A Woman with Ointment


By Jackson H. Day, Christ United Methodist Church,
The Second Sunday after Pentecost, 14 June 1998




Psalm 5:1-8 (UMH 742)
I Kings 21:1-21a
Galatians 2:15-21
Luke 7:36-8:3


I – Intimacy and Discomfort



On Palm Sunday our young people Nicole Petro as Mary, Greg Shivley, as Jesus, and Genevieve Riebel, as Martha, acted out the story of the woman with the ointment, a story of intimacy, extravagance, and grace. Even knowing that this was only a play, there was a human intensity to what I was seeing before me that made me give it my full attention – and made me uncomfortable. In every Biblical account of this story, it took place in front of a crowd of people–but seeing it acted out made me realize that it had an element of intimacy, a private moment to which the stares of others might be inappropriate and intrusive.

The story contains not only intimacy but extravagance–the perfumed ointment was expensive, and in a moment's use, it was gone. The story contains not only extravagance, but grace–an act of giving which requires nothing, is dependent on nothing, and asks nothing in return. Intimacy, extravagance, and grace all catch our attention when we see them happen. We remember them because they are out of the ordinary. And they make us uncomfortable.

As I read this morning's gospel in Luke, and the parallel accounts in Matthew, Mark, and John, I began to realize how uncomfortable this story's intimacy, extravagance and grace made others as well – even when the stories were being written down. As a result, the details in the four gospels are amazingly different. Reading this morning's lesson in Luke is especially jarring because it was John's very different version that we saw our young people act out on Palm Sunday. See how different the stories are:

  • Who: The woman was Mary the sister of Martha in John's story, but in Luke is "a woman in the city, who was a sinner", and in Matthew and Mark is just "a woman."
  • Where: John writes that the event took place in Bethany at the home of Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. In Matthew and Mark, it's at Bethany but at the home of Simon the leper. And in Luke, it's at the home of a Simon, who is now a pharisee, place unknown.
  • What: John and Mark refer to nard, which John calls perfume and Mark calls ointment; both plus Matthew say it was costly; while all except John say it was in an alabaster jar.
  • In both John and Luke, the ointment is poured on Jesus' feet. But in Matthew and Mark, it's poured on Jesus' head.
  • How did others react? In Luke, the Pharisee says Jesus should have known this woman was a sinner; in Matthew and Mark the disciples complain about that the ointment could have been sold and the money given to the poor – and in John, the complaint of the disciples is voiced by Judas Iscariot, who is accused of being a thief.

    •  What disagreement on the details! The only things all the stories have in common are that:
  • 1. a woman poured something on Jesus;
  • 2. someone in the room objected,
  • 3. Jesus responded positively. And:
  • 4. that it happened was remarkable enough that it was remembered 40 years after the event when the gospels were first written down.

    • But what accounted for the discrepancies? Fundamentalists, for whom the Bible must be literally true in every detail or their faith crumbles in ruins, apparently handle this by making each account a separate story–so for them, there were 4 different women with ointment, one in each of the gospels. But not being a fundamentalist, I couldn't take that easy way out. I had to ask why the story was one way in year 30 AD and various different ways by the time the gospels were written in 65 and 75 and 90 AD.

    I looked for clues in the stories themselves. And what I believe happened is that as the early Christian church developed over its first 40 years, the values of this story – intimacy, extravagance and grace–came into conflict with two other important values of the church: justice and righteousness. And sleuthing out how the early church handled that conflict of values can help us know not only them–but also ourselves, and God.

    II – Extravagance and Justice


    Social justice was an important value for the early Christian church, as it is for us. When Mary, the mother of our Lord, found out she was pregnant and gave her wonderful Magnificat speech, she praises God for filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty, revealing a powerful social justice commitment. After Jesus' crucifixion, the disciples lived a life oriented to helping the poor; in Acts 2:44, we are told "All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need." What place does extravagance have in a world like that?

    As the early Christians debated some course of action or another, I can imagine more than once a conversation like the following:



    You can imagine, as the story of the woman with the ointment got told again and again, some of these conversations about the story ended up being conversations inside the story, with the disciples taking the part of those who objected to the woman's extravagance. A commitment to social justice means being offended when someone takes more than their fair share. Isn't that what the woman with the ointment did – she gave Jesus far more than his share. How do you justify that without throwing your justice principles out the window?

    Matthew Mark and John have a solution to that question. What makes this extravagance OK is that the woman's ointment is preparing Jesus' body for burial. That solves a piece of the intimacy problem, too–if someone is nearly dead, then putting ointment on their body isn't nearly so intimate, it's just sort of a professional service, like an embalmer.

    Matthew and Mark thus found a way to honor the woman with the ointment while affirming the people who object -- they were the disciples, after all, and the justice they espouse is an important value, even when it conflicts with extravagance. Reading between the lines, I can see the early Christians struggling with differing opinions but trying to find room for everyone in their church.

    John, however, goes farther. For him, the people in the church who complain about extravagance aren't just any disciples, they are Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Jesus, whose justice perspective is insincere–they're probably stealing the money anyway. In John's story there's a willingness to just write the other side off that I don't see in Matthew or Mark.

    III Grace and Righteousness


    Righteousness, too, was an important value for the early church, as it is for us. And righteousness collides head-on with grace. Grace is an unconditional love, a giving without expecting any particular kind of response, and a forgiving again and again. Grace, therefore, involves setting aside the reward system we attach to right and wrong, and that can feel like setting aside our standards of righteousness themselves. Our right and wrong system is basically commercial–everything has a quid pro quo; do right and you will be rewarded; do wrong and you will be punished.

    Into this steps the woman with the ointment. She comes to Jesus, she pours sweet, soothing ointment on his skin, she dries it with her hair.

    Well, says Luke, she had to have a reason. The woman must have done this in order to get something from Jesus--healing for her soul, forgiveness. And so unlike the other gospels, we have in today's Luke reading a lovely story about forgiveness – but working back from loving much to forgiving much, we are told that the woman has sinned much. Uncomfortable with unexplained generosity, Luke makes the woman a bad person. Now, the Greek word for "sin" which is used -- hamartia – simply means a falling short of the mark and is the general word for sin, without any particular sexual implications. And this morning's Old Testament lesson about Queen Jezebel reminds us that women are perfectly capable of being evil in non-sexual ways. But for most of our culture, then as well as now, a "sinful woman" is a woman whose sin is sexual.

    There must have been conversations during those 40 years where someone mentioned the woman with the ointment, and someone else replied, "yes, but don't you know what kind of woman that was?" Or perhaps when someone suggested the church should be more inclusive, and someone asked, "yes, but don't you know what kind of people they are?

    When Luke portrayed these conversations inside the story, he put the objections in the most righteous characters of Jesus' day as he could find: the pharisees. The pharisee says "the woman is a sinner," reflecting what is important to pharisees – knowing who is a sinner and who is not.

    In the core story, grace is brought by the woman in the form of ointment. Luke is not comfortable with this. I think Luke's theology gets in the way. He knows that God brings grace and God is present in Jesus. So, in Luke's story grace is attacked by the pharisee–and rescued by Jesus. When Luke's story ends, the woman has become a bad person, and it is Jesus, by forgiving her sins unasked for–who is the dispenser of grace.

    Luke too has a solution to the intense intimacy of the story. Now the woman's act is part of an exchange: –I'll do something for you if you'll do something for me. Much less intimate. Our comfort level has been restored.

    When Luke wrote his version of the story down, is was still a work in progress. It continued to develop. Just as the unnamed woman in Matthew and Mark became Mary the sister of Martha in John, so the unnamed woman in Luke became–some time after the New Testament was complete, Mary Magdalene, a prostitute, who 19 centuries later in the musical Jesus Christ, Superstar, sings to Jesus, "Everything's alright, yes, everything's fine, and it's cool and the ointment's sweet, for the fire in your head and feet."

    IV. God


    So where is God in all this?

    God reaches out to meet us in the stories themselves and the points that each gospel writer has to make. But there's more.

    God reaches out to meet us especially when we struggle with the various versions of the story together, as I did. Struggling with scripture is good for the soul, because it forces us to give up ideas we have had, and ask God for new ones. Like our biblical ancestor Jacob, who wrestled with a stranger all night and would not let him go until he had obtained a blessing, we recognize when daylight breaks that it is with God whom we have been wrestling, and it is God from whom the blessing has come. And still there is more.

    Most importantly of all, today, God is present in, and reaches out to us, from every one of the characters in the stories. Because together they represent the struggles of the early Christian church to be faithful to God, all the characters in the stories mediate God to us.

    God is a receiver. We meet God in the one who receives the woman's gift--Jesus, the second person of the Trinity. Each Sunday in Communion we worship God as the one who receives, when we sing the Sanctus: Holy, Holy, Holy. In singing those words, we are the givers of praise, and God is the receiver of our worship.

    God is an objector. We also meet God in the ones who object to the woman's gift.

    In the pharisee we meet God who knows and demands of us right and wrong. We're uncomfortable with such a God, because in the presence of God's light we see the darkness of our own lives. It's more comfortable to associate righteousness with the Pharisee, who isn't to be taken seriously because he's a hypocrite, but behind all that there is a God of right and wrong with whom we must make peace.

    In the disciples we meet God who has compassion on the poor, and this is an essential part of God's nature. Again, we're uncomfortable with such a God, because we don't really want to believe that poor people have a special place in God's heart, and we don't want to order our lives or our world so that it brings justice to the poor.

    But of the greatest importance, God is a giver. In the woman with the ointment we meet God as the one who gives. In the story of the ointment poured at Jesus feet and dried with a woman's hair we see giving that is not measured but boundless, not reasoned but spontaneous, not cautious but abandoned. In the sacrament of communion we model the God that we meet in the woman with the ointment -- a God who nurtures, a God who nourishes, a God who feeds us out of all God is, and who calls us to model nurturing each other.

    ***

    The development of this story continues. Why should it ever stop?

    When others criticized what the woman with the ointment had done, Jesus responded, "Leave her alone. She has done a beautiful thing."

    He did? Where is that recorded? I was shocked when I searched the concordance to find this quote and it wasn't anywhere. In none of the Gospels does Jesus say, "she has done a beautiful thing." In today's gospel he forgives her sins, and in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, he says, "she has done me a good service," and that's quite different, isn't it!

    So where did those words come from? Did I just make them up? Or .....

    You'll have to decide that one for yourself.



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