A Well-known Incident


By Lance Haward

How well known, in fact?

Hearing Luke's account of the alabaster box of ointment last Sunday, I was suddenly struck by a detail which I hadn't previously noticed. Nevertheless, a fairly obvious detail - the fact that the woman, 'which was a sinner', should have been allowed into the house of a Pharisee at all. One commentary on this passage advises us that these suppers may well have been conducted on the Louis Quatorze system, a meal open to viewing by non-partakers at large. But it is always instructive, as a first step in commentary, to compare the different accounts of the same incident.

It proves on examination of the other three sources to be one of the more complex of such witness-dances: but do the several points of overlap indicate that what we have is the same incident, slightly garbled in one or more of the versions, or two (?) separate incidents conflated?

Pharisee, for example. It is only Luke who ascribes that particular description to the host - and on the strength of it goes on to add the sermon on hospitality, purification (a significant theme for any Pharisee) and the forgiveness of sin. Mark and Matthew, whose accounts are effectively the same in terms of incident, offer a far more striking portrait of him - Simon 'the leper'.

John (as so often) differs from all the rest in making the venue Lazarus' house, and the woman no stranger off the street but one of the family, Mary.

In all these three versions, the moral of the incident is not repentance and absolution at all, as in Luke, but the more subtly profound (and perhaps, for our times, more important) one of the economy of human resources as it relates to devotion and votive offerings. In Mark-Matthew, this theme itself precipitates Judas' treachery (Judas, custodian of the common purse); John affixes no such consequence to it.

And in Luke the event takes place comparatively early in Our Lord's Ministry, and not necessarily in the vicinity of Jerusalem.

Let's take a moment out to equip ourselves properly for a critical approach to these texts. The orthodox analysis of the pattern of the four Evangelists is roughly: Mark-Matthew represent our closest source to the original events and are invaluable as basic factual testimony; Luke offers the most painstaking but subsequent attempt to fill in the fine detail; and John supplies a larger, theological commentary less obsessed with the niceties of the circumstantial. Now back to our narrative.

Perhaps the small point of inessential detail in Mark-Matthew gives the clue: the throw-away location 'in Bethany'. If John, in his lower state of concern for factual precision, has picked up this piece of topographical information, he may casually have supposed that his informant was speaking of that house in Bethany which loomed largest in his mind - that of the three siblings - and instinctively attributed the flamboyant gesture to the impulsive one of the sisters. It looks like the small thread which holds the separate texts together, as varying accounts, but of a single incident. That alternative designation of Simon does not in itself necessarily embody any discrepancy. In so far as Phariseeism was not a status but a system of belief and practice, there is nothing inherently contradictory of this in the Mark-Matthew label: a leper could still have been a Pharisee (though not a priest). But it points to a possible alternative understanding of the meal itself - not so much a royal levée as a private supper at which those who chose to defy the taboo of uncleanliness by association might well have been more than welcome as guests. John's preferred setting equally lends itself to the idea of an entirely private occasion. The touch of discomfort which was my starting point thus evaporates.

  1. In sum, we have five points of real or apparent divergence between the several narratives, ranging from outright contradiction down to mere omission.

  2. The immediate venue. The house of Simon or of Lazarus, Martha and Mary?

  3. The burden of the argument. An issue of economy (with or without the hospitality overtones) and the consequent reaction of Judas, or a question regarding contrition and absolution?

  4. The description of Simon. Pharisee or leper?

  5. The time of the event. Proximate to the Passion or earlier?

  6. The wider location In Bethany?

1. may be explained as arising from John's more cavalier approach than Luke's to the business of scientific verification of the facts. 2., in any writer of the Classical age, is little more than a reflection of the author's didactic preference of the moment, which traditionally shaped ostensible reported speech. 3. may be no discrepancy at all; 4. an almost invisible one, of little consequence; and 5. is manifestly not a difficulty, rather some sort of correlation which gives integrity to the four accounts as facets of the one entity. Moreover, the high degree of improbability that two or more such alabaster boxes were broached on different occasions (spikenard as the groupies' established modus operandi!) seems to confirm it.

Is there, then, any moral to be drawn from all this (you know I try!) or is it nothing more than my notorious legal, and slightly antiquarian, delight in pulling apart specimens which others hitherto have been happy to leave decently intact?

Clearly the most important, the least legalistic, of these five points is the absolute difference in fundamental purpose between Luke and the other three. Which is the more important lesson to be learned? That love is the natural outcome of forgiveness (a proposition whose basis in common and unredeemed nature Jesus Himself takes as the starting-point of His exposition in Luke's account - the parable of the debtors)? The only subtlety of that reasonably axiomatic message, perhaps, being its almost surreptitious warning that we, whose lives wander along fairly quiet paths of small peccadilloes and no very historic offences against a community wider than our immediate circle, may be in danger of that luke-warm attitude for which the Laodicaeans were castigated by John.

Or that any act of devotion toward God is absolute and beyond price; and cannot be weighed in some meaningless moral balance against the equally important works of practical philanthropy? I suspect that this is a lesson which our present generation, saturated by delusive ideas of 'value for money', very seriously needs to imbibe. The act of raising a cathedral and endowing it with the costliest of architectural, artistic and musical adornments cannot be quantified; it cannot be mathematically related to the number of Cafod lorries which those resources, alternatively distributed, might conjecturally have produced, even if such re-allocation of committed assets were possible. Indeed, in that the glorification of God is the life's work and fulfilment of every human being, every instance of it enhances every human being's situation. Remember Michael Ramsay's immortal dictum? "There is no single act of adoration which is not of profound service to the human race."

Once again it seeks to redress that well-rehearsed false antithesis, that 'people' are more important than 'things'. Whenever we set up that supposed choice between the one and the other we are almost invariably overlooking that the 'things' are the expression, and the essence, of the 'people'.