Sermon for Sunday, April 6th 2025 – 5th Sunday in Lent – consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus

Fifth Sunday in Lent, rcl yr c, 2025
Rom. 6: 3-11; ISAIAH 43:16-21; PSALM 126; PHILIPPIANS 3:4b-14; JN 12:1-8

consider yourselves dead to sin
and alive to God in Christ Jesus

Neither Jesus, nor Judas, come off all that well today, in different ways.

Judas, upon seeing Mary pour out a year’s worth of wages in the form of perfume onto Jesus’s feet—Judas appears to ask the right question, appearing to be concerned for the sake of others, asking “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” It’s a good question in its own way; Judas appears to be oriented to the plight of those with very little.

But when we learn a bit more in the form of a parenthetical remark from our narrator, we are led to call his motive into question; we learn that he doesn’t speak in the interests of the poor, but instead in his own interest: Judas “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.” And Judas begins to come off not all that well. We learn that Judas’s intentions are mixed, at best, and at worst he’s not concerned for the poor at all, but concerned rather that there might now be less money in the purse for him to take for his own.

While on first glance Judas’s heart seems to be in the right place, but only until we learn more, it’s the opposite for Jesus. At first glance Jesus’s heart seems to be in the entirely wrong place. “Leave her alone,” says Jesus; “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” Jesus, this time, appears to have little concern for the poor, and appears to say that the problem of poverty is insoluble, and that a gesture of extravagance such as Mary’s, is more important than lessening the hardship of others.

I wonder, though, if we looked more closely, we might find that there is a bit more to what Jesus is saying; that just as Judas’s motivations appear to go from kind-hearted to callous, that what Jesus says moves in the opposite direction— what appears flippant or callous at first, is in truth a bit more profound than we might first realize. And It seems to me that our other readings for today might give us some sense of what Jesus is saying. That what first looks like a dismissal of human need is, instead, a way of reorienting us, and telling us something about what is really and truly valuable in life.

Now I don’t want to trivialize the sort of poverty that Judas seems to be speaking to when he says “Why was this perfume not sold … and the money given to the poor?”There is poverty that is not symbolic; there are kinds of poverty that are about the lack of real resources; the sort of poverty that keeps people hungry or poorly housed. But I wouldn’t take Jesus’s words “You always have the poor with you” as a kind of defeatism, as a giving in to this as a reality that we can only manage unsuccessfully; it seems to me there is much in Scripture, and in Jesus’s actions otherwise, that prevent us from imagining that Jesus is just shrugging his shoulders at poverty here.

But I would want to say that Jesus sees more going on here—in Mary pouring our this perfume—than simply the wasting of something costly that could otherwise have been used more practically. I do wonder if part of what Jesus is saying is that sometimes, in pouring out those things we perceive as valuable, and pouring them out at the feet of Jesus, actually leads not to a poorer life for us and others, but rather such offerings lead us to living richer lives. That there are “former things,” that there are “things of old,” as we hear in Isaiah, that are to give way for the sake of “a new thing,” a new thing that is like a “way in the wilderness” characterized by a greater abundance of things that matter, and experienced as lives lived more fully.

This does seem to be close to what Paul is getting at in Philippians, doesn’t it? Paul lists a whole lot of what appear to be good things, valuable things: status, respect, depth of devotion; he was not just a “Hebrew,” and among the chosen people of God, but he was one of the best of the Hebrews, and among the most righteous of all, he tells us. Maybe not far from saying “among Christians, a priest; and among priests,

a canon rector; and among canon rectors one with an advanced degree and a special title.”

All valuable and good, but not for their own sake—but good rather as an offering, good insofar as they are poured out at the feet of Jesus as a proclamation of Christ, and Christ crucified. I imagine you could supply your own honours and achievements too, those things you find precious. Things of value, costly things, but compared to the surpassing gain given in Christ, compared to death conquered for our sake, they become things that are little more than beautiful dross, winsome refuse, costly rubbish;

the precious nard, the lavish ointment, the opulent oil whose price becomes negligible, and nearly nothing in comparison to the one who sits before us, in the days before his death for us and his death for our sake.

And so we give it away. We make it an offering. We pour out  such wonderful and worthless things before him and upon him, as an act of devotion to the one who raises our friends, like Lazarus, from the dead, that they might sit now at the table with us in witness to our act of thanksgiving; we pour out  such wonderful and worthless things

before him and upon him, the one pursued by his enemies for this act of kindness towards his friend; we pour out such wonderful and worthless things before him and upon him, the one on the road to Jerusalem where he will be met with laud and honour, but a road that will lead also to Golgotha, the place of the skull, and his death on the cross; we pour out such wonderful and worthless things before him and upon him, the one who would be anointed again in the tomb except that this tomb is one we find empty.

We make our sacrifice of such wonderful and worthless things, and pour them out before him and upon him, for his sake—for the sake of the one who is making all things new, and us dead to sin and alive to him.

The Revd Canon Preston Parsons, PhD