Transcript
You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me. Please be seated.
Before I begin. I want to give a disclaimer. Consider this my way of offering you healthy boundaries. I’m going to be preaching on death appropriately as we get closer to Holy Week. But if you are here thinking you showed up on just some random Sunday and you are struggling with your own grief, I want to invite you to get up and walk out at any point during this sermon. None of us will be offended. None of us will think any less of you. Instead, for everyone here, if you need to not hear this sermon, then that’s okay. That is healthy boundaries because it’s admitting to yourself where you are in your own grief journey.
And now a sermon about death.
This might sound odd to say, but one of my favorite classes in seminary was called “Death, Dying, and Bereavement” because who doesn’t love a good class about death? It was a applied theology class that fell into the same category as pastoral care and preaching, which really means it included the practical applications. I found it so intriguing to talk about the theoretical and practical aspects of death and grief. I read books like Jean Fowler’s Caring Through the Funeral and Sharon Newlands How We Die. Each chapter an in-depth description of each way we could die. I looked at the Episcopal Church’s liturgy for a time of death and for the burial of the dead. I wrote a paper about Viking funerals and also about grief after a miscarriage or stillborn. And I spent a lot of time calling my mom and asking her all the various questions when asked as they prepare for the end of life.
You know, questions like, do you have a will? And in my parent’s case, is it new enough that I don’t end up at my aunt’s house? Do you have a power of attorney? Do you have a living will? Do you know what you want to happen with your remains? You know all those really happy, joyful questions a mom always wants to be asked by her adult daughter.
I feel like after reading today’s gospel, the disciples would be wise to ask the same questions of Jesus. After all, if they were paying attention at all, they would know that Jesus’s death is pretty much imminent at this point. Jesus even says as much at the very end of the gospel passage. I think we often get caught up in the part of the phrase that talks about the poor, but Jesus literally admits to his impending death. He says, you always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.
Like I said, we often get caught up with that first half. The poor part. It seems we missed the part where Jesus says, I am about to die. Of course, that probably makes sense in our current predominant American culture. A culture where death seems like a surprise and grief has a timeline, a culture where we are almost afraid to talk about death because, I don’t know, then we might bring it about kind of like Beetlejuice.
But John, in today’s gospel reading, John technically foretells Jesus’s death three times. Once at the end, like I just said, once when Mary anoints Jesus’s feet and once at the beginning when we are told this whole scene takes place six days before the Passover. Because in John’s Gospel, Jesus becomes the new Passover lamb, the lamb that is sacrificed at the Passover.
Real quick, do you know what Passover is? Passover is the Jewish celebration commemorating the time of when the forces of destruction passed over the Jewish homes in Egypt. The last of the ten plagues that God sends down to Egypt. You know when Pharaoh won’t listen to Moses and let his people go? The last plague is the death of every firstborn son. But in order to preserve the Israelites and let them not suffer any more than they already have, God instructs them to sacrifice a lamb. Exodus chapter 12 begins with God saying, Your Lamb shall be without blemish, a year old male, and once the lamb is fodder, the Israelites should take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. Thus the lamb will be sacrificed, and his blood will be used to mark which home is safe or to be saved. And in John’s Gospel, Jesus becomes that Passover lamb, the sacrifice whose blood will indicate who is to be saved.
As such, John is telling the reader that today’s story happens six day before Jesus dies, and it seems like Jesus is ready or as ready as he can be. And it seems Mary is ready, but I’m not sure many of the others gathered are ready. Certainly not Judas Iscariot, that’s for sure. Remember, while John paints Judas as not a nice guy right now, he really hasn’t gone totally bad just yet. It will be in the next chapter.
After Jesus washes the feet of the disciples, when the beloved disciple asks who will betray Jesus? And Jesus says, it is the one to whom I give this piece of bread. And John’s gospel continues. So when he had dipped the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas, son of Simon Iscariot, after he received the piece of bread, Satan entered him. That is when Judas becomes evil. At this point in today’s gospel reading, Judas is perhaps a bit more like you and me, a bit more like the predominant American culture, the culture that likes to imagine death doesn’t happen, at least not to us, and certainly not right now.
Although I will say to all of you here gathered, Saint John’s certainly gets to see a lot more death than I think a lot of America. I mean, we- we know death because we are a religious community. We know death because of our faith, because of our religion, because of our liturgical calendar and the ebbs and flows of our church life, a church life that, yes, includes Christmas and the birth of a savior as a baby, and also a church life that includes Lent and Holy Week, preparation and denial, and sacrifice, and finally, death. We as Episcopalians in a liturgical tradition, we as Christians, knowing Christ and Christ story.
We as the demographic that attends a church that’s been around for 400 years. We know that death happens and sneak peak in case you didn’t know. The resurrection happens also. But first, we know that death happens and that can be terrifying. I wonder if Judas is asking- acting out of fear, like perhaps he kind of has an idea that his body is about to die, but he wants to pretend it’s not actually going to happen.
So he makes a conversation about something else. I’m pretty sure we’ve all done that, or at least I have. Not wanting to have a certain conversation. So completely changing the topic. But it doesn’t work. In today’s gospel reading, Judas tries to talk about the poor and Jesus almost shushes him.
You always have the poor with you. You do not always have me. And while Jesus is saying this is a very significant theological statement and foreshadowing of his crucifixion and death, it is an also a statement for all of us. For those of us here who know that no matter what we value, the people around us are probably the ones we will miss the most when they are gone. But, and here’s the good news, because every sermon has to have good news.
But we know that death is not the end because of what happens to Jesus after crucifixion. Death is not the end because of resurrection, because of Easter. Jesus says, you will always have the poor with you. You do not always have me. And yet we do. We do always have Jesus, because after death he rose again. And while he did not ascend to heaven, while he did ascend to heaven and sit at the right hand of God the Father, he also lives within each of us a piece of his creation with a splash of his blood that saves us.
Lent is a great time to think about the end, the end of sin. The end of the liturgical season and the end of life. It is a great time to prepare for what happens next. Liturgically speaking with Holy Week and then Easter, faithfully speaking with forgiveness and sacrifice and love and hope and practically speaking with the acknowledgment that death will happen to all of us and resurrection will also happen just as it happened to Jesus Christ.
In today’s gospel reading from John, Mary prepares Jesus for burial. She anointed with costly perfume made of pure nard, a practice usually reserved only for those about to die. Maybe she knows, maybe she doesn’t. But we know and we can prepare. Death will happen to Jesus and to each of us. And to those we love.
As we approach the end of lent and the beginning of Holy Week and eventually Easter, may we hold on to that. The realization that death is unavoidable and so is resurrection, and so is the hope of eternal life. And so is the assurance that nothing, not even death, shall separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Nothing can separate us from the love of God.
Amen.