This is the fourth of four Lenten addresses on the theme Contemplation, Activity and Resurrection in the Passion of Christ. The first is posted here, the second here, and the third here.
“And the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment”
The Anointing: Love in Repentance and Mercy
Bethany is the place of the preparation for the Passion of Christ. The cross, in some sense, is already present at Bethany.
The Passion is present in the anointing of Christ. The Passion appears in all of the Gospels but appropriately with some differences in emphasis and detail. Yet even the differences serve to highlight the essential purpose of the anointing which is to point us to the Passion. Here is the anointing of the King who will reign from the cross wearing a crown of thorns. Here is the anointing of the Lord who forgives all our sins upon the cross in his love for us in his love for the Father. Here is the anointing of the Lord who bears all our sins even unto the abyss of death and the grave of burial.
The anointing presents the Passion in the theme of love in repentance and mercy. It shows our love for God and God’s love for us. Luke tells of a woman who was a sinner. She is identified as such. We are all sinners but we are not all willing to be identified as such. She comes into the house where Jesus was at table. She “brought an alabaster flask of ointment and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment”(Luke 7. 37,38). It is an extraordinary scene of great intensity.
This was not at Bethany in Luke’s account, yet it shares something of the same intensity of the passion anticipated in the anointing at Bethany in John’s Gospel. There “Mary took a pound of costly ointment of pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment” (John 12.3). The one is an act of love in repentance; the other an act of love in sympathy with his approaching passion. The one seeks repentance in love. The other attends in loving devotion to the meaning of repentance in the death of Christ. There is repentance and mercy.
Repentance is an act of love born out of the sense of the mercy of God. It proceeds from a sense of God’s goodness. You can’t seek forgiveness unless you acknowledge your sins. You can’t acknowledge your sins unless you acknowledge the truth of the goodness of God against which you have sinned. To confess one’s sins is to confess God. You acknowledge your end and purpose in him. The very goodness of God prompts us to confess. “The goodness of God leadeth to repentance”.
The woman who was a sinner sees in Jesus that absolute goodness of God. Her repentance is her love of that goodness. She seeks forgiveness from him who alone can forgive. She says nothing but her extravagant actions speak volumes. Jesus alone understands her heart’s longings. He alone names her love and reveals what she knew, that he is the one who forgives sins. “I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much” (Luke 7.47).
Her extravagant action recognizes that God’s goodness is absolutely prior to our sinfulness. Repentance is the love of the goodness of God against which we have made ourselves unlovely. As a motion of love, it seeks the restoration of that goodness in us. Repentance is a twofold motion of the soul. There is a turning away from sin and a turning towards God. Repentance is the turning back to him from whom we have turned away. It is prompted by the love of God’s own essential goodness without which it would be an empty and meaningless motion.
But there is something more. That twofold motion of the soul does not actually accomplish anything of itself beyond heightening the sense of our distance from God and intensifying our desire that he overcome it. While repentance seeks God’s action towards us, it cannot effect it. The mercy is that God turns towards us to effect our forgiveness. The anointing at Bethany recognizes the extent of that mercy. It means the death of Christ. Mary’s action foreshadows the mystery of our Lord’s passion for our salvation. Her action serves his passion. The shadows of the cross show that the way of the cross means going “through the valley of the shadow of death” (Psalm.23.4).
What exactly is the forgiveness of sins? The Old Testament presents two aspects of the forgiveness of sins which appear in tension and which are only fully resolved in the New Testament. The first concerns the Law and focuses on the sacrifice of blood. “For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.” (Leviticus.17.11)
This concerns the Levitical priesthood and the system of sacrifice. It belongs to the Law. “Under the Law”, says The Letter to the Hebrews, “almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Heb.9.22). “It is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul”. It is substituted before God, for blood is the “life of the flesh” and as life, it belongs to God, the author and source of all life.
The second is the prophetic concept of forgiveness as a divine forgetting. “I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my sake and I will not remember your sins” (Isaiah 43.25). It seems to advocate a deeper spirituality – one without the bother and mess of sacrifice. Yet the prophets do not seek to abolish but to reform. They desire from the sacrificial rites what the rites had always demanded – a change of heart, a returning to the Lord, a certain purity of will and a zeal for righteousness.
The idea of divine forgetting carries the theme of forgiveness more directly into the life of God himself. Either God forgets our sins or he keeps them to himself and spares us the recollection. “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old” (Isaiah 43.18). It is viewed primarily with respect to God himself. “I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my sake”(Isaiah 43.25). The righteous God will hide within himself that which is contrary to his nature. The repeated “I” and the reflexive “for my sake” intensifies the understanding that only God alone can forgive sins.
Both aspects of forgiveness are divine. God “accepts” the blood sacrifice which is offered for righteousness. God “forgets” sin by taking it into himself. Both the accepting and the forgetting are forms of the divine forgiveness. But they are partial and incomplete forms of its true character. In the New Testament, these two aspects converge and emerge as a new thing. The forgiveness of sins is Jesus Christ. “Who is this, who even forgives sins?”, they say about the woman “who was a sinner” to whom Christ says, “your sins are forgiven” (Luke 7).
The forgiveness of sins is a divine act. Forgiveness cannot be a mere forgetting, a simple act of oblivion. Forgetfulness is a condition of time. There is the slipping away of the past in the moment of the present and in the anxiety for the future. There is the limitation of finite minds which in the contemplation of eternity cannot hold together all the moments of experience in the simultaneity of everlasting life.
With God it is otherwise. There can be no eternal forgetting for him in whom there is eternal awareness. “Awareness of all belongs to the very nature of eternity” (Charles Williams). God is not a God who merely forgets. After all, what kind of God would that be? In him there is awareness of all. Consequently, sin and evil must be known there, but only after the manner of the divine goodness itself and as a means of the making known of the goodness of God himself.
We come to the cross. There is the forgiveness of sins. “It cost the heart-blood of the son of God to redeem us” (Jeremy Taylor). There we see our sins and the meaning of all sin, “he was made sin for us” (2 Cor.5.21). He wills to be identified with all that denies the truth of ourselves in the purpose of God. There can be no forgetting of sin where all sin is known. There can be no forgetting where we behold the overcoming of sin by the power of God’s love transforming the vain nothingness of our sins into the glorious purpose of God’s redemption of our humanity.
Christ crucified freely wills to be bear in his own body the will to nothingness, that deep sense of violent despair, desolation and dereliction. The point is that he wills to bear it. He gathers into his love for the Father and the Father’s love for him in the Spirit that will to nothingness which is the ultimate meaning of sin.
On the cross, the idea of forgiveness emerges as the transformation of sin into righteousness, of evil into good, of death into life. Forgiveness means not a forgetting but rather an increased knowledge of the goodness of God who makes even our evil an occasion of good, our unrighteousness the means of his righteousness. Repentance and mercy converge on the cross. There and only there we see the love which effects the forgiveness we seek.
Divine forgiveness takes away all our sins and offences from us, not by blotting them out, not by forgetting, not by the blood of bulls and goats, but by the transforming power of the active love which yielded itself to the hard wood of the cross. Christ is our forgiveness who, at the moment of his dying, said “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”. It is the first word from the cross. It looks to the last word but only through the abyss of desolation, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me”. Christ walks “through the valley of the shadow of death” and only then is salvation accomplished. Everything is gathered into the Son’s love for the Father. “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”.
The anointing anticipates the Passion but it already looks beyond the cross to the grave. In so doing, it already begins to share in the radical character of divine love which creates out of nothing and recreates out of the nothingness of sin. The tomb cannot contain him. The tomb of Christ becomes the womb of new life, the radical new life of the Resurrection.
It begins on the cross. Even in the hour of death, the overcoming of sin’s folly and death’s consequence are in the process of transformation. The cross proclaims the love of God.
The Gospels speak either of the anointing of Christ’s head or his feet. The accounts vary. But what flows from his head and from his feet, what flows from his wounded side is more than the oil of gladness. It is something far greater, something far more precious. It is the life-blood of our creation, the living water of our redemption and the holy oil of our sanctification. What flows from the crucified anoints the dust of our sinfulness and raises us into new life.
Mary in Bethany anoints Christ’s feet. “How beautiful are the feet of them that preach glad tidings of peace”. How more beautiful the feet of him who freely walks the way of the cross, who is our peace and our salvation. Bethany belongs to that way. The anointing anticipates Christ’s passion and shares in it. What is the Passion? It is God’s charity, God’s love for us in the love that is God. The crucifixion opens to view the charity of God.
We come to the cross. The shadows of the cross shed light upon our wretchedness and illuminate the infinite depths of divine love. Bethany leads to the cross and presents us with the Passion in anticipation. The anointing is an act of sympathy on Mary’s part, her sympathy with the Lord in his passion and with his death which that entails. The alabaster jar which she opens in love flows out of the same love which is opened out for us on the cross. We come to Bethany in the way of the cross, in the way of that redeeming love. “Walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour” (Eph.5.2).
“And the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment”.
Fr. David Curry
Lenten Series, “Scenes of Bethany”
Tuesday, March 15th, 2016