Jars of alabaster, jars of clay, & the journey of Holy Week
The way of the cross is Jesus's and ours
Gentle reader,
Today’ post is excerpted from my short book Pandemic Prayers: Devotions and Prayers for a Crisis. I wrote it during Holy week of 2020.
Jesus knows the week is fraught with danger.
He is preparing to pour himself out for us.
What do you do when what’s coming is the brutality of the cross? If you’re Jesus, you have dinner with your friends.
We probably know the cast of characters—Lazarus, Mary, and Martha.
The two sisters and their brother are some of Jesus’s closest friends. He calls them “beloved.” He comes to their home when he needs respite. The last time he was here, he stood at his friend’s grave.
And he wept.
And then he called Lazarus forth from the dead.
And now the friends are having a meal together, again.
Even if we don’t know this story, the one of the dinner party we’re at right now, we might be able to predict what they’re doing tonight based on the other stories we’ve heard about them.
Martha is serving. She’s made sure the meal will be good. She’s looking out to see that everyone has what they need. Maybe she pauses to glance at her brother, marveling that he’s living and breathing, after she thought she’d given him up to the tomb forever.
Lazarus is at the table with Jesus. They’re dipping bread in oil and eating fish. Maybe Lazarus is conscious of enjoying the food and the company more than he would have before he got sick and died.
Before his friend Jesus called him out from death and back to their shared table.
Do they talk about it? The fact that that the Lord of Life is at their table?
And what of the other sister? Where is Mary tonight?
She’s where she’s been before. At the feet of Jesus.
She takes a jar of “costly perfume made of pure nard” (Jn 12:3).
She anoints Jesus’s feet.
She wipes those feet with her hair.
Tears run down her face.
She knows what Jesus is about to say out loud. She knows she will not always have him there, with her. And she prepares him for his death by pouring all she has out for him, a preview of what he will do for her when he goes to the cross.
Pietro Lorenzetti, Saint Mary Magdalene, with an Angel [left panel], probably 1340
The house fills up with the “fragrance of the perfume.”
It’s holy week.
The way of the cross lies before Jesus.
It lies before his friend, Mary.
It lies before us, too.
Several years ago, I was thinking about Mary and her alabaster jar of perfume. About how costly it was. I was doubting I’d have it in me to do what she did.
But then I thought about some other jars in scripture: clay jars.
“We have this treasure in clay jars,” Paul says, “so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us” (2 Cor 7:7).
I wrote this short poem:
by Beth Felker Jones never, Lord, would I have had the guts to shatter that alabaster jar. Love, though, made me clay. whatever nard still spilling through the cracks, so graciously set free.
It’s holy week, and the way of the cross is before us. All the alabaster things are shattering. We’re left with clay that cracks, clay that makes it clear that our hope is in God and God alone.
After the bit about the clay jars, Paul goes on;
“We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh (2 Cor 4:8-11).
Our mortal flesh is groaning. The cross looms before us.
And it’s right here, in our weakness and sorrow, that grace will make Jesus “visible in our bodies.”
Descent from the Cross, 1653, Adam Lenckhardt, (German, 1610–1661), Ivory, Cleveland Museum of Art
I’m praying today, to look to the cross, to focus on what Jesus did in pouring himself out for us, so that God’s grace might allow me, just a little, to make Jesus more visible right here.
Dear God,
Thank you for your promise that, though we are afflicted, we will not be crushed. Help us to look to Jesus, who poured himself out on the cross, and so made it possible that we might show his life to the world.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
Amen.
Excerpted from Pandemic Prayers: Devotions and Prayers for a Crisis (Cascade Books, 2021), ©Beth Felker Jones, all rights reserved.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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Thank you for the yeast! How often do we gaze around the table and the room, thinking about our guests lives in the last week or so? The alabaster jar of life!