1 June – Elevation
Easter 7
1/6/2025
Isaiah 43:16-21
Psalm 36
John 12:1-8
The best thing about my car is the sound system. A 2010 Renault Koleos comes with a Bose sound system with a 5.1 speaker configuration. This is to say that it has 5 tweeters and mid-range speakers arranged across the front of the cabin, and a subwoofer at the back, nestled inside the spare tyre under the cargo area (you have to remove the speaker to get the spare wheel out).
In addition to this impressive hardware – and this is for those who’ve seen that movie – you can turn the volume up all the way to “32”! Not that I often push the sound to 32 because, at that level, things do start to distort a bit. Although, because it’s a Bose system, it’s not the speakers that are distorting but the panels and contents of the car (occupants included). Or that’s what it feels like.
The point of all this is just to say that, at a more moderate setting of about 20, it’s possible to create an enveloping cocoon of sound in the cabin, whether it’s the soundtrack of Mission Impossible 2, a thumping Icelandic rock blues band, or something more…refined.
A couple of weeks back, I was returning from a meeting across town in the more refined mode. As I pulled up at some traffic lights on Alexandra Parade, Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel” was playing – in English, “Mirror in the mirror” – an exquisitely simple piece made of piano and violin. As with Mary’s perfume in the gospel reading today, the sound of the music filled the cabin of the car, wrapping around me as I waited for the lights to change.
And then there stepped out, in front of the first row of cars at the red lights, one of those street-performer juggler people, dressed in a striped t-shirt, mounting a 4- or 5-foot unicycle and beginning to toss and catch his skittles in what he hoped would be a pay-per-view performance.
And I could not help but laugh out loud at the incongruity, at the mismatch of the soundtrack with the moving images!
But it wasn’t that the juggler was out of place (or that the music was out of place), as if the presence of the one diminished the other. It was what they were together: each an elevation of the other, each heightened, enhanced and enriched by the other, each now inexplicably more than itself because the other is there. And as important as the experience itself was that the moment could not have been planned, and could hardly be repeated. It was an instant, an event, a “revelation”.
———-
Our Gospel reading today is a familiar one to most of us. Familiar too is its disorienting effect, because we might well find ourselves uncomfortably by Judas’ side in his criticism of Mary. And this would be to find ourselves the target of Jesus’ response to Judas and having to make sense of what feels like a deflating declaration: “You will always have the poor with you”.
We want to argue the morals here.
But, as with last week’s episode in the temple, so also here: moral divisions miss the gospel point. The smell of the perfume filled the whole house. And, again, as we saw last week, this house is more than the few rooms in which everyone was gathered. It is the house – the “oikos” in Greek – which extends to the dimensions of the “oik”-onomy, our environmental “oik”-ology and our social and political relations in the “oik”-umené. For just a moment, Mary’s oil sanctifies everything.
But if perfume were sound rather than smell, Judas’ response would be that the soundtrack and the images don’t match. He divides the world as moralism always does: now is not the place, not the time, for that. Whether from the perspective of his own purported greed or from the point of view of a genuine concern for the poor, for Judas the time and place are wrong: the context diminishes Mary’s devotion and that devotion diminishes the context. There is here no mutual elevation by which the needy world is lifted along with the lifting up of Christ; Judas simply does what moral thinking always does, divides what should be together. The elevation of Jesus in the anointing looks to Judas to be a dismissal of the needy world rather than an embracing and elevation. Jesus’ response contradicts: what is done to the poor is done to me; what is done to me is done to the poor.
———-
I could not help but laugh out loud at my traffic light juggler, and I knew instantly that he’d earned what he’d performed to receive. I passed him a 2-dollar coin through the window just as the traffic began to move with the green and he had to scoot to safety as the traffic began to move again.
But as I pulled away myself, I realised I’d missed the opportunity to do what Mary did: I should have given him the fifty I had in my wallet – not because he was that good but because it’s not often we get to see the deep truth for which the world is made: that each previously contradictory part elevate every other part, like the image of a mirror in a mirror, reflecting again and again, back and forth from greater and greater depth, the perfume of truth enveloping us, filling our senses, not despite whatever else is going on but because it is going on.
I should have given him the fifty, because that would have been the best way to respond, not to him but to the gift of such a world when it comes. This is because he’d have had no idea why I’d given him so much, would himself have been taken by surprise, elevated, given a story to tell of an unexpected ecstatic moment he’d experienced in the midst of the mundane. He too, for at least that moment, would have been made to stop and to notice in wonder: the world can be like this – a gift can be given. And this casts everything in a new light.
The ordinariness of our houses and lives is fit to be filled with the perfume of this truth. It is for this reason that Mary so lavishly anoints the one who raised her brother Lazarus, the one who overcomes the divisive power of death and its lethal echoes in our own dividing up of the world into bad and good, then and now.
The ordinariness of our houses and lives is fit to be filled with the perfume of this truth. It is for this reason that Mary so lavishly anoints the one who raised her brother Lazarus, the one who overcomes the divisive power of death and its lethal echoes in our own dividing up of the world into bad and good, the worthy and the unworthy.
And we are to become the same: present in the world as those elevated by grace to become the possibility of elevating grace for others. Not only our lives but all lives are fit to be filled with the perfume of grace.
Let us then live that this might be more fully realised, to God’s greater glory and to the richer humanity of all.