If you have been a practicing Christian for more than a few years, you have noticed that the church calendar moves around with regard to the Gregorian calendar, such that holidays like Easter are not on the same date every year. This year, we will—spoiler alert—celebrate the Resurrection of our Lord on April 17th. Last year, it was April 4th, in 2020 it was April 12th, in 2019 it was April 21st, and in 2018, it was the somewhat dreaded April 1st.
April 1st is one of my personal least favorite days on the calendar, as I am a curmudgeon and I disdain the practice of April Fool’s Day. I do not care for pranks of any kind, because I do not find it funny that we punish each other for practicing trust.
You may be inclined to disagree—obviously this is a minority opinion, as we all experienced who knows how many dumb jokes just a few days ago—and that’s fine. But as someone whose literal job it is to listen for the truth and tell the truth, I struggle with a day dedicated to being mocked for doing just that.
Today is not April 1st nor is it Easter, but it is a day for fools. Let me explain.
One of our most well-known and beloved saints, Francis of Assisi, was a holy fool. He is featured in one of my favorite books, Illuminating the Way, by Christine Valters Paintner. In it, his foolishness is described as “subvert[ing] the dominant paradigm of acceptable ways of thinking and living.” [1]
We know him as a lover of the earth and all its creatures, as he famously noted that “the world [was his] monastery.” At the time of his life and ministry, the church was a place of riches and grandeur, and St. Francis chose to relinquish all of that in favor of a simple life of presence.
St. Francis was an anticapitalist before there was a capitalist to be anti, rejecting the mainstream social values of hurriedness and productivity and consumption. He chose to slow down, live a contemplative life on the margins of society. He was by no means the first of our church ancestors to behave in this way, but his 12th-century peers thought him quite foolish. But Francis knew that this was the best way for him to see where God was at work.
The prophet Isaiah relays the words of God, who says, “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” We are being invited to look at the world in new ways, perceiving from a different perspective. This is what holy foolishness, like that practiced by St. Francis, calls us to. As “fools for Christ”, which he called his community, we step outside what is considered “normal” in our culture, and break loose from the bonds of others’ expectations and rules for our lives. We follow Jesus’ radical example, not the conformist example of conventional wisdom.
In some ways, Jesus himself is a holy fool, “the one who subverts the way things are done and confounds our expectations. Jesus sat at the table with tax collectors and [sinners]. He healed on the Sabbath. He broke boundaries, turned things upside down, and invites us to do the same.” [2]
In our Gospel story this morning, Mary does something foolish. She upends a valuable bottle of perfume—an entire pound of pure nard, it says, for emphasis—onto the feet of Jesus, mopping up the significant excess with her own hair. This is not normal behavior. This is not typical or expected or even responsible. But Mary did not do it because she thought that it was. She knew it was foolish, and that is precisely why she did it.
Mary, you may remember, is the sister of Martha—with whom she disagreed about how to show hospitality to Jesus and his friends—and the sister of Lazarus, whom Jesus resurrected from the dead. Quite a family! Mary is someone who spent a lot of time with Jesus and his disciples, and had listened to him preach and teach before. She knew who he was and what his presence meant in her home.
Other than Jesus, of course, the other major player in our story this morning is Judas. I am personally uninterested in any Judas slander, as I imagine his role in the life and death of Jesus to be more nuanced than our Gospel authors give him credit for, and these narratives were penned decades after the events they describe, when there had been plenty of time to cement him in the villain role. So his objection to her foolishness, and particularly the author’s parenthetical assignments of motivation are not what’s interesting about this story.
But what Jesus says to him has been interpreted in some problematic ways over the centuries, and so we do have to address his presence, briefly. Judas says that the perfume should not have been “wasted” in this way, and instead should have been sold, and the money given to the poor.
Jesus replies, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
Jesus’ words here, “you always have the poor with you,” have been spun to excuse us from alleviating poverty for centuries. Many preachers will tell you that this story is a repudiation of social justice, and that our focus should be exclusively on the worship of God, not the liberation of our siblings.
If we are scholars of scripture, though, we know that here Jesus is quoting the Torah, Deuteronomy 15:11, to be precise. There, it is written, “There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.” This verse comes in the section of the law regarding debt cancellation.
Deuteronomy 15:1 says, “At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts” and then lays out how, precisely, to go about structuring that. This debt-canceling year is known as the “year of jubilee”.
Our present debt crisis could use some jubilee. Yesterday, the student loan debt in the United States reached one trillion, eight-hundred-ninety-four billion, four-hundred-seventy-eight million, three-hundred-fifty-six-thousand, nine-hundred-twelve dollars ($1,894,478,356,912).[3] 35 million Americans have student loan debt, and 90% of them are not ready to make payments toward that debt when the pandemic payment freeze ends on May 1.
It is arguable that it is foolish to cancel student debt.
People have been paying off student loan debt for decades, and the US government is counting on those payments being made, eventually, so they can pay back their own debt, presumably. People take out loans all the time; it’s a significant part of how the US economy functions. It’s how we own homes and cars; it’s how we start businesses. There are many people who have already paid off their student loans who feel that cancellation now is unfair to the hard work they put into their payments. There are economic arguments all over the place for all the reasons why it is foolish to do it.
But student loan debt cancellation could lift up to 5.2 million American households out of poverty. Black and African American college graduates owe an average of $25,000 more in student loan debt than white college graduates. 58% of student loan debt belongs to women. Student borrowers who identify as LGBTQ have an average of $16,000 more in student loan debt than those who are not LGBTQ. [4]
Advocating for student debt cancellation may cause others to look at us askance. But we sit at the feet of Jesus.
And Jesus is not saying that there is no need to give money to the poor, but rather the opposite. Debts should be canceled so that all are able to live freely and to give freely. We should all be at liberty to lavish one another with our riches—financial, emotional, and spiritual. Mary has chosen to show her adoration of Jesus by anointing him with this richly perfumed oil.
Jesus suggests, perhaps, that Mary’s unusual behavior foreshadows his death. Mary knows that Jesus is in danger, and is wanted by various authorities for various crimes against the empire—for advocating for things like debt cancellation.
She knows that times like these, gathered around the table with friends, may be limited. Tensions are rising. She wants to be sure that her friend Jesus knows what he means to her, to them, to their community. And so she does what is perhaps not the most fiscally responsible choice, according to conventional wisdom and “the way it has always been done”.
Reconfiguring our financial system to more closely resemble the Torah would perhaps be an unpopular option among those who are wealthiest in our present system. But for the poor—who were there in the time of Jesus, who have been there since, and who are here now—it would be gracious, and merciful, and holy, and foolish. How will we, who sit at the feet of Jesus, lavish our riches on those we love?
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[1] Christine Valters Paintner, Illuminating the Way: Embracing the Wisdom of Monks and Mystics, 4.
[2] John Valters Paintner, “Jesus and the Fool Archetype: The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard” in Illuminating the Way: Embracing the Wisdom of Monks and Mystics, 7.