This reading for passion Sunday, which is sometimes marked by the full reading of the entire passion narrative and inserts something, pivots us a little bit as we’re about to enter the two weeks of passion tide. It’s a bit like that Hallelujah that we don’t sing until Easter Sunday. It’s a bit like all those things that we’ve taken away coming back in during Lent. But since we don’t observe lent very well, we live in a secular society where Lent is really just a matter of giving up some chocolate. It perhaps doesn’t have the same strength that it might, but this vividly, vividly sensuous passage breaks the bounds of the sombre Lenten season and as we launch into passion tide, it stops us a bit in our tracks. It’s such a powerful story. Today’s story is not about fasting, but about feasting among friends. It’s about a meal lovingly prepared for others. Jesus at home in his favourite place with his closest friends before he turns his face to Jerusalem. We know that this household was very special to him, so this was a special time with the closest friends. And then there is of course the strong, sweet smell of Nard competing with the smell of death. The recent death and resuscitation of Lazarus and the looming horror that Jesus knows what he is heading towards. All recognised and acknowledged in this passionate action of Mary, all held within a domestic moment, with loved ones.

Now I have confession to make, which is that I thought it would be lovely to fill the church with the scent of Nard. And so, I ordered some. It smells disgusting. So, I haven’t subjected you to it. But I did want to fill the church. In my mind, I’ve always imagined smashing that jar and the smell, the smell. Anyway, I’ll do a bit more research. But, in a sense, I have at least some Myrrh incense. Maybe you’ll get a whiff of that, because I just wanted to cut through a little bit the ordinariness of Lent we don’t, as you know, often have incense, but it’s nice sometimes to just feed our senses a bit. I wonder if you could think of those times in your life when everyone’s been around the table, and you’ve got the best people with you and it’s a special time and you treasure it. That’s what this was for Jesus. And those were the moments that we carry in our hearts when we can’t all be together. They’re the moments we carry in our hearts when life is tough, and we treasure those memories. We may have them in photographs, we may have them as annual events, but they are important, and they give us the courage and the love that we need at other times in our life. So just wonder a little about when those moments are for you. I can see a group of you here who are about to create one of those moments on Wednesday in a wedding. But it doesn’t need to be a special occasion. Sometimes it’s just the being together. And it interrupts the normal rhythm of things.

And it just puts a mark in the sand. This is what’s important. These are the people who matter. Let’s talk about the things that matter to us. And this scripture passage today is one of the most intimate of all the gospel readings. Here are people celebrating in the presence of the divine who is incarnated in flesh and blood around the table there are bodies that are sensitive, or hungry or exhausted or worried, or perhaps traumatised. Imagine what they’ve gone through with Lazarus. Who are yearning, who are joyful because Jesus is with them, but who are grieving at the same time. These are people who have been through the mill together, following in the footsteps of Jesus following his ministry, the ups and downs, the dangers of his ministry and the worst is yet to come. The worst is yet to come. In describing the Anointing of Jesus’ body for what they all know he must do to a greater or lesser extent, I suspect some may have had their eyes more open to the dangers of Jerusalem than others. But in describing it, we’re hearing how the risky direct actions that they must take in the coming week are being acknowledged and held by Mary.

There are too many Mary’s in the Bible to know exactly which Mary this is. The myth is that it’s Magdalene, but we do not know for sure. But here is a woman who knows what needs to be done. Here is a woman who recognises what is coming down the road and needs to make a gesture of abundance and love. And in reading it and carrying it in our hearts and knowing it so well, this passage can speak to and anoint our own tender, fearful, courageous yearning bodies as we contemplate what this time in our life needs of us. What this time in our time in history needs of us, what this world needs of us as Christians. We can start with the personal whatever is going on in your life can be anointed by this story.

Whatever is going on in the world can galvanise us to be anointed by this story. But it’s a very physical act, this jar has been taken from a shelf where it’s been kept for the right moment. And here is a woman who knows this is the right moment. Imagine that decision. This is worth a year’s wages. It’s being kept for a burial. And she takes it, and she decides to take it down now and to go in and interrupt that meeting, that meal, and smash it over the feet of Jesus and wipe it with her hair. She’s had the courage to say we need to acknowledge this moment. And we get very intellectual. We are very mind orientated in the church. We tend to think about things. We tend to try to work them out. But sometimes these physical things just cut through and reset things and she’s cutting through. She’s adding to what’s going on. And she’s shocking us because it sounds like a shocking act. I wonder when as well as those moments with family and friends, I wonder when you reset suddenly where something or something that you do, something that is part of your life that just resets you.

I have been very tired recently and I managed to get myself into some very cold water for a swim on Friday, and I love doing that, so that’s my thing. But it reset me. I just got in the water, I swam, I came out, I was transformed. And I think we need to remember those things in our lives, whether it’s standing on the top of a hill, whether it’s putting your hands in the soil to garden, whatever it is we need to think about the touch and the feel of the world. And in the world we live in, it’s more and more difficult to do that. Jesus’ world was a physical world in which you walked in the dust and the heat in which you had to wash your feet before you ate, in which you had to go to the well to draw the water. We’re so distanced from these very simple physical acts. It’s good to linger with these moments, to prepare our hearts and our minds and our bodies for the demands of Holy Week.

If we really immerse ourselves in Holy Week, we will be exhausted by Holy Saturday and we will know the joy of the Easter Dawn. Can we commit to marking Holy Week in our lives? Can we have a habit that week? Can we make it feel different to the other weeks of the year? And can we bless each other as we do that and support one another as we do this together as we walk through Holy Week. It’s good even to be extravagant, to affirm and celebrate each other’s fleshy humanity. To sit round the fire pit on Good Friday evening and eat fish and chips and talk about our lives. To get up early and come here at 8:00am to do morning prayer throughout a week. To shift the feel of the week, to start to engage with the whole story of the Via Dolorosa. Last Sunday, we all sat some of us outside in the wind and felt the wind and knew about the wind as we celebrated the act of caring. It was mothering Sunday, but we were celebrating caring in all forms, in those who have cared for us and in those whom we care for. We were remembering the multiple settings and the multiple people that have cared for us and whom we care for. And alongside today’s gospel, it’s good to be reminded that we should celebrate one another. Mary knew she needed to celebrate Jesus as a body, as a human in this world, and that we, in celebrating and honouring each other, embolden each other. Jesus must have felt both blessed and emboldened by this show of love.

Encouraged, I often sign off emails to fellow activists with these words, love and courage, love and courage because they go hand in hand. The Lord is Mary’s expression of love and courage, love and courage to Jesus as she knows he will turn from this domestic bliss of the household that has nourished and supported him, that would have been on our heart of belonging at the back there, all those people who’ve supported him, he’s going to turn from that to the public square. He’s going to face the horrors of state violence and the corruption of the people who will become the mob that will destroy him. Being reminded of the physical and not getting too intellectual about all of this is something that was just familiar to our mediaeval ancestors, who sat in this place in Holy Week hundreds of years ago. They were faced with the reality of the stench of death they were faced with the reality of harm. They were faced with the reality of flood and failed crops. Of hunger and of abundance, depending upon the seasons and the weather. We’ve lost a lot of that. But we can reclaim it. And we do reclaim it. We do shape our worship to try to engage with these things, and we shaped our Lent course to think about the Psalms from a heart perspective, not a mind perspective.

How do we respond to the Psalms when we take them into our hearts? How can we express the feelings of the Psalms in pictures, without having to use words? Next week on Palm Sunday, we will be outside for the first time since lockdown, and we will be putting our hands in soil in a gesture of solidarity with the world and in a recognition that from the soil comes new life and that is so much the story of Easter. We’ll build our own Easter Garden. We’ll erect our outdoor cross so that you can see it through the window. We will encourage folks to travel between the stations of the cross that will be set up in each of our group churches. So, you are encouraged to engage physically with Holy Week to move through it, heart and mind. And on Easter Dawn, then, with the far outside at 5:45am, the bird just beginning to sing and the newly glowing walls will be able to bring the light back into the church, but only if we can travel through the darkness first.

But there’s another part to this passage, we cannot ignore the voice of Judas breaking in, deeply uncomfortable with what is happening. He pushes back. He appeals to people’s charitable giving, to modesty, to having a good business sense to abstinence. All this represents something in each of us which tends towards negativity and towards censure. He wants to stop this happening. Jesus, it seems, cannot abide this kind of tenderness. This kind of care. And the church has a history of censuring, of not wanting to be tender. The church has history of censuring bodies, women’s bodies, queer bodies, the church often, like Judas, cannot stand Mary’s level of sensuality and humanity. And the world, meanwhile. Does need us to stay numb, to separate body from mind because it knows that if we are embodied, we will not abide the violence that we see if we are embodied, we will not be controlled by those who wish to keep us quiet. If we’re embodied, we will experience viscerally the violence of the crucifixion, both then and now. And we will resist the violence that we see in our world today.

So, like Mary, we must have our emotional antennae working during passion tide and beyond. We need to be open to what is happening. The story unfolds to not look away. Mary could have stayed at home. Instead, she made that very deliberate decision. You can stay at home, that’s fine, but you could make a deliberate decision to come and engage with Holy Week. But she took down the jar. She entered the house. She knew what she was going to do, and she knew that she needed to do it. Judas, meanwhile, was right about money. Tenderness has economic ramifications. Tenderness will cost you both in your pocket and in your heart. But it’s what we need, tenderness and kindness. Are all too frequent separation from that and from the physical world in our society fixated on our phones and our technology removed from the touch of skin. The touch of bark or Moss or fallen leaves or mulch. The smell of spring rain on soil. The touch of sea and sand. All of that, separated from us, keeps us desperately consuming unhelpful things to fill the hole in our souls. Because the debasement of the body is the debasement of the earth, it’s an economic driver fuelling consumption of everything. All the things we don’t need.

Note that Jesus accepts the caregiver. He allows her touch. He allows the interruption of the flow. I imagine that this moment showed him the love and gave him the courage he needed to walk into Jerusalem. Have you got the love and the courage to walk into Passion Tide, to engage fully with the events of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday. If so, you will not be alone. If so, you will arrive at Easter Dawn, enriched and rejoicing in the glory of a world that can and does surprise us with joy.