Mary and the Wolf at the Door
Passion Sunday 2022
Isaiah 43.16-21
Philippians 3.4b-14
John 12.1-8
On Thursday of last week, I was invited for a day on the Isle of Wight with Cathedral Sing, one of our musical outreach programmes, which provides classroom workshops for primary school children. We visited Newport and Carisbrooke, and it was fascinating to watch Adrian Green and George Richford work with one school choir and several classes, to teach them songs and to get them singing together, in preparation for a concert with some of our Cathedral choir next term. One of the impressive techniques I spotted was how, under the guise of just having fun, good vocal skills were imparted, from posture to breathing to unity – the children visibly grew, as they stood taller, breathed deeper, sang more beautifully together. And of course I found myself sitting up straight and relaxing my shoulders, for the rest of the day!
Singing is a whole-body activity, in which the mind is also closely involved, and so, in every classroom, one word was used repeatedly. Confidence. ‘What does confidence mean?’ the children were asked. Immediately, one of them piped up, ‘Belief in yourself’. And they grew a bit more and sounded even better, as they were reminded to sing as people who believed in themselves.
So with the breathing and the posture of a couple of days previously still with me, I was intrigued to hear our new Bishop Jonathan’s first Presidential Address at Diocesan Synod yesterday. He began by saying that a senior military friend of his had asked, on hearing of his appointment, ‘What is the wolf at the door of Portsmouth Diocese?’ He wondered what each of us would reply to that, before outlining a few possibilities. Ukraine, safeguarding, resources, lack of young people – there are many possible answers to the question, each of them significant. But for him, as he has started to attend to the breath of the Spirit in this place, and to listen and take stock, there is one wolf: confidence.
He took us back to its Latin root: confidere – to trust, to have faith. And he reminded us that we need to trust in Jesus above all else.
This takes the child’s definition of confidence as belief in yourself seriously, and also takes it into another dimension. It recognises that in order to have belief in yourself, you also need to have belief beyond yourself. I think all human beings recognise that: all of us search for something which will give us a sense of self-worth. Our restless hearts cast about, seeking solace, seeking identity, seeking confidence. These can be found in numerous earthly things, particularly in our relationships with other people. But the one place in which we can repose absolute belief, absolute trust – in which our hearts can find their rest, is in the God at the feet of whose Son we find Mary this morning. And it is from here that our confidence comes.
This is Mary, who, steeped in prayer, sists at Jesus’ feet as her sister Martha bustles about with her many tasks. Mary who, with her sister, knows that Jesus has the power to save, and has witnessed his raising of their brother Lazarus. Now, Lazarus sits at table with them in the family’s Bethany home; again, Martha serves, and again, Mary is at Jesus’s feet, but this time anointing them in a crazy, extravagant gesture.
John gives us an almost tangible invitation into this scene. We feel the weight of the costly perfume; we see the outrageous flouting of convention as Mary uses her hair to anoint; we sense the beauty of the fragrance-filled air. We hear the words of the anointed one, anticipating his death as this ritual has anticipated his burial. We know that we are entering into a new and different economy.
Judas, with his own perfidious motives, but also perhaps as a symbol of earth-bound failure to recognise this difference, points to the literal economy. He speaks with an air of detachment, as one who has not sat at those feet; as one whose later gesture of physical intimacy will betoken not trust, but betrayal. He cannot see or hear or smell or touch the truth: he cannot savour the reality of divinity in his midst.
Mary, by contrast, has no need of words. She has no need of reason or explanation. She has no need of propriety. She has the supreme confidence not to care what anyone else thinks, because all that confidence comes from her identity in Jesus. All the grace, all the anointing, all the care and cherishing which she has received from her Lord, enables her to do this for him, in anticipation of what is to come: of his death, and of the realm which lies beyond it and the Kingdom into which it draws us.
This little scene – this microcosm of life and death and burial, of the economy of the earth and the economy of the Kingdom, enables us to see confidence in a new light – a light which helps to show the way, as on this Passion Sunday we begin the journey towards the Cross.
In this confident action, Mary makes herself vulnerable: vulnerable to ridicule, to rejection, to pity. But also vulnerable enough to become fully herself in the Lord’s presence. And in her vulnerability, with the clear eyes of her confidence, she sees that Jesus is also made vulnerable, and that he is already fully himself, God and man. She knows where her strength and identity come from, and so she knows what to do.
Her action is shot through with darkness and sorrow – she, who wept with Jesus for the loss of her brother, knows what death is. Confidence, as we walk this way, does not anaesthetise us against pain, conflict, disappointment or failure. These are all part of the earthly economy in which we live. But at the same time as embodying all these things, Mary also shows us what it is to draw confidence from its source – to drink from the rivers in the desert, in the knowledge that God, at all times, is doing a new thing. So whilst the vulnerability of this life is a constant, she is not anxious about what is to come – she knows what will be, and she knows how she is to respond.
So when does confidence, or rather lack of it, become the wolf at the door? It is surely in those times when we fail to put our trust in the right place; when we allow anxiety to lead us, and so try to do everything in our own strength; when we see earthly success or failure as the touchstone of our existence and our worth.
In these days of Passiontide, we are called to put our trust in Jesus, wherever his anointed feet lead us, and as he fills us with the confidence which banishes anxiety, we can truly stand taller, breathe deeper, sing more beautifully together, with each other and for the world.
Amen.