In my Sunday school class yesterday we reached the story of Mary (only identified as such in the John 12) anointing Jesus with a very expensive perfume (one wonders if her taste for perfumes that cost roughly a year’s wage was the reason Mary seems to have still been unmarried). In the Gospel of John this is not, as in Mark, an anointing beforehand for burial, since Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus will provide Jesus with the honorable burial that he deserves, and which according to Mark he didn’t receive.
This difference between John and other sources seemed less crucial a point of discussion that the statement of Jesus that “the poor you will always have with you”. When I first read those words, I took them to mean that, in general, concern for the poor should take a lower priority than worship. I now take a different view of the meaning, primarily because it seems that the words attributed to Jesus are an allusion to Deuteronomy 15:11. When combined with the story from other Gospels (which John seems to have known, even if not directly from one of them in written form), the impression one gets is that concern for the poor remains as central a concern as ever – it is more central in both Testaments than many contemporary Christians do justice to.
Jim Wallis uses the image of modern conservative Christians having a “Bible full of holes” in his book God’s Politics. Wallis refers to a group of seminary students who did a search for all the references to poverty and surrounding issues in the Bible. Realizing just how many thousands there were, and how neglected these are, they decided to make the point symbolically. Since if one persistently ignores texts from the Bible they might as well not be there, these students cut out all these two thousand references. This shows in a provocative way what many people who call themselves Christians actually have: a Bible full of holes, not in the sense of full of problems (although I am not denying that), but in the sense of full of passages that they ignore. Indeed, fundamentalists ignore the problems, and so both meanings of ‘full of holes’ overlap for them, but they also ignore other parts, the ones where God criticizes the ancient equivalents of the Americans – since we as a nation are wealthy and not only are not doing all that we can to help the poor, but we ignore the fact that our national and corporate policies are actually in many ways responsible for poverty both in our nation and in the wider world.
The point of the story in John is that that was a unique opportunity to do something for Jesus when he was physically present with his followers, something that custom required to be done but which, according to Mark, was not done. What John does in his own story of Jesus’ burial is to give him in narrative the burial his followers were unable to give him in historical fact, but wished they could have.
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