Art is what you do when there's nothing you can do

Readings for the fifth Sunday in Lent:
Isaiah 43:16-21
Psalm 126
Philippians 3:4b-14
John 12:1-8

 

Do not remember the former things,

or consider the things of old.

I am about to do a new thing;

now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

--Isaiah 43:18,19a

 

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

The Gospel lesson is so short this week, I decided to just paste it above so that it would be there for reference.  Also, because it's an awesome story and you should read it.

What's not really stated in this part of the passage is that Jesus has been hiding out at this point. He's raised Lazarus, very publicly, from the dead, and now that he's called attention to himself, the Pharisees are looking to kill him. So when he gets to Bethany, everyone knows he's a dead man. I believe this is also the same evening when, in other gospels, Mary sits at Jesus' feet while Martha does all the heavy lifting of hosting a dinner, and then she kind of flips out on Mary. So it's an emotional night at Lazarus's house.

But the thing about this passage that always strikes me is what a desperate, irrational act Mary commits in breaking the bottle of perfume and washing Jesus' feet with it. It's too bad that there's all this editorializing about how Judas was a bad, bad man, because I think a lot of us, if we didn't know where the story went from here, might agree with Judas. Three hundred denari would buy an awful lot of peanut butter and jelly. So Judas looks kind of reasonable to me on the surface, through the lens of someone living in the "real" world.

Mary's not living in the real world though. She's insane with fear and grief. I imagine she's desperate to do something with all these feelings that are roiling around inside her. I mean, first her brother died, then Jesus came, and she knew he could have saved Lazarus, so she sort of chews him out for not being there. Then Jesus brings Lazarus back, which is joy beyond reason, but then that very act of reanimation is what really gets the bullseye painted on Jesus' back, which must cause Mary and the whole family a great deal of guilt. Plus, you know that after his experience, Lazarus can't be the same. He must be very changed, which would be stressful for a sister who just wanted her brother back, and didn't quite get him. And now Jesus is at the house, about to walk right into Jerusalem, where people are waiting to have him killed. What is the reasonable response to all of that?

I don't think there is one. So Mary does what many of us do when life has dealt us a blow that we can't respond to in any rational, reasonable way. She does something completely irrational, because it feels right. She takes an incredibly valuable jar of perfume, smashes it, pours it over Jesus' feet, and then uses her hair to rub it all over his feet. She essentially commits an act of art. I think she was trying to say that compared to what she was going to lose in Jesus, nothing had value, nothing was important at all. But like all good art, her actions say a lot more, maybe even more than she knew at the time.

Because at another level, I don't think she meant anything at all. I think she was just beside herself, and she had to do something, something big, as big as her feelings, and the perfume thing was what she came up with. It felt right to her, so she did it.

And Judas, who may be in denial at this point--maybe he's still expecting Jesus to find a military solution to his situation--can't get out of the everyday here-and-now to see that Mary's logic and actions belong to Someplace Else.

In her book Walking On Water, Madeline L'Engle talks a lot about chronos, or linear time, and kairos, which is time out of time. Chronos, L'Engle says, is good for baking and catching the train, but in prayer or in creating, we do our best work in kairos. Kairos is that state when you are so absorbed in your task that you can spend hours working, though it only feels like minutes are passing by. Or you can pray or meditate and feel like you've said and understood so much, you must have been sitting there for an hour, and discover it's been ten minutes. Time stretches and contracts and you hardly perceive it, because you are so completely in the moment. We're in Kairos when we're creating and it's going well, and we're also in Kairos when we're knocked breathless by grief. In today's Gospel, Judas is living in chronos; Mary is in Kairos.

And Jesus gets that, and honors it. In both of them really--like the father in last week's parable of the prodigal son, Jesus meets both Judas and Mary where they are. His response to Judas has nothing to do with him being a thief and a betrayer. He just says, you can take care of the poor later--I'm not going to be around for much longer.

And to Mary, the prodigal child in the act of squander, he holds out his feet. He lets her do what she needs to do, not to make sense of it all, but to discharge some of that emotion in a meaningful way. I really do think this is what all artists do--create not so much to make sense of the world, but to try to make concrete their own response to it, even if their response is just to say, "This cannot be." And Mary's act of art seems to have been meaningful, even moving, for Jesus--because if the bible were a novel, you would be a very bad English major if you said it was just an interesting coincidence that a week later, Jesus decides to wash everybody's feet.

And he, perhaps, is being an artist as well, when he takes the bread, breaks it, and commands his followers to eat it, and likewise with the wine. It's an act of art that has taken on a life of its own for the past two thousand years. 

In a grand coincidence this week, I accidentally dropped a full bottle of perfume in the bathroom at the back of the house, so I can report with confidence that Mary's nard would indeed have filled the entire house with its odor. It would have lingered for days. Every time anyone entered that house, they would have smelled it and thought back to that last dinner they all had together. Mary would have thought of it every time she brushed her hair. It was as close as she could get to sleeping in his t-shirt, and I imagine it was a comfort to her in the days that came after. Because that's the thing about living in Kairos and making art. It leaves its scent behind and colors your experience for a long time afterward. The very act of acting--out of desperation, fear, frustration--it changes you. It lingers with you, and flavors your life like the scent of something much more lovely than anyone could rationally expect.