Scenes of Bethany – IV
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”.
