May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
The temperance movement of the early 19th century was one of the most successful reform movements in our country’s history. Just about every scholar who has tried to work out the rough statistics agrees that alcohol consumption fell, and fell by a lot, between the 1820s and the 1840s. One leading historian believes that alcohol consumption fell in those decades from about seven gallons per person per year to about two.
That’s a huge decline. Some of it is attributable to other social changes. But the temperance movement does deserve a lot of the credit.
And who were its leaders? Mostly educated middle-class women, inspired by the enthusiasm of the Second Great Awakening, the revival of religious sentiment that was sweeping through evangelical protestant churches all over the country.
Their tactics were simple and personal. Some of them used the term moral suasion, and modern historians haven’t found a better term for it. They reached out with emotional, personal appeals to individual drinkers, and won them over, one husband, father, brother, son, and neighbor at a time.
So energetic were they, and so successful in their organizing, that they became the seedbed of all the other great reform movements of the 19th century: Education reform, prison reform, asylum reform, the abolition of slavery, and of course women’s rights. The leaders of all these movements were inspired by the temperance movement, and many of them had taken part in it.
Now this was not the Prohibition movement. It was a movement for temperance. Many of these women favored Prohibition, but it was not their priority. Politics and legislation in the United States in those days were part of an exclusively male public sphere. Male allies of the temperance women were successful in pushing through Prohibition laws in a number of states starting in the 1850s, but those laws generally didn’t last. They were quickly found to be unenforceable and counterproductive.
But some Prohibitionist politicians kept pushing for them, and decades later, in 1919, they were able to ratify the 18th Amendment and bring about nationwide Prohibition.
I suspect you know disastrous that was. It had little if any effect on alcohol consumption; it provided a kind of perverse economic stimulus for organized crime; and it was repealed after only a decade and a half.
I heard one young historian present a paper on the differences between temperance and Prohibition, when the annual meeting of the American Historical Association was held in Boston about a decade ago. The gist of her argument was: “This is what happens when you take a perfectly successful movement, and put men in charge of it.”
I couldn’t help but recall that remark, and the stark differences between the historically mostly female world of moral suasion and the mostly male world of power politics, when I considered the contretemps between Mary of Bethany and Judas in today’s gospel reading
All three of the major figures in this gospel story seem to be aware that something momentous is about to happen. Shortly before this, they have witnessed Jesus raising Mary’s brother Lazarus from the dead.
Now Mary anoints the feet of Jesus. It’s an extravagant act, one that Jesus compares to the anointing of a body for burial.
Judas is beginning what will be about as bad a week as any human has ever experienced -- in a little more than six days he will betray Jesus and turn him over to the authorities. Here he upbraids Mary for wasting the valuable perfume. He knows exactly what it is worth – 300 denarii, about the equivalent of a year’s wages for an ordinary day laborer.
And Jesus rebukes Judas, in one of those startlingly sharp commands that he sometimes utters in the gospels: “Leave her alone.”
Like Paul in the letter to the Philippians, Mary is clearly ready to lose all things, to “regard them as rubbish, in order that [she] may gain Christ.” Now Paul, like us, knew only the risen Christ. But Mary knew Jesus, and she believed.
Then again, Judas knew Jesus, too, and so did Peter. In the harsh words Judas speaks to Mary in today’s gospel, he sounds a lot like Peter will sound less than a week later, when he complains as Jesus begins to wash the disciples’ feet at the last supper.
Neither Judas nor Peter has the patience to try to understand the significance of the ritual that Mary enacts in Bethany, or of the one that Jesus enacts in Jerusalem.
And yet, I have to admit, Judas makes sense to me. At first glance, Mary’s extravagant act of worship bothers me, too. It just seems so wasteful. The 300 denarii could have been used to help the poor. John seems to know that some readers of his gospel will react this way, too -- so much so that he has to warn us away, by making the charge that Judas was an embezzler. That’s not found in any of the other gospels.
But Judas and Peter make sense to me. Is this what happens when you take a perfectly good church and put men—men like Judas and Peter (and me, I guess)—in a position of responsibility?
Unlike Judas, Mary of Bethany, wiping the perfume from the Lord’s feet with her own hair, knows that the followers of Jesus are not a social service agency, that the strange and transformative human experience called worship is at the center of their community’s life.
Mary is the sister of Martha as well as of Lazarus, but in John’s gospel Mary and Martha are not the hands-versus-hearts opposites of Luke’s telling. Before the raising of Lazarus, Martha is one of the first to say to Jesus, “Lord, I believe that you are the messiah, the son of God, the one coming into the world.” That proclamation of faith seems to be a necessary precursor to Lazarus’s restoration to life, along with Mary’s simpler statement, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died”.
So many of the people in John’s gospel who share Mary and Martha’s faith, and their impulse to worship, are women! This culminates in the presence of four women (along with the unnamed beloved disciple) at the foot of Jesus’ cross – Jesus’ mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. I think the key for all of them, as for Mary and Martha, as for the temperance women of the nineteenth century, lies in a connection that is personal and emotional, not simply theoretical or ideological.
After his betrayal, Judas has disappeared from John’s narrative, never to return. After his denial, Peter is in hiding, cowering with the other apostles. But these women who are extravagant enough to worship without reservation, without counting the cost, are also brave enough to follow as disciples where that impulse to worship leads: to the foot of the cross, and then, on the third day, to the empty tomb.
Back in Bethany a week earlier, Jesus (who we are told knows full well what Judas will be doing in the next week) admonishes Judas by saying “You always have the poor with you.” Jesus is not dismissing the poor here, or the commitment of his followers to serve them and mitigate their misery. He’s not looking around and saying, “What, are they still here?”
He’s charging his followers, and charging us, with an everlasting responsibility for the poor. For one thing, he’s paraphrasing a verse in Deuteronomy that concludes, “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.”
But he is also reminding them, and us, that this responsibility is rooted in the extravagant personal devotion and connectedness of Mary’s act of worship, not in the scientific management and dutiful budget-balancing that Judas espouses—or claims to espouse.
And Mary’s extravagant act of worship is rooted in her and her sister’s personal realization, especially vivid to us at this season, that Jesus is “the messiah, the son of God coming into the world”; that his days among them are growing short; and that she must make the most of them—as must we all.
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