Anointing
John 12:1-8
by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones
First Central Congregational Church
6 April 2024
Let me begin today with a reflection on what one expects when they first go to church. It’s written by Meggan Watterson:
I’m not sure what I was expecting when I first went to church as a little girl. Yes, I do. I was expecting the outside to be like the inside. I wanted the great big, unsayable love I felt within me to be seen or witnessed outside of me. Back then before I felt separated from it, there was this wide expanse of love inside me, like my own private ocean.
And so, I guess I was expecting church to be this place where everyone walks around and greets each other, from one ocean to another, their innermost self, right there on the surface, their inner world rising up from the depths for a breath of fresh air. A place where we can hang our masks at the door, and just help each other be human. A place that reminded me how to be here in this world while not forgetting the part of me that is not of it.
But, then she writes, “But that wasn’t what [church] was like.”
Instead, she encountered a place, a group of people, that did not affirm her vast inner ocean of love, but instead, corrected her behavior and taught her to experience guilt and shame, to see herself as less, as sinful.
How many people have experienced toxic and harmful religion? I encounter it all the time when I meet someone and tell them I’m a pastor. There is almost a recoil. Most people begin explaining why they’ve rejected faith and religion, and it usually has to do with something bad that happened to them at church or, at least, their general perception that religious people are judgmental, cruel, or just plain ridiculous and out-of-touch.
Which is among the reasons that we work so intentionally and diligently to form a very different kind of community here at First Central. One that is hospitable and welcoming, inclusive and caring, supportive and affirming, deeply thoughtful and engaged with the world and real life, where genuine and authentic connections are made. Which means we don’t go around policing people’s, including kid’s, behavior, and we sure as heck try to refrain from judgement, guilt, and shame. I hope the people who come through our doors find a place where the vast inner ocean of love inside of them is seen, affirmed, and allowed to flourish. I believe we are trying to help each other be human—at least that’s one thing I’ve aimed for in my pastoral leadership.
Meggan Watterson describes this kind of faith as “The Christianity We Haven’t Tried Yet.” The kind that affirms our inherent goodness, that helps to lift us up out of our egos, that views sin, as she writes, as “simply forgetting the truth and reality of the soul—and then acting from that forgetful state.”
The queer contemplative podcaster Cassiday Hall puts it this way, “The true self shows up most authentically when it is dedicated to the well-being of all, amid a deep understanding of oneself.”
The story of Mary anointing Jesus at this final dinner with his followers, before the events of his passion begins, is a story of physical, emotional, and spiritual intimacy, where our human vulnerability is centered. There is a realness to this story. The touch, the tears, the closeness. We witness a deep love and affection and a story that emphasizes our bodily experience.
Michael Koppel, a professor of pastoral care, writes that “anointing channels God’s life force and favor into the one being anointed,” and does so through a practice that relates to the bodily senses. Not only do we see and hear what’s happening in this story, there is the smell of the oil, the feeling on the skin. A multi-sensory moment of embodiment.
For me one of the most profound moments of pastoral care every year is Ash Wednesday. Partly it’s because I touch people on their foreheads, a place I don’t usually touch people and where people aren’t used to being touched. And I’m marking them with ashes mixed with oil, which has a distinct feel and smell and look to them. Finally, in the marking I’m reminding them of their mortality, of their physical vulnerability. The ritual is intimate, humbling, caring.
The same can be said for foot-washing, which I’m personally a big fan of in the worship life of the church. It is a deeply spiritual ritual precisely because it is awkward and unusual, intimate touching. And we generally don’t even have the calloused and dirty feet of a first century Middle Eastern peasant. Our children have recently been exploring it as part of learning the story of Jesus, so you should ask one of them about it.
Anointing with oil is one of those rites we perform occasionally, less often than we probably should. In the Christian tradition it is most common as a symbol of healing or an act of blessing. Also used to consecrate a person at significant moments—like King Charles at his coronation.
Michael Koppel writes that “an overflow of life energy is associated with the anointing.” Here is a rich, ancient, physical symbol of life, healing, salvation, wholeness.
The wisdom teacher Cynthia Bourgeault encourages churches to do more anointing because this is a rite of spiritual transformation. She believes greater emphasis upon the ritual will help us to recreate Christianity as that kind we haven’t fully tried yet, one that lifts up “imaginal wisdom and mystical love.”
She believes that a greater emphasis upon anointing will awaken our creative imaginations to the presence of the holy within us. Helping us to overcome our own egos and to embody love. Through that we will encounter the presence of the Risen Christ. She writes, “Present, intimate, creative, ‘closer than your own heartbeat,’ accessed through your vulnerability, your capacity for intimacy.”
These lessons are among the wisdom revealed in a story like today’s gospel.
Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ body is so powerful because it is a physically intimate action that is connected to preparing his body for death and burial. Deeply loving, radically compassionate.
Michael Koppel, the pastoral care professor I quoted a moment ago, has written a helpful book entitled Body Connections: Body-Based Spiritual Care. I’ve taught from it some in our Wednesday night classes in recent years. I love this main idea which anchors the book—“Caring for our bodies is faithful moral activity in a world that fragments, torments, and traumatizes.”
That, of course, is part of the power of this story in the Gospel of John. We know what Jesus’ body is about to go through. The ordeals it will endure. The pains he will suffer. The absolute horror and affliction that is torture and crucifixion. A body that will definitely be fragmented, tormented, traumatized.
Yet, here is Mary, intimately, affectionately, compassionately, caring for that same body, with tenderness and grace. What she does is deeply moral activity.
Judas, of course, with his limited moral vision doesn’t see that. In this story, he’s one of those folks focused on the bottom line. The utilitarian calculus. And thus he misses the moral depth of Mary’s action. Stewardship and prudence are tools, but sometimes the extravagant act is what is called for.
“Touch,” Koppel writes, “makes us feel real.” And so he works to correct a religious tradition that often alienated spirituality from the physical, and instead he advocates a more holistic and healthy approach that sees the deep “connections between our embodied experience and faithful spiritual care.” Because, as he writes, “God moves in and through our body experience to lure us toward transformational change.” We engage in spiritual growth through embodied practices.
The psychologist Hillary McBride, in her book The Wisdom of Your Body, which I’ve also taught from in our Wednesday night classes, teaches that most of us have to learn embodiment, because we’ve often grown up in traditions that didn’t teach us to be aware of our bodies and to appreciate, honor, and learn from them. So, to learn embodiment, she writes, “requires curiosity, attention, sensation, and acceptance.”
But McBride makes a further, supremely important point—that we cannot learn our own embodiment, or experience healing and wholeness, without collective action. She writes, “Our individual healing can’t happen without addressing our need for collective healing, culturally and as a collective human body.”
The primary reason for this is, as she states, that our “experience of being a body in a social context.” Our experience of our bodies is shaped by cultural and social expectations, stereotypes, laws, etc. Societies try to define, control, limit, problematize bodies.
We’ve seen a resurgence of that in America the last few years. Instead of cultivating a culture of compassion, where we help each other be more human through acts of physical care that affirm our authentic selves and the deep ocean of love that resides within each of us, contemporary American politics has returned to a previous era where women’s reproductive choices were controlled by the state, where parents of trans kids are prohibited from seeking medical care for their children, where trans adults are told they don’t exist, and more. These actions are revolting. Assaults not only upon civil and human rights, but contrary to the wisdom and compassion of an enlightened and mature Christian faith.
Last week most of us were horrified watching the video of the kidnapping of Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, studying here on a Fulbright scholarship, assaulted on the street by masked agents of the US government. It was like watching something out of Soviet Russia or the East German state police. It was horrifying to watch, clearly inflicting moral injury upon all of us observing it. We never thought our government would do such things in our lifetimes after all the achievements of civil and human rights. But, here it was, happening before our very eyes.
Writing in The Christian Century this week, David Dault, who is an assistant professor of Christian spirituality at Loyola University of Chicago, said this about the incident:
The first man to approach Ozturk on the street calls to her. Ozturk looks up in surprise, not fear. That quickly changes. A moment later, the man is directly in front of her. She makes a move to step back, and he grabs her.
When I watch that, something inside me twists. . . . I think of all the ways that what is happening in that moment is a violation. I think of how, in a country that claims to respect and protect religious liberties, a non-Muslim man feels at liberty to put his hands on a Muslim woman. I think of how, when she clearly protests, withdrawing any possible consent to what is happening, the man ignores her. And through it all, even as the camera angle makes it hard to see, I can’t help feeling that I know how his face looks in that moment. I can’t shake the feeling that, above all else, this man is enjoying himself.
Dault focuses attention not on the larger humanitarian and civil rights concerns, but instead on the immediate act of physical violation. The act of force and its violence and fear. How that overrides basic rules of consent, of human dignity and autonomy. A physical act that is the opposite of what we encounter in the Gospel of John. This is the repudiation of care, compassion, openness to vulnerability. This is an act to inspire fear and moral injury.
So, we followers of Jesus must condemn such evil. And bear witness to what Jesus expects of us, which is a better humanity. Dault concludes:
If we look to the horizon beyond the churning repetition of sovereignty, discipline, and control, what do we see? I’d like to think that what comes next, where Jesus is leading us to go, is a society of consent, where the violence embodied by that man who grabbed Rumeysa Ozturk might be interrupted at the source, instead of after the fact, as we are attempting to interrupt it now.
And we interrupt it at the source by doing and creating better. Learning embodiment as a moral act, that can bring about healing and spiritual transformation. Let’s begin by helping each other become more human, acknowledging and affirming that vast ocean of love inside each of us, and treating each other with the respect and kindness we deserve. Learning touch that isn’t violent or forceful, but, like Mary’s, caring, compassionate, vulnerable, loving.
And when we do that, when we learn the lessons of anointing, the life energy will flow.