensive thing and wasted it for the love of her Lord. Saint John, the apostle of love, came to understand this and called her by way of introduction “the woman who anointed the Lord.”

I often think of this when I see mothers pouring out their lives in unpaid service to their churches or families. Nobody likes the “Church Lady” anymore except to mock her, but she has a model in Mary of Bethany.

“Isn’t that a waste,” our culture sniffs. “Couldn’t all that talent be used to save lives or something,” having already betrayed Christ and embraced a culture of death.

“Isn’t the stay-at-home mother selfish?” one student asked me. “Only if the total offering of all of self, a soul created in the image of others, in unpaid service is selfish,” was my mental reply.

I also see Mary of Bethany when those same ladies labor long and hard to beauty the church for Easter with flowers, their best hand sewn linen, and other crafts. “Can’t we worship God without such things? Shouldn’t we experience Easter in our hearts?” snorts the critic. “What a waste!”

Mary of Bethany made a symbol real . . . and pictured what was to come by her mental act made physical.

What do I mean?

It is easy to forget that Mary of Bethany did not actually prepare the Lord for burial. Her physical act was a symbol, but it was not merely a mental symbol. It was played out in space and time, like a piece of performance art. It was both physical and symbolical, like the symbol of the Lord’s supper or baptism.

People have bodies and people who say that they can love God without expressing that love physically are either great saints or lying due to laziness. They pretend to a profound spirituality, because it saves them the social embarrassment of doing something religious and the money for cut flowers. My experience tells me that saints are rarer than lazy cheap skates!

Mary was preparing the Lord for death while He was still alive. Our acts of service to Him now bring His Easter to a world that can only believe in the pain of Lent.

This Holy Week we will worship God with both our bodies and our spirits if we worship Him in spirit and in truth. All of us must be as Mary of Bethany was and make the inner reality real in some way. Some will do so by carefully preparing an Easter basket for her children (not just throwing in the candy and going to bed), others will do so by decorating their parish hall, still others will do so by hugging a sick child this Sunday missing Easter service (longing for all this Lent!) so that the child will not be alone.

All of these are Mary of Bethany. All of these are bringing vibrant Easter spring time to a world caught in winter.