“Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”
“Let her alone.” Listen, if you can, to that strong command. “Let her alone.” Jesus says more to his churlish, resentful friends in this paragraph-long speech — he says more by far — than he’ll say in his own defense against his accusers, later on, at the sham trial. He is speaking to his own, to his friends, to his beloveds, to his family. And he is unhappy with them. And they know it. They remember it. This rebuke is recorded more than once: the first Christians cherished this memory. They wanted us to cherish it too.
Jesus is correcting his closest followers, but he is not shouting. He is not throwing a fit. He is not snarking, or delivering a sick burn, or being aggressive, or even harsh. But his rebuke is all the more devastating because of its gentleness. He is firm, direct, even assertive! Yet he remains gentle, kind, and good.
We see Jesus through five ancient lenses: the four Gospels, and Paul’s letters. These five portrayals are distinct. Mark’s Jesus is raw and immediate and human; Matthew’s Jesus is the new Moses preaching from the mountaintop; Luke’s Jesus is an eloquent prophet of economic justice, a foodie who loves to eat with the hungry; John’s triumphant Jesus rises above the earth in splendid glory; and Paul’s muscular Jesus is the risen Christ, shattering the powers of Sin and Death. All different, all memorable in their own ways. And yet, it’s uncanny how we encounter the same gentle yet fierce person across all five portrayals. One person seems to shine through them all.
Jesus always defends and protects the vulnerable, and makes them his own, whether he’s the human friend we meet in Mark, or the cosmic mystery we crane our necks to glimpse in John. In all five portrayals, Jesus is an ally of those without male privilege, without education privilege, without health or ability privilege, and especially those without wealth privilege. When he says, “Let her alone,” he is standing alongside the one other person there who fully understands his mission, and who he truly is.
Jesus stands alongside his one lavishly generous companion, a woman whose name we do not know. (Maybe, if we do not know her name, we ourselves can more readily take her place of honor in the story.) By anointing the body of Jesus with shockingly expensive ointment of pure nard, this woman does something brave and extravagant and loving. She performs a quiet but brazenly prophetic act: she centers Jesus as the source of our virtue, the ground of our faith. She centers the movement of Jesus on his saving death, in which he gave it all away – even his life – for the dawning of the dominion of God. She touches and caresses and soothes his physical body: in doing this, she performs a startling sign of the raw, earthy, sensual, physical bond we have, through Jesus, to one another and to our neighbor.
And so they scolded her. They scolded her because of course they scolded her: she shames them in the poverty of their imagination. She steps far beyond the basic, pious, perfunctory charity that upstanding people, then and now, perform around the edges for the ever-present “poor people.” Jesus says, “The poor you will always have with you … but you will not always have me.” Don’t miss the meaning of this odd verse. If our neighbor remains only a recipient of our charity, then we will always, always have people around us who are in extreme need. And we will always be patronizing them while hoarding most of God’s blessings. But if we really understand who Jesus is and how Jesus challenges us to change the world, then the world really will change.
This woman gets it: She sees how, with Jesus at the center, we are all in with all the people the kingdom of the world rejects and ignores. With Jesus at the center, our movement makes the ever-present them full members in one beloved us. We embrace one another. We are scandalously generous with one another. We caress and soothe and anoint one another.
And consider all the people who are no longer the ever-present “poor,” but are now our beloved siblings in Christ. Imagine who will join our movement, when we are ridiculously and radically generous, when we take up the vocation of the nameless woman and her alabaster jar. Reflect for a moment on who, exactly, gets stitched into the center of our heart, when we anoint the body of Jesus for burial. We have known them.
Well, maybe we’ve mostly just tolerated them, or managed to discreetly ignore them.
He is Black or brown, or undocumented, or wasn’t taught English, our language of empire. She is starving in southern Gaza. He is neurodivergent, or lives outside, or struggles with mental or behavioral challenges. She has a rap sheet, a record, a history of wrongdoing, like those awful tax collectors Jesus loved. He is desperate to defend his Ukrainian town. She is a faithful, decent member of a group we love to hate. They are nonbinary and therefore hunted mercilessly, taunted viciously, in the halls of their senior high school, in the halls of Congress.
And — what a friend they have in Jesus. Jesus is the friend of the vulnerable. He is the friend of the woman who anoints him, the generous companion who gets it. But even when he rebukes those of us who don’t get it, the kindness never leaves his eyes, even as his voice becomes devastating. All five ancient lenses reveal this fierce yet kind Jesus, this harrowing yet lovely Jesus.
Fierce yet kind; harrowing yet lovely. This is the person we contemplate, year by year, in this holiest of weeks. We keep coming back to this person at the center of our community. He is a great man, yet he’s great enough to reject out of hand the ‘great-man theory’: this is not a master and commander, not a decorated war hero and global diplomat, not a canny executive or corporate titan. No. That’s not Jesus. That’s not the one we look for, the one we caress, the one we finally see on the Cross.
Jesus is kind. And that is no small thing. That is, in fact, everything. Kindness, true kindness – the ancient word is chesed – true kindness is almost as rare as a unicorn. I sometimes think I understand kindness, even if I fail to embody it. I want to be kind. Do you? I know for sure that I look for kindness. I look for it everywhere. For me, Holy Week is about my never-ending search for kindness, the potent kindness that shatters the powers and defeats the principalities, the dreadful kindness that removes the oxygen from the room with a quiet yet startling rebuke on behalf of one brave person.
But we know in our bones what the broken world does to the strong and kind ones, the fierce and good ones. Year by year, we contemplate not just Jesus, but the death of Jesus. We contemplate how goodness is shredded and kindness is scolded. We stand with the women who huddled at a distance to watch the burial of Jesus; and alongside those brave women, we refuse to veil our faces to the reality of injustice, the reality of cruelty, the reality of hell on earth.
And we keep at it. We strive to be kind, as Jesus is kind. We strive to be fierce, as Jesus is fierce. We strive to be something bigger than resentful scolds. “Let her alone,” Jesus tells us. “Why do you trouble her?” We hear this rebuke, and the harrowing kindness that drives and directs it. I pray that we will then go and do this good thing, in the presence of this memorable, mighty woman with her jar of pure nard.
I pray that we will let her alone.
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Preached on Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion (Year B), March 24, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 31:9-16
Philippians 2:5-11
Mark 15:1-47