York Minster

Anointing Jesus' feet

Date: 17th June 2007
Preacher: The Very Revd Keith Jones

A woman who was living an immoral life in the town had learned that Jesus was a guest in the Pharisee’s house and had brought oil of myrrh in a small flask.  Luke 7: 37

Last Monday, leaving Glaisdale on a day with the Minster Walkers on their epic weeklong fund-raising walk from Whitby to the Minster, I was offered, and for nothing, the opinions of a man outside a shop about what was wrong with the Church.  His drift was that he had given up on us because we don’t give people a firm moral lead.  “All except that Sentamu, though; he says it all right”.  By now, John and Tony had got most of the walking party up onto the moorland, and I was in danger of being left behind, so I had to cease giving him audience.  I was rather sorry to bid him farewell.  In the first place it’s always a pleasure to hear how our Archbishop registers as a true, straight Yorkshireman.  And at least the man cared, or he wouldn’t have thought it worth speaking to me.

I wonder if my questioner meant, what people so often mean, when they say we don’t give a firm moral lead.  That is, that he wanted people like me to be a megaphone for his own bugbears.  To tell you the truth, I myself would quite like to be a megaphone for my bugbears.  The trouble is that moral teaching is less like using a loudspeaker than engaging in a conversation, just as our neighbour is not so much like a lump of dough that has to be beaten into shape than a door that has to be opened with the right key.

Take today’s Gospel, which is about a penitent prostitute: at least, I presume that’s what St Luke tells us.  I do not think the church could be clearer than it is in condemning of the prostitution of anyone.  So let’s get it over with. Thou really shalt not do it, and in a longer sermon than this, with or without megaphone, I will go into why, and why the subject is as relevant today as ever, and how many today are involved in the horrid traffic and exploitation of human souls for sexual purposes.  However, I suspect (and this is from inspecting you from several feet up and some distance) this particular matter is not where many of you here today are in most immediate moral danger.  I hope you are satisfied, then, with my moral rant.  But the Gospel story of the woman who anointed Jesus’s feet with costly myrrh is about so much more than ranting about the moral failings of others and bellowing about our own probity.

This incident with the woman took place in a Pharisee’s house.  Jesus has clearly been received with some reserve: no kiss, no signs of endorsement of Jesus’s doubtful credentials, we hear.  And there is little doubt that what was going through the host’s mind was that if Jesus was anything like a decent religious teacher he would be telling this woman, in the words my own grandmother would have used, that she was no better than she ought to be.  If the Pharisee had met Jesus walking through Glaisdale, I expect he would have told him to be stronger on the megaphone.  But the reason this story is remembered is that Jesus turns towards this weeping woman.  And then, in one of the most marvellous moments in the Gospels, this despised and broken woman becomes not just a tart from Bethany village, but an example of the sort of soul who hears and receives what Jesus says and is transformed by him: a sign, I will say, of what a Christian today should be. Note this: at this moment in history, this unnamed woman hears words said to her that are more gracious, more affirming, more loving than any words that any human being has heard from the beginning of the world.  Not Peter, not Mary (Jesus’s mother), not St John, not anyone Jesus had healed or resuscitated, or commissioned, has heard such words as these; “Your sins are forgiven.  Your faith has saved you, Go in peace.”  This is not soppy clergy-gush.   This is God speaking to a sinful person who has even now, frankly, behaved with perfect social decorum.  You and I do not hope to hear more words from our lover and our judge on the day when we shall stand before his face and submit to his handling of our eternal destiny.