| October 14, 2007
You are welcome to reflect on this message "The Scent of a Woman" (Mk 14:3-9) October 14, 2007
The toughest problems are the ones that won't go away. Still staring at you when you wake up, just like they escorted you to your pillow when you laid down. What do we do when it can't be fixed? In the fellowship hall after worship last week, a person said to me the most memorable thing they took with them from the previous week’s worship was this: “If you keep doin’ whatcha always done, you’re gonna keep gettin’ whatcha always got!” Just an ol’ southern saying that I felt needed to be said... mostly because it’s true. But even that allows for something to be fixed. You can always “stop shooting yourself in the foot,” and you’ll walk much better!
Four of the churches I’ve served had soup kitchen memories, and are full of folks who “shoot themselves in the foot.” You can try to do something redemptive, but you’re naive to think you can fix it. ‘Cause the same people come back, day after day, year after year. They’re all too familiar with poverty, addiction, prostitution, survival of the fittest, and no nightly Good Samaritan attempts from well-meaning volunteers are likely to make a dent in it. Yeah the hardest ones won’t go away.
Maybe one reason we feel for the unfortunate, is we invest our time and energy, involving ourselves in hands-on service to alleviate human suffering. So we’re tempted to measure our effectiveness by how much we are able to fix it. But life is much more complex, and many of the struggles, in our churches, and families, and our world ... we aren't able to fix with either band-aid or suture. How can you fix something you can't get your hands on?
Like when my Daddy died, we had two lines at the funeral home--one for me and my sister; and the other for my brother Tommy. That's because bro. Tom wouldn't go inside where the casket was. He mentioned it the day before, when we were making the preparations: "I'm not going in." I thought he was teasing, but it turns-out, he wasn't. So two lines: and Tommy stayed outside. It was too hard for him because somebody he loved and depended upon was dead; and was in there. And it couldn’t be fixed. When somebody dies, it is appropriate to bury them. Somehow my brother thought if he stood outside at the front door, it would be easier to handle. But it wasn’t.
Easy believism gets you nowhere in this world. Even if you’ve got one of those Bibles that says in the back: “For help read Psalm 23.” There are no pat answers. Some of the difficulties in our lives don’t get solved ever. They keep returning, and our hearts keep breaking. There’s no end to it. The pain doesn’t lessen with the repetition. But it does carve out room for more faith in God. Church oughta help us with this. One of the deepest challenges of life is to learn how to live graciously in a cruciform world, where most of the problems won't go away?
That leads us to the Gospel of Mark, and our text for today. Jesus had more yesterdays than tomorrows. And the cross was looming large, which not even God could fix. Not that some didn't try. Peter tried his best to steer Jesus away from Jerusalem. But he did more harm than good...which is usually the result of trying too hard to fix something. Because the other side of “fix” is manipulate.
In the Eagles song “Lyin’ Eyes,” there’s a line about “fixing:” “My O my, you sure know how to arranging things, you set it up so well, so perfectly. Ain’t it funny how life doesn’t change things, you’re still the same ol’ girl you used to be. You can’t hide your lyin’ eyes!”
Judas the Zealot, tried to “arrange things.” And he blew it worse than Peter. He thought if he could get Jesus into a confrontation with the Romans, he would fight and the insurrection would be on. But when he “delivered Jesus to the authorities,” all Judas could do was watch helplessly, as his efforts to “fix it” went awry and he took his own life.
So there they were “in the house of a leper named Simon,” and another life's about to be taken. Outside the forces of hatred were gathered to do a good man in. And nobody could fix it. Do you feel the helplessness? There was one in the house, however, who discerned what was happening. She was a shady lady, but also grateful and perceptive. And because she was a woman, accustomed to being out of control, having no power, she was familiar with having to make the best of a bad situation, when faced with limited alternatives.
The religious crowd was set on narrowing Jesus’ options. The most common way we try to fix people, is to get rid of ‘em! He was at Simon's house, and an uninvited woman showed up, and showed ‘em all up, because she sensed it was the last time she’d be with Jesus alive. And she had no qualms about “going inside the house.” Her weapons against the forces of evil and hate were just a bottle of perfume and a sensitive heart. But that seemed to match the tools of him who only used a towel and a basin. With these, she couldn’t stop his death. All she could do was manage herself and acknowledge it with hope. And that's what she did. And boy, did that make God smile?
Mark tells us simply, "She did what she could." That's it. She broke a bottle of perfume and poured it on Jesus. That was all she could do. At first glance, it appears to be a pretty tepid tribute. What’s so heroic about somebody "doing what they can?" Granted, most people don't even bother to do what they can...that's why Jesus praised her. How many times has the world been blessed when somebody had the courage to "seize the moment," and simply do what they could with what they had? Such is a mark of greatness in the eyes of Christ.
For most of us, there would’ve been only two alternatives. Maybe some of us would feel badly but look the other way. That or start a war where our futile efforts in trying to fix it--only makes it worse. But this shady lady realized another option, namely, to look for what God’s trying to do in the moment and then give whatever limited resources she had to that. Whether it's a picnic lunch or a bottle of perfume. Jesus once fed 5000 people that way, just “doing what he could.”
And Magdalene did what she could: she gave something precious away. Then look what happened. Immediately opposition arose. It's predictable. "Now, why did you do that? You just wasted all this precious perfume! It could’ve been sold for a fortune, made a real dent in poverty with the contents of that bottle. And you just poured it out. We've got problems around here woman, that we wanta fix!" And Jesus said, "Some problems you always have with you--like the poor." You don't wave a magic wand and get rid of that one. There’ll always be “war and rumors of war.” And cheating and misrepresenting. Some things can't be fixed, ever.
Jesus always seemed to notice unnoticed women. The widow who “gave all she had.” Mary who broke her priceless nard & he who restored crippled limbs left it shattered. But he loved her for breaking it for him. One of the things that ought to happen when we go to church is to become sensitized to the human suffering in our world, and how few problems we can really fix with any finality. But that doesn’t keep us from trying. What can we do when the problems won’t go away?
Well we can pray. Always that is proper. Maybe we can’t fix it, but hopefully God can. Somebody pointed out to me once, there are two kinds of CEO’s who try to solve problems. One says the obvious: “We must work harder.” The other wonders, “What can we do differently?” To do nothing is to say "there is no God." To try to do it all is to be God. But to see thru the eyes of faith, with the ability to perceive what God is doing, and give what we have to that -- is to serve the God who alone can make things right, whether its gets fixed or not. There’s a lot of things that don’t get fixed, but God is still God. When Christ rose from the dead, he still bore the ugly scars. But God is still God.
When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, he too had to face unfixable realities. His arrival signaled the death of hundreds of kids. Paranoid, ruthless King Herod, destroyed all the boy babies 2 and under. (And if all God wanted Jesus to do was die, why not let Herod do the honors right then? Ah but God had a lot more for Jesus to do than die. He had to live before he died, to show us how to live; as well as die).
Naturally, the people expected him to use the power of God to make this world right. That’s what a Messiah’s supposed to do. The Baptist thought so. And so did everybody else. And when he didn’t, he was rejected: “He came unto his own, and his own knew him not.” Because the evil Jesus exposed was mostly religious evil, there was hell to pay. But he offered no quick fixes by a show of power. For he recognized that simplistic, violent answers to perplexing problems “makes us more a child of hell than ourselves” as Matthew put it (Chapter 21).
It’s easier to call out the Marines than it is to break a jar of expensive perfume. Because one costs others, but the latter costs us. God's power is redemptive not destructive. There are no quick fixes. It's about enduring what cannot be avoided, like crosses and things that won’t go away. That was part of the mission of Jesus. It took “the scent of a woman” at Simon's house to stop Jesus in his tracks. He declared, out of all of ‘em there, she’s the one to watch; she’s the one who “did a beautiful thing to Jesus.” "And I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached, what she has done will be told in memory of her." I’ve tried to fulfill that today.
And my hope for us is that we too will likewise strive to “do all the beautiful things” we can in the face of our own intractable dilemmas. May we never be ashamed of our brokenness, for that’s when we’re most like Christ. And let us not be afraid to break our own vases in devotion to God. For how else can this smelly-old-world catch "the scent of his fragrance?"
PRAYER: |
