There’s a lot I love about the Bible, but close to the top may be this: the sheer volume of bold, scandalous, wise women.
There’s Eve, mother of us all, who dares to question God’s own self. There’s Sarah, who laughs in the face of impossible odds and then bears Isaac at the ripe old age of 90. A cavalcade of women in the Hebrew Bible pave the way for Mary, the teenaged prophet and mother of Jesus, who rejoices at being the one through whom God will bring down rulers, lift the lowly, fill the hungry with good, and leave the rich wanting. Mary meek and mild? I think not.
My book The Church Cracked Open is inspired by the story of a scandalous, unnamed woman who crashes a men’s-only dinner party and breaks a precious alabaster jar of costly nard, which she then pours over Jesus’s head. Jason Stewart Sierra painted the icon that accompanies this reflection. Like me, he was stirred by this sister’s love, generosity and unalloyed passion for Jesus.
This Sunday we will encounter another of the bold women of God: Mary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus and Martha. According to John 12, she moves close to Jesus as he sits at a table with a group of men, takes perfume made of pure nard, and anoints Jesus’s feet. Then she wipes his feet with her hair. Did you catch that? She. Wipes. His. Feet. With. Her. Hair. It’s so intimate, so scandalous, we ought to turn away and let them have their moment.
Men like Judas are utterly flustered, blubbering about how expensive this offering was, how much food for the poor they could’ve bought (when we all know he’s just salivating over the silver that nard would’ve garnered on the open market). But Mary gave it all for Jesus. She held nothing back, acted in a highly inappropriate manner, squandered a precious resource, risked humiliation and judgment, embarrassed her family. She gave it all for the love of God.
In this fourth week of our Lenten journey, I read this text and picture this sister, and I am humbled. Look what she surrendered for Jesus, at such great financial and social cost. Then imagine the luminous glow in her eyes. She appears scandalous and impossibly bold to me, but for her I sense it just felt right, true and good. Why? Because she’s doing it out of adoration.
As I review my own rule of life, I see commitments, disciplines and practices that seem difficult, sacrificial, even ridiculous. I wonder, “Do I have to give up this?” and “Does God really expect that?” Maybe these are the wrong questions. Instead, I could take a page from these biblical women and ask, “What does love for God bid me to take on, to turn from or simply to give away?” What if we didn’t worry so much what it looks like or whether it’s measured or appropriate? What if we let God overtake and enlarge our small hearts, and let our actions and offerings flow from that center?
Some might call it a scandal. We would know it to be love.