“Don’t jinx it.” We often hear or say it. I can imagine Judas Iscariot saying this internally in the gospel lesson this morning when he sees Mary anointing Jesus’ feet with costly perfume made of pure nard. Jesus, however, considers Mary’s strange act of anointing as a pre-funeral ritual. This isn’t too surprising since he has also been openly talking about his death to his disciples. It’s just that they don’t want to hear anything about it. This death means their failure. Their decision to follow him would be proven to be unwise and wrong if he helplessly dies. Judas just wants to prevent it from occurring and undo what Mary jinxes it.
Let’s think about ourselves. What are some examples of others’ behavior triggering anxiety and fear in us? Among nurses, there’s one word one is not supposed to say out loud: QUIET. There’s a superstition that it will make them busy if the Q word is spoken. About ten years ago when I was a rookie chaplain, I made an unintended mistake of saying this forbidden word to staff. I can imagine them thinking I knew nothing about the hospital culture. This Q word phenomenon might show how much hospital staff doesn’t want to deal with crazy situations when that institution they work for is already filled with anxiety. So what do you say instead of the Q word? I can go with the word “silent” but this word doesn’t work well either since it has the same meaning. Anything that means “quiet” doesn’t work. My go-to word is “uneventful.” I can say, “Have an uneventful one” “Let’s keep it as it is” or “Keep it down.” This whole discussion about jinx or superstition at its core is more about fear rather than what actually happens. As much as hospital staff doesn’t want a crazy shift as if the Q word would trigger that busyness, Judas doesn’t want anything that reminds him of Jesus’ death. When he sees Mary pouring costly perfume over Jesus’ feet and anointing, he would be like, “Mary, you stop it right there! What do you think you’re doing!?” The fragrance of pure nard is not pleasant to him but is the smell of an embalmed body of Jesus. Mary’s behavior not only indicates his failure of choosing Jesus as his leader but also foreshadows the death of Jesus that eventually leads to his death. If one is a certain kind of naturalist who believes nothing is real except what can be studied and verified by the natural sciences, death means an end to everything. There’s no life after death. Whatever one hopes dies with death. It is in its nature nihilistic. We don’t have any information on whether Judas is a nihilistic naturalist. Yet, his fear of death which is triggered from his fear of Jesus’ death is pretty evident. Jesus, unlike Judas, accepts Mary’s pre-funeral or living funeral ritual to the fullest. He completely embraces his death. There’s no indication that he is offended by Mary’s act of anointing. Instead, he defends and justifies her. He then invites his disciples who may secretly agree with Judas’ accusation of Mary being unwisely wasteful of money and inconsiderate for the poor and might be ticked off by her pre-funeral ritual. They’re challenged to imagine what they would do to their loved ones when they know they’ll be gone soon. This anxiety-producing invitation applies to us too. What would we do if we knew our loved ones would be gone? While we don’t even want to imagine that scenario, as if thinking about it somehow makes it faster or not thinking about it makes it slower, we’ll treat them lovingly and kindly. The money wouldn’t be an obstacle to showing how much we love and care for them. In this case, there’s nothing we spend wastefully. Whatever we spend our time, energy, and resources on is worth it. How dare we measure the value of our loved one’s precious life? This is the approach we take to better understand Mary. What about the death piece? How do we make sense of it that may provoke fear of death in us? How do we resolve this fear of death Judas is explicitly reacting to, with which we may share? Don’t we have some reactions to it that we want to avoid talking about? One clear thing is we can never go around this topic. At some point, we will have to face it through our loved ones and our own. This finite nature of humanity, that is, mortality is inevitable. What then seems to matter in the most practical sense is what kind of afterlife we envision. Every human being does make a choice on which version of afterlife one believes in while whether that choice is made consciously or not is another matter. For someone like Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and author of “The God Delusion” who is a fundamentalist naturalist, there’s nothing after death. This naturalist view may be a popular one in our secularized culture. The acronym, “YOLO” which means “You Only Live Once” is more used than the opposite acronym “YODO,” meaning “You Only Die Once.” In this position on the afterlife, life is the only thing that is available and there’s nothing else after this life is over. For us Christians, we clearly have our view on the afterlife, which is the resurrection. In the lens of the resurrection, “YODO” doesn’t apply to us. We don’t die once but twice. We die once sacramentally, not alone but with Christ, in our baptism, and die again physically in Christ. Just as we die twice, we live twice too. Once we die in our baptism, we’re called to live out the resurrected life here on earth via contemplation. The second time we physically die. This is the afterlife that we don’t have any scientific evidence to prove it’s real. The afterlife aspect of the resurrection can be considered as a working hypothesis that helps us live better here and now. So we are connecting between the first death and the second death by linking the first resurrected life with the second resurrected life. This is to say that what we’ll be resurrected into depends on how we live our resurrected life here and now. If we believe and hope that we’ll be united with our loved ones in God after death while we leave open to what nature or form we’ll be transformed, that longing for the union must drive us to love one another as ourselves more consciously and intentionally to the fullest. Mary’s extravagant longing and love for Jesus is the longing and anticipation we want to cultivate. Lent is a perfect season to reflect on this longing for the union with our loved ones in Christ and to let this longing make compassionate changes in our relationship with others here and now. |
Paul"...life up your love to that cloud [of unknowing]...let God draw your love up to that cloud...through the help of his grace, to forget every other thing." Archives
January 2025
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