Yesterday, I wrote that on one level, the lengthy gospel reading for Palm Sunday is a story about the confusing mix of humanity and divinity in the person of Jesus. On another level, though, all the gospel readings during Holy Week invite us to grapple with the limitations of language. This is certainly true of the Monday of Holy Week.
My husband and I are visiting my sister and her husband in North Carolina this week. Today Vicki and I engaged in a significant annual tradition: the first pedicure of the season. After a long winter of cold temperatures, we use my yearly visit over spring break to officially usher in spring through this ritual of exfoliated skin and painted toenails. And oh, did it feel like an incredible luxury.
The Gospel Story on the Monday of Holy Week
Today’s gospel reading tells the story of Jesus visiting the recently resurrected Lazarus and his two sisters, Mary and Martha, in Bethany a week before the upcoming Passover holiday. Martha scolded Mary earlier in the gospel account for attentively listening to Jesus on a previous visit while Martha did all the hard work preparing for their guest. This time Judas reprimands her for anointing Jesus’ feet with expensive, perfumed oil instead of giving the money that purchased it to people experiencing poverty.
Jesus tells Judas to pipe down with a surprising retort: “Leave her alone. Let her keep this for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me” (John 12:7-8).
So, Mr. Give-Everything-To-The-Poor applauds Mary for such an unthinkable extravagance? Captain I-Was-Sent-To-Bring-Good-News-To-The-Poor suggests that since we’ll never completely eradicate poverty, we might as well indulge ourselves in mindless luxury? Huh? His comments here seem out of sync with the rest of his message about caring for those on the margins of society.
The Limits of Language
I think we experience discordance in these verses because we have a hard time reconciling Jesus as “God” with this picture of lavish sensuality. Like yesterday’s gospel reading, this passage forces us to grapple with what we mean by “human” and “divine.”
To understand what I think is a false dichotomy here, we have to go back to the beginning. Not just the beginning of Jesus’ life or the beginning of salvation history. Not even just the beginning of human life. We have to go back to the genesis of everything.
Nothing Begins at the Beginning
The true origin of everything goes back long before it began. It wouldn’t be a lie to say that my life began on election day in 1967. But it wouldn’t be the whole truth, either. The cells that divided and multiplied in my mother’s womb came from my parents. And theirs from their parents back through the generations. Go back far enough – say, 600,000 years or so – and we’ll see the beginnings of our very species. Go back another six million years, and we’ll see primitive animals make their entrance. Another five or so billion years gets us to the birth of our sun. Back another 300 million years and the first stars and galaxies begin to form.
Walt Whitman wrote, “I am large. I contain multitudes.” While he couldn’t have known everything science has uncovered for us in the modern age, I still think this is what he meant.
Star Stuff
Scientists since Whitman’s time have learned a lot. Somehow, the “singularity” through which the Big Bang and ensuing expansion led to the eventual explosions of stars, which led to the creation of the first elements, which led to the advent of single-celled life which eventually, over an unimaginable expanse of time and space, led to you and me and every last thing in the universe.
The famous science writer, Carl Sagan, described it better: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff.” The creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2 describe the same truth through narrative and figurative language. In each one, all of existence comes from God. Ironically, science and religion seem to agree on this central point. They just describe it differently.
A Pearl of Great Price
In short, we all come from the same place. We are all made of the same material. We are individual pieces of the same whole. I believe that everything in life – the trees, books, desks, electric bills, accounting software, broken pencils, and you and me and everything else – are all diverse instances of the same unified, generative source.
But I’m certainly not original in my thinking. Aldous Huxley explained this viewpoint when he published The Perennial Philosophy in 1945. Rabbi Rami Shapiro explains it in simpler language in his book, God: A Rabbi Rami Guide:
“The Perennial Philosophy asserts 1) everything is a manifestation of God; 2) people have an innate capacity to intuit God directly, and when they do, they realize the unity of all things in, with, and as God; 3) human beings can see themselves as both apart from and a part of God, and can if they choose, overcome the alienation and ignorance that comes with the former by engaging in practices that make clear the latter; and 4) the sole purpose of human life is to realize God as the singular Reality manifesting as nature’ wonderous diversity” (113).
This philosophy is not a “religion” per se but influences religions of all stripes. The mystical arms of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all rest in this perennial philosophy through a monotheistic lens, and Buddhism and Hinduism each point to it apart from a theistic orientation.
Seeing With New Eyes
It would be no overstatement to say that coming to this understanding of God or Reality has been life-altering for me. Through it, religious faith has ceased to be mere magical thinking and become a vehicle through which I understand the “real world” and my place within it. It doesn’t make life easier or prettier. But it does make life understandable for me.
As St. Paul said in his first letter to the Corinthians, “When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things” (13: 11). When I was a child, I too thought of God in childlike terms. God was a male spirit-being who knew what the future would hold and decided how it would play out. God was a grandfatherly, mercurial Santa-in-the-sky who sometimes answered my prayers but sometimes didn’t.
He had a vast ledger that kept track of my good deeds and sins, and after my death, he would review my account to arrive at some final judgment about whether I’d spend eternity with the angels in heaven or be consumed by the fires of hell. But now I see God not so much as a “being” but more as what theologian Paul Tillich calls the “ground of being.” God, for me, is less of a noun and more of a verb.
There we have it – we are all individual parts of one sacred unity. And if this is true for us, then it must be true for the human person known to the world as Jesus of Nazareth.
The Point, Please?
What on Earth does this multi-paragraph philosophical detour have to do with perfumed oil and the first pedicure of the season? What does it have to do with the Monday of Holy Week? A lot, actually.
If we are all made of the same God-stuff, then “humanity” and “divinity” aren’t binary opposites at all. Perhaps they are points along a continuum of Being. Maybe “divinity” is a word that describes the Ultimate Reality from which we come, and “humanity” represents one category of individual manifestations of this dynamic Source. Whether or not I’m on the right track, I’m confident these words need better definitions.
Let’s take it a step further. If we are all made of the same God-stuff, then what was available to Jesus is also available to us. Humanity doesn’t have to be something different from divinity. Perhaps Jesus is “divine,” not so much because a spirit-being from the clouds sent him on a rescue mission to clean up a mess on Earth. What if instead, Jesus’ followers recognized something so extraordinary and life-changing in his message and ministry that they didn’t have language adequate to the task? What if it was so far beyond their previous life experience that they could only describe it as something “other” than their Earth-bound experience? Perhaps that’s what led them to use opposite terms when the actual realities they point to aren’t in opposition at all.
Perfumed Oils On the Monday of Holy Week
Jesus’ words on the Monday of Holy Week make more sense against this backdrop. His rebuke of the criticism leveled against Mary’s extravagance speaks volumes. I don’t think it was a statement about the proper use of funds. Instead, I think it was an invitation to recognize that all life is sacred. In essence, Mary’s lavish washing of Jesus’ feet becomes sacramental. This highly physical act is drenched in love, the elemental force that reminds us that we are all connected. The sensual becomes a vehicle for the spiritual. The secular becomes a medium for the sacred.
It’s all God-stuff.
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