The Word Made Flesh

March 13, 2016

Fifth Sunday of Lent

Here we are with Martha and Mary again. Efficient, busy Martha. If you need something done, something practical, she's the friend to turn to. She's the big sister, always organizing the people around her. And she's organized this beautiful dinner for Jesus. I can imagine the table. What a spread! She probably knew just what Jesus's favorite foods were, and had cooked them just the way he liked them. She loved Jesus! He had brought Lazarus back from the dead! And she is showing him that love by doing what she knows how to do well—welcoming him, making him comfortable, filling his hungry belly.

And then there's Mary, the little sister. If you wanted something done, Mary is usually not much help. She's not worth much in the kitchen, that's for sure. She is easily distracted. But Mary is loveable, fun to be around, spontaneous—she's the baby of the family. And she loves a party, and she can't resist a house full of company. She doesn't want to be left out. She wants to do something for Jesus, too. But what? She peeks in to the room of men, sitting around the table, eating all the good food Martha has made. There is Jesus, reclining on his side on a couch as the guest of honor, with his bare feet tucked behind him. Out of nowhere, she has this idea.... She grabs the delicate alabaster jar hanging on a cord around her neck, snaps it open, and pours the precious nard on Jesus's feet. She kneels down; she can't resist touching him. She spends minutes, caressing his feet, wiping them with her hair. Judas is jealous, don't you think? There's no young woman throwing herself on the ground to caress his feet! He works so hard for Jesus, but no one pays any attention to him!

In today's Gospel, Jesus is not just an idea. At the center of this passage is Jesus's physical body, his actual, touchable, young, male, hungry body, which is made of flesh and bones, just like our own. Mary and Martha don't just love Jesus as an concept. They love his very physical self. It is this actual physical body of his, and all the things that it suffers, that somehow, by Easter, will connect all of them and all of us here and now to God and to one another. At the center of Christianity is the human body—Jesus's body, and our own fleshy, imperfect, smelly, aging, bodies; these bodies that God gave us to live in. Christianity is about feeding these bodies, healing them, resurrecting them, bringing them to fullness of life. Jesus was flesh and bone, like us; this Christ, this Anointed One we worship, is also called the Word made Flesh.

Which leads me to a very big question—why would God bother with bodies? I grew up in a family where bodies were merely inconvenient but serviceable ways to keep our brains from dragging around on the ground. God made us in his image-- and here we are. Human bodies all around. And, for some strange reason, these bodies are part of God's purpose. God has a claim on these bodies, and a plan for them. They matter.

Here's what I think. Love is meaningless if it is just an idea, an intellectual concept. Love can only be made real through bodies. Love requires flesh. God's love requires flesh.
In the beginning, God's love became real, took on flesh, in creation. But God's love didn't stop there. God's love kept moving, kept trying and trying to make contact with those human bodies that God made and loved, kept wanting to know and understand humanity fully. And so God took on human life, took on our human experience, our point of view. Because that's what we do when we love someone, isn't it? We put aside our own point of view, and we take on the point of view of the one we love.

And when God became Jesus, I think God learned things from that experience of self-constraint. God learned things that can only be learned through the body. God learned, through Jesus, about human limitations and stresses and joys—what it feels like, as a human body, to fight temptation; to be gripped by fear; to choke with grief ; to suffer pain; to succumb to despair. Perhaps, who knows? Perhaps, when Mary caressed Jesus's feet, God felt a shimmer of human sexual desire.

Listen to the ways that Jesus talks to his disciples, to the people he teaches, about God and about reality. He doesn't use a lot of intellectual categories, words that live above our necks, up in our brains, as concepts; words that we can discuss from a distance, count, and evaluate from a position of safety. Jesus never, ever, speaks the sort of dry, philosophical language we hear in the Nicene creed. When Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God, Jesus uses words like imprisoned and free; broken and whole; hungry and filled; thirsty and quenched; dead and alive. These are not cerebral categories, they are experiences we know viscerally, through our bodies.

In our current practice of Christianity, we spend a lot of time, like Judas, the careful keeper of the purse, calculating value and worth, evaluating right and wrong, arguing philosophical positions and categories in our heads, moving around intellectual pieces on these chess boards we call religion and politics. We are playing old, familiar games, like the ones Jesus saw the Pharisees play. It is safer and easier to stay in our heads, to keep our ideas about God circumscribed within the limits of a proposition or a rule. The life of the mind is controllable and safe. The life of the body can be passionate, disturbing, dangerous, inconvenient, and messy.

Holy Week is not far away. What did Jesus say and do in his final days? He did not leave us with a philosophy, or an intellectual argument. Actually, he didn't even leave us a list of required beliefs. He gave us things to do—washing feet, eating bread, drinking wine, feeding the hungry, touching one another. The Word made Flesh told us to care for one another's flesh.

As part of my training for ordination, I served as a hospital chaplain. At the end of each overnight shift, which had been spent, if I had been lucky, in a hospital bed; or, if I had been unlucky, in the artificial lights of the Emergency Room or at a dying patient's bedside, I would step out of the hospital's back door into the concrete parking lot and breath in the crisp, early morning air, aching with awareness that every breath, every step, every sensation, is a gift. I would go home so full of bittersweet gratitude. I would put my hands on my children, touch their skin. I would embrace my husband. Eat a meal. Go to bed. Sleep. I learned more about God in those moments than any theology class could ever teach me.

We can keep religion and faith in our heads, like Judas, calculating right and wrong, counting up the benefits and the costs. Or we can give over our whole selves to the smell, and touch and goodness of this bodily life—this life of the flesh that we, like Martha, are asked to feed and care for; this life of the flesh that we, like Mary, are called to anoint and caress with holiness.
We don't need more theology or more information about God. We need the daily practice of living. Jesus speaks to us in the language of our lives, the language of the flesh. As Christians, we are called to speak that holy language, too.

Amen.