Uplifting the Insignificant, Ruling from the Grave

 

During Jesus’ last week, several things unfold that the gospel writers use to illustrate significant things about Jesus and what he was about.

One of these is the anointing of Jesus. You can read it in Matthew 26:6-13.

The story goes that Jesus was at a dinner party, enjoying company of his friends and others. Sometime during the course of the meal a woman shows up and pours a jar of expensive perfume oil on Jesus’ head. 

It’s a slightly strange scene if you’re not familiar with the context. First of all, pouring oil on one's head wasn’t all that strange in the first century. Using oil on one’s head was a thing of hygiene or cleanliness. There wasn’t the convenience of showering daily with a nice botanical shampoo. Oil was the way to keep clean and fresh.

Now, especially in the Jewish community, pouring oil on someone’s head was a reminder of the anointing of kings and priests – significant leaders appointed by God. This is what Matthew has in mind. This isn’t just a hygiene thing. That would be done in one’s own home, not in public by a strange woman. The gospel writer is pitching this as the anointing of God’s king – the person appointed by God to bring God’s presence and rule into the world.

Usually God’s appointed kings were anointed by a prophet, someone specially appointed to be entrusted with carrying out the task of anointing God’s king. And the anointing would be done in some public forum, a special place – usually in the temple. And the anointing would precede taking the seat on the throne.

In this story, Jesus' anointing takes place not in the temple, but in the home of Simon the Leper (cant’ get more unconventional and unclean than this). It’s done by an unidentified woman whom Jesus welcomes into an environment she would traditionally not be welcome. Women weren’t usually allowed into the men’s only dinner parties. It would have been perfectly appropriate for Jesus to tell the woman to get out, to wait until later, to not impose into the group. Yet he welcomes her, bucking convention. And the woman is unnamed (read: insignificant and unknown). And Jesus says this is in preparation for his burial, not for taking the typical throne of a king.

What’s this all getting at? 

The woman who is unnamed is taking the role of a great prophet. In this action, her life is elevated from a nobody to a person of significance, who is allowed to bring honor to God’s appointed savior. Her being unnamed serves for her to represent all of the unnamed and insignificant. This story opens us to see Jesus and the coming of God among us, not as a king who plays the typical kingly game of separating himself from the nobodies of the world, high on his throne, but of welcoming and lifting up the unnamed and insignificant into his presence. But he does it not by inviting them to come into his castle; he brings his glory into our lives, into the homes of the outcast (Simon the Leper), to elevate us as we are.

The anointing of Jesus as God's savior by an unnamed woman in the home of Simon the Leper tells us no less than this: the mission of Jesus' salvation is one of bringing significance to the unnamed and insignificant, and turning the mundane, isolated places of life into places of sacred presence. Whatever else one might say about the gospel of Jesus Christ, it must include this.

If you think you're not good enough for God to notice you or that God wouldn't waste God's time on your life, think again.

And Jesus says the anointing is for his burial, not for his glorious throne. The place Jesus will be exalted is ironically the place of deepest human depth, both literally if we think of burial as going into the earth as opposed to being lifted on a throne, and symbolically.

Jesus doesn’t rule as God’s Lord and king by a display of magnificence and power, or by showing himself to be more important and dignified than his people, demanding that they recognize his status and serve him. He rules by means of becoming like us, even in death, in laying down his life and going through death, in order to bring us with him through to the other side. If this is how God’s king is, and if Jesus is our king, savior, and Lord, than this is defining for who we are, too.

Jesus is not your typical earthly person of power. This is God's anointed king, and this is the good news of God's salvation, beautifully proclaimed "in memory of her," as Jesus says.