Passion and Proportion: St Mary's Parish Eucharist: 25th March 2007: Revd. Dr. Alan Winton

Lent 5:  Isaiah 43.16-21; Philippians 3.4b-14; John 12.1-8 St. Mary’s
 

Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Jeffrey: not Tristram I’m afraid, but Archer! As you may have heard, the controversial ex-Olympic athlete, ex-MP, writer of bestsellers and member of the House of Lords has just published ‘The Gospel according to Judas’. It has been written with the help of Francis Maloney, a distinguished Roman Catholic biblical scholar, and was launched this week at the Vatican with endorsements from among others, Lord Carey, and an audio book version voiced by none other than Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Whatever you may think of Jeffrey Archer, this represents quite a remarkable achievement: he certainly seems to have a way of sweet-talking high-profile people into helping him.

I haven’t read the book, but from the articles in the press, it seems to be another example of the many attempts made over the years to rehabilitate the character of Judas, to see him as misunderstood, to try to give a more charitable account of his motives than the Gospels seem to allow. It is written from the perspective of his son, concerned to set the record straight about his father.

Our Gospel reading today gives a classic New Testament example of the way that Judas has been somewhat maligned in the tradition. A celebratory dinner is held at the home of Lazarus, presumably to give thanks for his miraculous restoration to his sisters Mary and Martha. Jesus is invited, and during the course of the meal, Mary takes a jar of costly oil and uses it to anoint Jesus’ feet. It is an extravagant gesture, and Judas is recorded as articulating his disapproval, with the not unreasonable point that such costly oil might have been sold to provide for the poor.

John, however, as writer of the Gospel, suggests a base motive for Judas’ disapproval, alleging that he used to steal money from the common purse, and perhaps intimating that this was his plan on this occasion. But regardless of what we make of Judas’ motives, it is Mary who receives the approval of Jesus on this occasion.  It is a wonderfully described Gospel incident: in just a few brief lines, a scene is graphically created with a really difficult dilemma posed, and it seems to force us into taking sides. Do we instinctively sympathize with Mary or Judas in the point of view they represent?

My Jeffrey Archer inspired take on this scene would be entitled ‘Passion or Proportion’, because the story does seem to juxtapose these two qualities, passion and proportion, and I believe that both can claim a legitimate place within the life of faith.

Proportion is that voice of good sense which often causes us to stop and think. It’s the voice that tells us not to rush in, but that a little wisdom is needed. It’s the voice that urges us to weigh things up, to be calculating and not impetuous. Proportion is about engaging the mind, thinking through options, making a wise and considered choices, taking note of the implications. Passion on the other hand is a much more instinctive aspect of faith, it is where we are moved at the level of the heart, often an emotional response to what we see before us, that is swift and dramatic. Passion is not calculating, it is impulsive, and as such it is capable of great force and impact.

Clearly, Mary acts with passion in the story: she is moved by love and gratitude to Jesus and wants to show how she feels, for her that is much more important than weighing up all the consequences of her action. Judas is bothered by the question of proportion, he is thinking about the cost and exercised about the wisdom of this action.  Both attitudes have something to commend them. Faith requires us to use our minds, to think things through and weigh up the options open to us in any situation or with any challenge that we face. To use our God-given abilities to solve problems, to develop strategies, to plan and act with purpose. But we also need passion, we mustn’t allow ourselves to become cold and detached in all our judgments and actions – one of the qualities we often see in Jesus is his gift for compassion, and that is essentially a response at the level of the heart and the emotions to another person’s pain. And passion can unleash the power to bring about real change, to make a real difference.

If both are important and legitimate qualities, then this story is in the end surely about learning what is right for each particular moment. On 9 out of 10 occasions, Jesus might well have reached out to stop Mary pouring the expensive oil. ‘Save it’, he might have said, ‘for there are better uses than this’. Jesus lived his life with a deep concern for the poor, and denied himself any of the trappings of wealth and security that most of us feel are essential to life. But in this moment, he saw what lay behind Mary’s actions, both the love she had for him and perhaps also a discernment of the coming confrontation that would most likely lead to Jesus’ death. What was important in this particular moment was that Jesus allow himself to be anointed as a sign of his willingness to go all the way to his death. Passion and feeling was the right quality for this moment, but on other occasions it would be his disciples’ ability to engage their minds that would be commended.

The story presents two strikingly different attitudes and actions: the force of passion and the rationality of proportion. Faith is not a matter of making a choice between these two extremes, but discerning what is demanded in each moment. If faith always demanded of us the same response, them our lives might be easier, but they would be so much less interesting.  So go back now and think about that question of which character in the story we would instinctively side with: do we find ourselves joining Judas in his detached weighing up of the moment and seeing what else might have been done with that precious oil? Or do we sympathize naturally with Mary, rejoicing in her spontaneity, her freedom from the fear of what others would think, her willingness to act on her feelings without worrying overmuch about the consequences?

Whichever side we take, then the challenge of this simple Gospel story might be to go away this week and explore why we were drawn in that way? How much is that our instinctive response to every situation we find? What scope exists in our experiences for drawing on either the passion of Mary or the proportion of Judas, developing what is not instinctive, what doesn’t come so naturally to us?  The life of faith will present us with many challenges and opportunities: sometimes we will be called to act with passion and spontaneity, not to be held back by our inhibitions, or to over-conceptualize what we might or might not do. And there will be other occasions when what is needed is to hold back, to rein in our natural enthusiasm, to think as well as simply feel. Real maturity in faith is to know what each moment demands of us.  For such variety of response is also deep within the nature of God. That God is loving and merciful and faithful does not change, but we cannot easily tell what God will do in any given moment. Isaiah reminds his listeners of the God who formed a path through the waters for them to bring them out of Egypt. On that occasion he made the land dry for them to help them escape. But now God is doing a new thing, don’t get stuck in the past he says, recognize as God’s gift what is about to spring forth. The people face a dry desert, and so on this occasion God will bring them water, he will open up a river in the desert so that they can pass through.
God’s nature remains constant, but what he might do for us in any given moment is as varied as the response he might demand from us. We must be prepared for change and challenge and not get stuck in a rut. “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”

We need open eyes to see what new thing God might want to do for us, what is the new and unexpected way in which our prayers might be answered or the path ahead opened up to us. And we also need the flexibility to recognise the new challenges that God might have in store for us, the new ways in which he might want us to respond to the challenges we face.
Faith does not boil down to a simple choice between the passion of Mary and the proportion of Judas, God gives us much more freedom than that and requires of us much more creativity and insight and discernment.

But I will get down from the fence today, because as I think about our situation as an Anglican Church in prosperous Hertfordshire at the start of the 21st century, populated by many educated and successful people, I would have to say that it is Mary’s passion we need more of, and that we probably do quite well in terms of Judas’ detached and reflective desire for proportion. We need more spontaneous acts of generosity, love and service, fired up by a passionate and uninhibited love for God. And that thought is summed up for me in a rather good quotation from this coming week’s Lent course, a quotation that Mary might well subscribe to, and one that you might like to ponder and discuss: “I do not want to possess a faith: I want a faith that possesses me”. Amen.