Timing, Tears and Touch

This morning I read… Simon the Pharisee asks Jesus to have dinner with him. An ‘immoral woman’ turns up bringing ’a beautiful alabaster jar filled with expensive perfume. Then she knelt behind him at his feet, weeping. Her tears fell on his feet, and she wiped them off with her hair. Then she kept kissing his feet and putting perfume on them.’

I found some old sermon notes from 2002. I’d talked about the woman’s ‘Failure, Faith and Forgiveness’ (I still enjoy alliteration!)… Today…?

Timing… Yesterday I watched a Bruce Springsteen interview. A documentary is publicising his coming tour, 60 years after his first gig.

The interviewer asked why they’re filming behind the scenes when they’ve never done it before. ‘…because I could be dead by the next one,’ Springsteen replies, ‘I’m 75 years old now. I’ve decided that the waiting-to-do-things part of my life is over.’  

The woman decides that her ‘waiting-to-do-things’ time is over. Perhaps sometimes I need to do the same.

Tears… Yesterday I learned that Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind’ is a ‘threnody’. That’s a new word to me. Apparently a threnody is a song or poem of mourning, written as a memorial…

We’re coming up to Remembrance Sunday. Many will hear John McCrae’s threnody:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below...

Sometimes tears are entirely appropriate – for the woman… for me.

Touch… Yesterday I had a good conversation with my brother… about church politics, prayer, healing, how we interpret the Bible. I guess Simon the Pharisee was good at discussing religion. You can keep your distance with theory and ideas.

Johnny Cash sung: ‘Your own personal Jesus. Someone to hear your prayers, Someone who cares. Reach out and touch faith.’

In this story  a woman got up close enough to touch Jesus personally… her faith moves from being theoretical and distant, to being close and touching… And me?