April 7, Fifth Sunday in Lent (John 12:1–8)

It has been said that Jesus eats his way through Luke’s Gospel, from which most of this year’s Gospel texts come. Now, this last Sunday before Holy Week, we shift from Luke to a passage from John—and this too has to do with a meal.

This should not surprise us, for throughout history the main act of Christian worship has been a meal. We can imagine countless of our ancestors in the faith reading this passage just as we read it now and preparing to share in the meal just as we do. This meal in John takes place just before the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, which we will be observing next week. Therefore, the text is particularly appropriate for this Sunday.

This is a friendly meal in which Jesus, apparently along with some of his closest disciples, is invited to dine at the house of Martha, in Bethany. John has not told us about the other meal in the same house of which Luke tells us, the one in which Martha does the chores of a hostess while her sister, Mary, sits at the feet of Jesus. John introduces these two women and their brother, Lazarus, just a chapter earlier, when Lazarus is raised from the tomb. As in Luke’s story, Martha is serving. A pragmatist, she knows what has to be done and does it. We are not told what Mary is doing until she does an unexpected thing: she anoints the feet of Jesus with a very expensive perfume—the equivalent of a year’s wages for an average worker—and then wipes his feet with her hair.