Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” (John 12:1-8)
CONVENTIONZadok the priest, and Nathan the prophet,And Mary with about a pint of nardAt dinnertime, and all the people saidHow dare she? after she had poured itAll, a year of day’s worth, on the feetBy which she had the wisdom to be told,Before they hit the final stretch of road,And all the people said, it’s wasted.All, except the object of her recklessnessHimself a broken and an emptied thingPreferred to all intents and purposes.She re-arranged her hair, tall, breathing inThe earth-sweet air that filled and held the roomAs though around a throne, or in a tomb.Carolyn Whitnall, 2019.
I’ve got the hang of the fact that ‘Christ’ isn’t Jesus’s surname. But sometimes I slip into thinking of it as a nickname – a synonym that means I don’t have to write ‘Jesus’ twice in a sentence. But it’s not; it’s a title. And to give it is to make some pretty weighty claims.
Like the Hebrew word ‘Messiah’ that it translates, ‘Christ’ (from the Greek) means ‘anointed one’ – anointing being the ritual by which prophets, priests and kings are ceremonially appointed in the Hebrew Bible. Christians understand Jesus to hold all three of these offices, in a special sort of ultimate way that supersedes all others, always.
Only, in literal terms, he wasn’t anointed … was he? The establishment was out to kill Jesus, not give him a job. And when insurgents moved to “make him king by force” he was having none of it (John 6:1-15). The accounts of Jesus’ life conspicuously lack anything approaching a formal ceremonial initiation into any human-recognised position of authority.
What the three synoptic gospels do have is the story of his baptism, when “the Spirit of God descend[ed] on him like a dove” – a divine anointing, confirmed by a heavenly announcement: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” (See e.g. Matt 3:13-17).
What they also have (and John as well) are stories of physical anointings performed by at least two different women on at least two different occasions. [1] One of these is his close friend and disciple Mary (the same Mary who elsewhere gets in trouble with her sister for preferring Jesus’ teaching to her household duties, and who has seen her brother Lazarus miraculously raised to life).
There is a lot going on with such a gesture. It is both personal and public; hospitable and highly inappropriate. It is costly, lavish, sacrificial; full of gratitude and deep commitment. (For the woman in Luke it connects to individual repentance and forgiveness, but that is not forefronted in Mary’s story). It anticipates Jesus’ death, and preempts his own example-setting act of servant-hearted foot-washing. It demonstrates a level of understanding frequently lacking from the male disciples – about who Jesus is, and what he is up to – resonating with claims and hints throughout the wider narrative. This anointed one … the gospel writers want us to believe … is the Anointed One.
There is a lot going on with such a claim. Especially, I think, the idea that it makes him ‘king’. Haven’t we had our fill of kings? (And presidents, prime ministers…) Nationalists and warmongers at one extreme; ineffectual, expensive figureheads at another; and all of them, however noble at the outset, partially corrupted by and clinging onto power at the cost of people they are tasked with serving. To place Jesus in such categories – doesn’t that demean him, and legitimise patterns of human oppression?
I want to say that Jesus so subverts our whole idea of ‘rule’ as to explode it from the inside. A king who rejects the acclaim and endorsement of crowds and elites … who refuses, to the death, to conform to the pattern of the powers that be … who receives honour from women and marginalised “others” … who is anointed ad-hoc in a house and paraded under duress and crowned with thorns and robed in irony and raised above his public by the bleeding wrists … who “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself…” (see Phil 2:1-11). I want to say that Jesus’ servant-kingship de-legitimises tyranny and oppression, and that his sovereignty relativises earthly power, in anticipation of the possibility for perfect, unforced flourishing and liberation to prevail.
I want to say that … but.
The reality is, two thousand years of the belief that ‘Christ is King’ has not always and only worked out like this. Anti-semitism, holy war, colonialism, slavery – history is fraught with applications of Jesus’ kingship by Christians who interpret it as a mandate for domination and coercion in his name. And even those of us Christians today who most fervently and disgustedly reject such interpretations nonetheless benefit immeasurably from them, at least in the ‘Christianised West’, in the form of Christian privilege within our national contexts and Western privilege within a global context.
And there are many in this world still who would “make him king by force” [2]. Among them, I suggest, the white evangelical support base of the Trump administration. Their unwaning determination to cling to political power by which to impose 'Christian values' on society seems not a million miles from the manoeuvre that saw Jesus head to the hills on his own – a response I can relate to more and more with every new development. I’m sure there are closer-to-home (and thus harder to spot) variants of the same agenda in play. And for all my outrage I have benefited; I am implicated. Mary’s gesture indicates a king prepared to die rather than compel the recognition he is due. What does it mean for me – here, now – to be a subject of such paradox?
[1] Some believe that Luke’s story of the unnamed, uninvited “sinner” who causes a scandal at the house of a Pharisee refers to the same occasion, but the differences – and the different emphases of Jesus’ response (here to do with matters of forgiveness and hospitality rather than Jesus’ ministry) – are considerable. All the accounts dignify the women involved and indicate Jesus’ compassion and counter-cultural inclusivity, but their conflation together, and along with Mary Magdalene, has traditionally served to weaken and discredit the presence and character of women among the first disciples.
[2] A post on the blog crookedshore got me thinking about this.
[Thumbnail cc by Snowscat on Unsplash.]
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