![]() There is no ignoring someone who was dead but is alive again. This truth has pervaded and overwhelmed this family’s days and nights. ![]() This is a truth this household knows well. And, Lazarus is living, breathing proof of Jesus’ power to command the destiny of death. Martha heard Jesus say that he was the resurrection and life before he raised Lazarus. Mary anoints Jesus as the one in whom death becomes life. Might we read this anointing story as the way the family, specifically Mary, decided to respond to the gift of life that Jesus gave her beloved brother Lazarus? The Gospel writer John clearly wants us to, reminding us at the beginning of the Lazarus story that Mary is “the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair” (John 11.2), thereby directly connecting the two events in his readers’ minds. The Lazarus resurrection narrative in John 11 doesn’t include any of the family’s response instead, the story jumps in chapter 11 straight to the crowd’s response and the danger growing for Jesus and his public ministry. If we remember who these people gathered at this particular dinner are, what they have seen and felt, what they have been confronted by, then we will have no issue understanding what motivated Mary to offer her loving sacrifice. And then Jesus did the impossible and showed himself to be greater than death. Mary and Martha each shared their pain and grief with Christ, each were comforted as Jesus wept with them. Just days earlier it wasn’t the lovely aroma of nard that filled the space, but the stench of death and loss that hovered all around. ![]() Too often, when we read the anointing story we forget that just days earlier, Jesus raised the four-days-dead Lazarus from the tomb. It is Lazarus’ resurrection that needs to be kept firmly in our minds as we read this week’s lectionary text. The last time Mary, Martha, Lazarus and Jesus were all together, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead (John 11). In fact, John’s telling of the event is directly connected to the last time that Jesus was at this particular house-another time when death was the central subject. Here in the Gospel of John, it occurs earlier in the timeline, before Jesus enters Jerusalem for Passover. Jesus is anointed around the time of Holy Week in each of the gospels, but the details of each account are markedly different.
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