Tag Archives: Faith

What Jesus Said About Vultures

Posted on by
Reply
Turkey vulture.

In all my years as a priest, I had never preached on the apocalyptic imagery of Luke 17:26-37, where people disappear without warning and Jesus concludes with an unnerving proverb: “Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.” This is not ideal preaching material, but with the help of the Epistle reading, Hebrews 11:29—12:2, I gave it a try last Sunday.

Today’s gospel [i] has quite a punchline: “Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.” It’s got to be pretty low on the list of favorite Jesus quotes, but it certainly gets our attention.

A couple of weeks ago I was at a raptor show at the High Desert Museum in eastern Oregon. A variety of hawks, owls and vultures flew swiftly among the seated spectators, who were warned to stay very still lest we be mistaken for prey. I did my best not to be a target, but a turkey vulture came close enough to brush my head with its wing. Perhaps it was preparing me for this strange gospel verse.

Some scholars say Jesus was simply using a common folk expression in response to a question about discerning the times, meaning something like “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” Such expressions have nothing to do with smoke or fire or vultures or corpses. They’re just colorful ways of making a point. Still, Jesus’ choice of such a grim illustration puts a sharp edge on his message. It certainly gets our attention. And where the enigmatic text is, there the scholars will gather.

Who is the corpse? they wonder. Who are the vultures? One interpretation suggests the corpse could represent ancient Palestine, with the rapacious vultures being the occupying army of Rome. The Book of Revelation, perhaps inspired by the vultures in the gospel text, imagined the raptors of midheaven being summoned to feast on the remains of the proud powers struck down by divine judgment. An even more fantastical interpretation identifies the sharp-eyed buzzards, who in fact can spot carrion from 3 miles away, as those perceptive disciples who gather to consume the Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ given to feed our deepest hunger.

Well, none of these images is going to qualify for a stained glass window. And the vulture verse is perhaps profitless for the preacher.

And yet, it leaves a haunting impression. It’s unlike anything else Jesus ever said, and its gruesome tone puts an exclamation point on his discourse of crisis. A world is dying, he says. Just as a world died in the days of Noah, or in the days of Lot—names which recall destructive narratives of flood and fire—so it is happening now. The times are in no way normal, Jesus warns his listeners. Anyone who pretends that is not true, who thinks we can just go on about our business as usual—eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building—well, they are in for a surprise.

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
You better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’ [ii]

When we sang that song 60 years ago, we thought the times were changing for the better. And that was true in many ways. But the flood of changes washing over us today do not feel like something better. When Jesus speaks of people being snatched up and disappeared without warning, he could be describing what’s happening right now in “the land of the free.” To paraphrase Jesus’ metaphor, “As it was in the days of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—in 1930s Germany—so shall it be in our own time.”

I pray that this will not be our fate, but the fact that such an outcome is even conceivable is a measure of the times. It can happen here. So what are the friends of God to do? How do we start swimming so we don’t sink like a stone?

We are not the first believers to suffer the worst of times. The Epistle to the Hebrews is clear about that. History isn’t always about the lilies of the field. It has its corpses and vultures as well.

But as the author of Hebrews insists, the faithful believe in the victory of God, and they act out that faith with their bodies. Some of God’s friends have “received the test of mocking and whipping and even chains and prison. They were stoned, cut apart in a slaughter; they died upon a sword. They traveled around in ragged clothing, impoverished, oppressed, afflicted.” But for all they suffered, those who kept the faith “subdued monarchies, did the work of justice … shut the mouths of lions, quenched mighty fires …” (Hebrews 11:29-12:2)

As people baptized into the Paschal Mystery, we understand that dying and rising, defeat and victory, are deeply intertwined. You can’t have one without the other.

When certain medieval women mystics contemplated the cross in prayer and vision, they saw not the triumph of death, but a kind of birth. For them the crucified Jesus was like a woman in labor, enduring pain and travail in order to bring us all to birth: 

Ah! Sweet Lord Jesus Christ, who ever saw a mother suffer such a birth! For when the hour of your delivery came you were placed on the hard bed of the cross and … in one day you gave birth to the whole world.” [iii]

To behold the death of Christ and call it birth is the central act of Christian imagination. It is why we declare victory at the cross. We don’t wait for Easter Sunday. We declare victory at the cross because the Passion isn’t just a story about the violent powers that always trample the weak and kill the prophets. It’s also a story about the Realm of God, where dry bones breathe and lost hopes dance, where the prodigal is welcomed home and the tears are wiped from every eye.

The Love that creates such a realm was nailed to a cross, but the cross did not consume it. Yes, death did what death does, but then God did what God does. And Love won. This is the story we belong to, and on the outcome of that story, we stake everything.

That is why we are here this morning. That is why we refuse to retreat to our private worlds, why we continue to gather in community at our Savior’s table: to nurture hope, shelter love’s flame, encourage one another, strengthen our hearts for service, eat the bread of life, pray without ceasing, sing our Alleluias and grow ever more fully into the visible, tangible body of Christ.

We are not alone in this journey. We are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, all those ancestors in the faith, from Abraham and Sarah and Mary and Luke right on down to the wise and loving mentors we’ve known in our own lives, who have taught us how to walk in the Way of life and peace.

I once heard a preacher describe the cloud of witnesses as “the balcony people” who are looking down and cheering us on as we run the race that is set before us. It’s a wonderful and resonant image. I’m sure that each of you has some very special people in that balcony, shouting their encouragement. Listen. You can hear their voices echoing through the years.

St. Luke, pray for us … St. Mary, pray for us … St. Francis, pray for us … Oscar Romero, pray for us … Dorothy Day, pray for us … Mom and Dad, pray for us.  

Last Sunday I was in Eugene for the National Track & Field Championships, and in the men’s 800 meters I witnessed one of the most stunning moments in the history of middle-distance racing. A 16-year-old high school sophomore named Cooper Lutkenhaus had qualified for the elite competition by breaking the 29-year-old high school record, running the distance in 1:45. And after stumbling and almost falling in his first race at the championships, he managed to survive the first two rounds.

Much to his surprise, he had made the final. But with some of the world’s top 800 meter runners in the race, no one expected him to be anywhere close to the top three who would earn a trip to the World Championships in September.

Rounding the last turn, Cooper was doing really well for a 16-year-old, in  sixth place out of nine racers, 10 meters behind the leader. Then, in the last 100 meters, he passed one runner, and another, and another, and another, to cross the line in second place. His time was 1:42.27, not only a personal best by an unbelievable 3 seconds, but the 18th-best all-time and the fourth-best ever by an American.

Donavan Brazier, Cooper Lutkenhaus, and Bryce Hoppel finish 1-2-3 in the 2025 U.S. Track & Field Championships in Eugene, Oregon.

Now I’ve been at a noisy NBA final with Kareem and Magic and Larry Bird. I’ve been deafened by the 12th man [iv] at a Seahawks game. But the sound of the crowd cheering on young Cooper Lutkenhaus blew my ears off. The cloud of witnesses.

When we run the race that is set before us, there will be times when our lungs burn and our legs scream with lactic acid. There will be the races that disappoint, and workouts that feel listless or discouraging. We may even stumble and fall, more than once.

But always, always, the cloud of witnesses is cheering us on. They know from their own experience what the race is like. They all had their own moments of weakness and doubt. They became acquainted with suffering by training hard every day. They all had to learn how to get up after every fall, lay aside every weight, gulp the breath of the Spirit, and accept pain as the runner’s companion.

I’ve done my own share of racing, and when the pain comes, I try to greet it as a friend. “Hello, brother pain. I knew you’d show up. Well, here we go. I know you’re not going to kill me, right?. We’ll just take it step by step.”

“Even the fittest may stumble and fall (Isaiah 40:31). As Roisin Willis and Maggi Congdon finish 1-2 in the women’s 800 meters at the U.S. Championships, Sage Hurta-Klecker dives for the third and final spot on the World Championship team. In previous years, she had missed out on a championship podium twice due to falls, but this time her fall was a triumph. She made the team.

The perpetual contest between weariness and perseverance is familiar to every athlete—and every saint. You’re going to get tired. You’re going to get discouraged. You may faint and fall. But keep your eyes on the prize, hold on. On both good days and bad, you’ve got to put in the work, “lay aside every weight,” surrender to a power and a strength that is not your own, and stay in the flow.

I began with a raptor image, so let me close with another. This time it’s not a vulture, but an eagle, in a beautiful passage from the prophet Isaiah:

Even the youthful may faint and grow weary, 
even the fittest may stumble and fall,
but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, 
they shall mount up with wings like eagles, 
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and never grow tired. [v]

Francesco Scaramuzza, Dante and the Eagle (c. 1860). The sleeping Dante dreamed he was carried by an eagle, but it was really St. Lucy who helped the poet on his upward journey toward heaven’s light (Purgatorio ix).

This homily was preached at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Renton, WA, on the 9th Sunday after Pentecost, 2025.

Race photo and video by the author.

[i] The texts for the 8th Sunday after Pentecost are in Wilda C. Gafney, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, Year C, which differs significantly for the Revised Common Lectionary used by most liturgical churches.

[ii] Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (1964).

[iii] Marguerite d’Oingt (d. 1310).

[iv] The loudest crowd in professional football is in Seattle, where the fans are called “the 12th man” for their ability to influence the game by making it hard for the other team to hear their quarterback’s signals.

[v] Isaiah 40:30-31.

“A sweet fragrance filled the room” — A Homily on John 12:1-8

Posted on by
5
Jan van Scorel, Woman with the jar of nard (c. 1530).

In all four gospels, there’s a story about a woman who interrupts an intimate dinner party to kneel at the feet of Jesus and make an act of devotion. Luke’s story differs from the others in significant ways, so it may be based on a different incident. But Mark, Matthew and John all seem to be describing the same event. It was a moment which clearly had an indelible impact on the memory of the early Church.

John’s version is the only one which names the woman: Mary of Bethany, whose brother Jesus had just raised from the dead in the gospel’s previous chapter. Coming between the dramatic raising of Lazarus from the tomb and the violent clamor of the Passion, the story is a striking contrast to what came before and what comes after.

Instead of a public event with lots of people, it is quiet and intimate. No wailing mourners, no crowd shouting “Hosanna!” or “Crucify him!” Just Jesus, a few disciples, and his hosts, the siblings of Bethany:  Martha, Mary, and Lazarus.

We don’t know what they talked about during that dinner, but the moment had to have been highly charged, given the people around the table: The sisters whose grief had driven the harsh confrontation with Jesus at their brother’s tomb (If you had been here, my brother would not have died!) … the rabbi from Nazareth who had wept his own tears over the death of his friend (and perhaps some tears for the human condition in general) but who also found himself channeling the awesome life-giving power of the divine through his own mortal body …and the stunned man who had been so suddenly snatched from the land of the dead, experiencing what had to be a volatile mixture of awe, gratitude, and PTSD.

Perhaps no one said very much at all. Perhaps they were all still processing the shock of their shared experience at the tomb, letting a profound silence hold their feelings in order to preserve the mystery of it from being reduced to the poverty of language. But at some point, Mary was inspired to acknowledge the sacredness of the moment—not with words, but with a sacramental action.

The text doesn’t give the details, but I imagine her rising from the table, leaving the room for a moment, then returning with a jar of nard, a fragrant oil originating in the Himalayas and transported at great expense along the ancient trade route from Asia to the Middle East. It was worth a year’s wages, so when Mary, without saying a word of explanation, poured it all out over the feet of Jesus, it was quite shocking, like throwing a bag of gold into the sea or setting fire to a pile of paper money.

Then Mary compounded the shock by letting down her hair and using it to rub the oil into Jesus’ skin. No reputable woman would have done such a thing, nor would a religious teacher have permitted himself to be touched in such a way. Nevertheless, that’s how it went.

Judas was at that table, and he couldn’t bear to watch. He was the apostles’ money man, and he objected to wasting wealth that could have done some real good. John’s gospel doubts his sincerity, accusing Judas of embezzling the very funds he was claiming to protect.

I suspect that Judas’ discomfort had more to do with Jesus rewriting the social codes of his culture by endorsing Mary’s action. “Leave her alone,” Jesus tells him. Jesus, unlike Judas, understood that this was a very precious and significant moment, and he wanted to let it happen.

Mary’s extraordinary action, both sensual and symbolic, overflowed with meanings. For one thing, anointing with oil was a way to mark the special vocation and identity of authoritative figures, whether powerful rulers or holy persons. It consecrated them as chosen and set apart. The title of “Messiah” or “Christ” means “the anointed one.”

It was revolutionary to have a woman be the one to anoint Jesus as priest and ruler, but the kingdom of God was all about revolution: the revolution of transforming a disordered and broken world into a more perfect expression of divine intention and human possibility.

Anointing was also part of the culture’s preparation of a body for burial. Performed in the week before Jesus’ death, Mary’s gesture inaugurates the sequence of sacrificial acts culminating with her Lord’s burial in the stone-cold tomb. The feet she anoints will soon walk the Way of the Cross for the salvation of the world. That was Jesus’ chosen destiny, and the oil is an outward and visible sign of his inward consent to perform that destiny.

The story’s third meaning is in its foreshadowing of the foot-washing, when Jesus, on the night before he died, knelt at the feet of his friends to perform the work of a servant, surrendering his power for love’s sake. The foot-washing marked the turning point from a paradigm of domination to a paradigm of communion.

By kneeling at the feet of his friends, Jesus was showing them, and us, an image of humanity’s best version of itself. In that sacramental act, Jesus was saying: This is how we must be with one another, because this is exactly how God is with us.

And in today’s story, just a few days before Jesus would teach this explicit lesson at the Last Supper, Mary of Bethany, foreshadows the foot-washing when she offers, in her own way, all she has, holding nothing back.

And her devotional act of kneeling down to pour out the precious oil not only anticipated the foot washing on Maundy Thursday, it was an image of the divine nature as revealed in the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus.  As one theologian has put it, “The self-giving extravagance of Mary’s actions point to the way Jesus would expend himself completely through his crucifixion.” [i]

In our Palm Sunday liturgy next Sunday, Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians will declare that Jesus emptied himself for us, poured himself out for us, and in so doing he revealed who God is and what God does. Whether in the costly pouring out of the Son’s life on the cross, or in the lavish pouring out of Spirit on Pentecost, God is the One who never ceases to pour out God’s own self.

And when, before his own self-offering, Jesus allowed Mary to anoint him in such a costly manner, she herself became an icon who shows us God with her own body, bowing before Jesus to wipe his feet so tenderly with her hair.

At the time, the disciples did not grasp the full significance of Mary’s act. Nor did Mary herself, I’d imagine. How could they?

As we say around here about Holy Week: The journey is how we know. The disciples had to learn by doing: following Jesus all the way to the cross—and beyond—before they could begin to understand—through memory and reflection—what it was all about. And that is what we will be doing as well during the seven days of Holy Week, not wanting to miss a single step along that sacred way. The journey is how we know.

Before we leave this story, consider the one sentence that stands out from the rest of the text:

The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.

There’s nothing else quite like it in the canonical gospels. The Bible in general is short on description and long on action. We never hear about the weather in Jerusalem or the colors of spring in the Galilean hills or the way light falls on the walls of the temple courtyard in late afternoon. So why does John invite us to pause and take in the sweet smell of nard?

In her fascinating book on the olfactory imagination in the ancient Mediterranean, Susan Ashbrook Harvey points out that aromatic spices were thought of as souvenirs of Paradise. When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, it was said, they were allowed to take away a few fragrant plants to remind them of what they had lost.

Smells are a powerful trigger of memory, and the sweet odors of plants, spices and aromatic oils not only reminded people of Paradise Lost, they were thought to alert our senses to divine presence in a fallen world. They help us remember God. As Harvey writes, fragrance is something like God:

“Unseen yet perceived, smells traveled and permeated the consciousness, transgressing whatever boundaries might be set to restrict their course … Odors could transgress the chasm that separated the fallen order from God; they could elicit an unworldly sensation of beauty.” [ii]

And so we hear St. Paul speak of the fragrance that comes from being “in Christ,” so that we ourselves begin to give off the “aroma of Christ” from our own bodies (2 Corinthians 2:14-16). A few centuries later, Gregory of Nazianzus, in his treatise on the effects of our baptism, wrote:

“Let us be healed also in smell, that we … may smell the Ointment that was poured out for us, spiritually receiving it; and [that we may be] so formed and transformed by it, that from us too a sweet odor may be smelled.” [iii]

And St. Chrysostom, in his 5th-century sermon on today’s gospel, urged his congregation to become like thuribles, sweetening wherever they happen to be with the incense of heaven:

Now the one who perceives the fragrance knows that there is ointment lying somewhere; but of what nature it is he does not yet know, unless he happens to have seen it. So also we. [That God is, we know, but what in substance we know not yet.] We are then, as it were, a royal censer, breathing whithersoever we go of the heavenly ointment and spiritual sweet fragrance.” [iv]

In the spirit of such olfactory tropes, John’s verse about the sweet smell of the nard in that Bethany dining room endow that moment with divine peace and blessing. And the verse is especially vivid in contrast with the stench of mortality hovering around the tomb of Lazarus a few days earlier. Don’t roll away the stone, his sister pleaded. After 4 days inside, the body will smell terrible. Or as the King James Bible memorably put it, “by this time he stinketh.”

But in that sweet-smelling dining room with Jesus and his friends, death and decay are held at bay for a few precious hours. Outside, the world is wild and raging, on the verge of murdering the incarnation of Love. But inside, a woman is imaging the peace of heaven at the feet of her Lord.

For me, this beautiful moment calls to mind a scene from Ingmar Bergman’s classic 1957 film, The Seventh Seal, set in the fourteenth century when the Black Plague is ravaging Europe. A wandering knight is trying to get back home before the plague catches him, stalling for time by engaging Death in a game of chess. He’ll never win, of course, but at one point he meets a kind of holy family: a man, Jof; his wife Mia; and their baby, Michael. They are traveling players who embody the vitality of the life force.

Antonius Block, the knight (Max von Sydow), plays chess with death.

The film ends with the knight taking his inevitable place in the dance of Death, disappearing over the horizon with his fellow mortals. But the “holy family” are not seen among the dead souls, for they have been spared to carry on in this life, untroubled by death because they belong to grace. They know how to accept the music of what happens, and not live in fear.

The knight finds grace in a fallen world: “I shall remember this hour of peace.”

In the sweetest moment of this anguished film, Jof and Mia share their strawberries and milk with the knight, who receives it like a sacrament, a taste of unconquerable life:

“I shall remember this hour of peace,” he tells them. “The strawberries, the bowl of milk, your faces in the dusk, Michael asleep, Jof with his lute. I shall remember our words, and shall bear this memory between my hands as carefully as a bowl of fresh milk. And this will be a sign and a great content.”

An hour of peace, an experience of great content in a world that is coming apart—isn’t that a perfect description of the dinner at Bethany? And are we not in that same place now, with Mary, Jesus, and the rest? The powers of death and malice and mindless destruction are raging outside. We know that. Yet here we are, tasting the bread of heaven, inhaling the fragrance of divine presence.

It’s not about escaping. Not at all. It’s about renewal, so that when we go back out into the world, we can be clear about our vocation: to exude that fragrance—God’s sweetness—in every place we go. And when it gets hard out there—and it will—just call to mind the fragrance of those sacred moments when we dwell in God, and God in us.

This homily was preached at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church on Bainbridge Island in Washington State, on the Fifth Sunday in Lent.

[i] Craig R. Koester, Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel: Meaning, Mystery, Community (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 114.

[ii] Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 53.

[iii] Ibid., 75.

[iv] Ibid., 115.