Truth in the Balance
Fifth Sunday in Lent
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 reclining with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’s 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 12:1-18
This Lent, I’ve been preaching on the theme of living in truth. We can’t possibly cover all of “truth” as a category, as that would be to cover everything about everything, including God himself. I also keep looking for (and maybe forcing) analogies to the weather, and I can’t help but notice that we in Vermont are between seasons—not quite spring, but might still get another snow…mud season, but not mud season, since I can actually drive down roads without sliding. It’s as if nature is in a balancing act. As it so happens, our gospel reading today highlights the tricky, sometimes challenging, but also really graceful nature of Christ’s balancing act of truth.
We are also getting closer to the end of Lent. It is a season of piety, though I won’t be checking any Lenten report cards if you don’t check mine. But the purpose of Lent isn’t so much about spiritual athleticism. It’s an opportunity to assess how our lives have gotten out of balance with the fullness of God’s truth and then change things that help us be more in balance (by the way, if you didn’t do this spiritual check-up at the beginning of the forty days of Lent, you can still start anytime. In fact, I don’t think God cares even if you start after Lent).
As for our reading, this gospel story of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet isn’t only recorded in John 12, but a few places including Matthew 26. And in Matthew’s version, it’s not just Judas chiding Mary, it’s all the disciples who are “indignant,” for this really expensive perfume could have been sold and given to the poor,1 a year’s salary was just poured out on the spot. But Jesus says, “You will always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
I doubt this completely satisfied the disciples in that moment. It might still bother us. We might think it almost sounds like Jesus is a little passé about the poor. It bothered Kurt Vonnegut, who didn’t preach many sermons, but he once preached on this passage and was convinced it was Jesus almost making a joke, a sarcastic, “Don’t worry, you’ll always have the poor with you…empires aren’t fixing that anytime soon.”
But what’s interesting is that this story is in Matthew 26, and just yesterday, our church’s Session met for our retreat to talk about how we can live into the verses right before it, Matthew 25:31-46, focusing on how we can have an active, living faith and address needs in our community. So right before this story of the perfume, we have Jesus’ famous lines, “When I was hungry, you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me…just as you did it to one of the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.”
That was a high bar to live up to, but the disciples wanted to live up to it. And now, just as they’re really trying to live out that call, Jesus is now saying, “You will always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
So which is it? Was he wrong in Matthew 25, or Matthew 26?
Was he wrong when he told the rich young man that to be perfect was to sell everything he had and give it to the poor?2 Or was he wrong when he celebrated Mary for her act of fragrant devotion, gone in the instant? Is Jesus contradicting himself?
To answer this question, I’ll ask another question that I asked our Bible study a few weeks ago: which way do you turn to get to Morrisville from Craftsbury? Do you take a right, or do you take a left? They’re opposite directions, so maybe you say, “Well, don’t be a hypocrite, you can’t possibly say both.” The answer, of course, is that whether we take a right or a left to go to Morrisville depends on where we are in our journey. But unless you can drive over the hills as the crow flies, you will, eventually, have to take a right, and then a left, and if you take Wild Branch Road to North Wolcott Road, you will have to go back and forth between steering right and left many times.
A lot of people in history have debated whether Jesus’ prophecies came true or not. There’s one prophecy where there's no contest: we will always have the poor with us. And as he calls us to do in Matthew 25, there is always a need and a call for people of faith to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick, visit the prisoner, and all the other ways to make our faith in him animated. There are always people to take care of. And, as we see here, the presence of Christ Jesus is one we will always need to celebrate, worship, honor, and remember, just as Mary does through her act of devotion. A faith that is alive needs both, and balance is the thing that lets the living move with grace.
We know this intuitively. In your own body, do you use your head or your heart? Physically, of course both. And of course spiritually, we need both, and our bodies and Christ’s have so many more parts. Churches that are all head and no heart are going to have problems (and on this, some would say Presbyterians stand guilty as charged). And for churches and spiritualities that are all heart—even as good and wonderful as the heart is—without discernment piercing through the ways the heart can deceive,3 we will be in trouble too.
One thing that might be so hard about living and moving in balance is on display in this story: Judas is actually right, in one sense, based on Scripture. That money could have been used for the poor; isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? But Christ’s challenge is that even when we’re right, we can be wrong without the fullness of truth in balance. It strikes right at the heart of our pride when we have loved our ideas so much because we “knew” how right we were, only to find out there was something we were just totally missing.
So perhaps Jesus uses this moment as the teaching moment because what Judas says is such an obviously good thing in isolation. It is inarguably a good thing, one of the things all followers of Christ should be doing, giving to the poor among us freely. But in that moment, and in his heart, he is deeply unbalanced.
To be sure, balance is not the “mushy middle,” saying the truth is always equally between two sides. And balance is not just staying still. Balance is something we might call, “Centeredness within movement,” even when it looks like stillness. We know in physics that anything that appears still and perfectly balanced—like anything around you and what you’re sitting on right now—is actually moving million of miles per hour hurtling through space, yet it is centered and balanced by how other things are also moving in relationship with it. Stillness in God is not staying put, doing nothing, it is staying centered while moving in relationship with him. Sometimes that means moving very slowly, slower than we’d like, and sometimes it means holding onto God when life is moving way faster than we ever wanted, and everything in between.
Any dance needs movement and countermovement, and partner dances need movement and countermovement lest you both fall. And what trait does a tightrope walker have above all else? Balance. Are they still? No, they are centered while constantly but subtly moving. They have to keep moving. If “the gate is narrow,” Christ says (Matt 7:13-14), it is perhaps narrow as a tightrope, a balancing act that is impossible for any of us to do on our own.
As the disciples were finding out, and as we are remembering all the time, there is so much important truth out there to balance constantly. Sometimes that truth seems to compete with itself: caring for the poor or enjoying the presence of God in our lives, justice and mercy, in the world but not of the world.
As we come near the end of Lent, maybe you haven’t been doing all the practices you thought you would. Maybe you didn’t even think about practices. But you always have to chance to find balance. It might mean you have to be spiritually counterintuitive to your own preferences, asking yourself, “What do I easily do, and what do I resist, and where can I be more balanced in the fullness of truth in Jesus Christ?”
As we walk with Jesus and follow him as he heads toward his cross, remember that in his overflowing, extravagant love that challenges us as it comforts us, Christ has made you to be his dwelling place; you are his living room. He is alive, and in him you are alive. So my prayer is that however slowly and subtly we move, we keep moving and loving in balance with the fullness of his truth. For balance is the thing that lets the living move with Grace.
Matthew 26:8-9
Matthew 19:16-26
Jeremiah 17:9