St George's Cathedral, Cape Town

A Meditation given by The Reverend Bruce W. B. Jenneker in the Cathedral Church of St George the Martyr during the Three Hours Devotion on Good Friday, 10 April 2009

Mark is a consummate story teller. He wants to tell us the story of a remarkable act of faith of an anonymous woman, whose faith is so rich and full that it wins from Jesus his highest approbation. To make the spotlight fall with inescapable brilliance on the faith of this unnamed woman, Mark first tells us first of the conspiracy of the religious leaders: they 'were looking for a way to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him,' Mark writes. With this treacherous scheming ringing in our ears, Mark recounts this unnamed woman's story, and then immediately after it, he moves right on to tell us of the unfaithfulness and treachery of Judas. With skill and artistry Mark has set the story of the faith of the unnamed woman in a context of escalating enmity and cruel disloyalty.

From the very beginning of his story Mark has made it very clear that the religious insiders, the religious bureaucrats, have been plotting the death of Jesus. Now their hour has come. The scheming of the plotters will achieve the death of the Son of God. The disciples have been shown to be slow to understand who Jesus is and what he is about. Now one of them will betray the Son of God and will sell him to death; the disciples will fail the Son of God in the garden of his agony; and Peter will deny the Son of God, not once by three times, before the cock crows. Mark's story has become a painful one, brimful of cowardice, disloyalty and betrayal. Hatred of Christ and rejection of him is coming to a climax.

Who is this woman whom Mark places among this cast of plotters and a double-crosser; a denier and a spineless band? Who is she, on whom the spotlight falls with a light so clear and bright, drawing our attention and focussing it on her. She comes to Jesus in her anonymity. Unknown and unnamed, she comes to Jesus in the house of an outcast, Simon the leper. She comes out of her love for Jesus, to perform a memorial act which will not otherwise be performed for Jesus. She comes to be defended by Jesus, commended and acclaimed. She departs as she came: nameless, no identification save her deed and Christ's giving to her the honour of his memory. She departs as she came: unnamed, no remembrance save the memory of what she does in remembrance of him.

She is not unique in her anonymity, this unnamed woman with a jar of costly ointment, who has come to the house of Simon the leper. She is one of a long list of unnamed characters in Mark's gospel who encounter Jesus Christ and find new life in him. There is the nameless leper in chapter 1 whom Jesus healed; the anonymous paralytic in chapter 2, all of whose sins Jesus forgave; the nameless man with the withered hand in chapter 3; the unnamed Gerasene demoniac in chapter 5; the blind man of Bethsaida in chapter 8, he too is unnamed; and also the unnamed epileptic boy in chapter 9. All these anonymous men found new life in their encounters with Jesus, life abundant and full, pressed down and running over. Mark also tells us of unnamed women who found this new life in Jesus Christ: the woman who had been haemorrhaging for12 years, Jairus' unnamed daughter, the nameless Syrophoenician woman whose unnamed little daughter lived because her mother was content with crumbs.

Now this unnamed woman of chapter 14 comes to the house of a leper seeking Jesus because he has recognized him. Because she knows who he is and believes in him, it is only he that she seeks, not the men reclining about the table; not Simon the host of the gathering. She has brought an alabaster jar of the costliest perfume with which she intends to anoint Jesus, pouring it out over his head. More than a year's wages has she brought in this perfume. She knows what it costs, she brings it precisely because it is precious, she knows its worth.

Writing in The Jesus Controversy, Dominic Crossan provides a luminous and inspired insight into this unnamed woman's witness. Crossan points out that at this stage Jesus 'had already told the disciples three times and very clearly that he would be executed in Jerusalem and rise after three days.' In the face of this repeated prophecy that death could not kill him nor the tomb hold him, the women whom Mark tells us brought burial spices to Jesus' in the tomb might have been acting out of love, but what they were doing it certainly was not an act of faith, in fact it was a blatant denial of faith. Overwhelmed by sadness and even despair the women came to the tomb to perform the rituals for the dead, having forgotten the repeated prophecies Jesus or because they had lost faith in him and in them. If they were convinced that Jesus would rise after three days, they would not have wanted to treat him like a corpse.

In contrast to the women at the tomb, Crossan points out, this unnamed woman who gate-crashes Simon's supper-party, believes those prophecies of her Lord's death and resurrection. She believes them and knows that if she does not anoint her Lord for burial now she will never be able to do it later. This is why she gets that astonishing commendation of praise, one unparalleled in the entire gospel record: wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her

This accolade is given because in Mark's Gospel this is the first complete and unequivocal act of faith in Jesus suffering and rising destiny. It is the only full act of faith in Mark's before that of the equally unnamed centurion beneath the cross who cries out as Jesus dies: Truly this man is God's Son. For Mark the unnamed woman with her alabaster jar who comes to anoint Jesus, is the first Christian.

Why is it that we so often miss the point of Jesus' death and resurrection? Is it because we are imprisoned by fear? Are we too afraid of life to see its possibilities and risk its challenges? Are we too afraid of death to accept it for the gateway to life into which Christ has transformed it? Or is it that we are too enamoured of the powers of this world, too wary of losing esteem and regard, and consequently hold onto our petty fiefdoms, our little worlds in which our authority and our control boost our complacencies? Is it that we cannot abandon ourselves to the joy of light overcoming darkness, because the darkness covers our crime and corruption? Are we unwilling to risk the oil of gladness because mourning encourages our wallowing and garlands threaten to redeem our ashes?

Are we ready only to claim Christ for dead and offer him our respectable rituals that hold him in the tomb? Is it our intention to keep him there, locked away from us and our world, a dead object of a impotent memory? Or are we willing like the unnamed woman, to take the best of what we have and are and lay them at Christ's disposal, convinced that in life he conquers death and in death he makes life possible. Dare we aspire to a faith that recognises in Christ a new world that is beyond the limits of our horizons, that challenges to overturn our prejudices and assumptions, to forge new ways of being what we are and who we are called to be.

Can we, like this unnamed woman who barges into Simon's house, an uninvited guest at his supper-party, can we, like her acknowledge that this man Jesus is the one in whom all things hold together, the one in whom love conquers all and in whom all is reconciled, the one who takes captivity captive to set us free from all that threatens to diminish and destroy us? Can we recognize him?

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