St. Patty's Day is coming up. Sometimes holidays can remind you of past holidays, and lately I've been turning over in my mind a St Patrick's Day from 4 years ago. I was attending Ulster University at the time, and recruited by a fellow student to travel with a carnival troop to march in the Dublin parade as a space alien. "Something different" I thought- something I could tell my children's children about, but in retrospect, I probably won't.
The group of kids I was traveling with were pretty wild. That's the best way I know how to explain it. For an example, the guy sitting a few seats behind me on the bus had dyed his hair bright fire engine red, and had left the vivid blue body paint on his skin from the parade. He looked like a t-shirt and blue jean clad version of Mystique. One of the boys who was about 15 had been annoying a few people during an earlier part of the trip, and so a few of them in the back of the bus decided to duct tape him to the seat. It wasn't just a little tape here and a little tape there, it was a full body metallic cocoon. I'm not sure if he had been drinking with the others earlier, but the boy somehow slept through the taping process. When he woke up and started to try to move around, intense jeering broke out in the vicinity of the silver webbed mass that used to be simply a human body. He was the vulnerable target of spit wads, and vulnerable in other ways because his arms were pinned to his side. Maybe on some level he deserved this, but it just seemed malicious to me. I'm not totally sure all of the reasons why, but it made me sick. Like, puke-my-guts-out kind of sick. I got up and made my way to the back of the bus. Maybe initially I thought some of the others from the front of the bus had had enough and would join me, but after a few steps it was apparent that nobody felt the same way. The whole bus erupted with shouting "Leave him alone! Sit down!" I could feel my ears turn red and my hands were shaking as I tried to tear away at the edges of the stubborn tape. After a few minutes the duct tape boy himself told me to back off, so I did. I walked back to my seat with a bus load less of potential friends, and wishing that the next lethargic 3-4 hours would rocket away.
This isn't all that great of a story, but there is a point to it. I'm taking the time to write about it because it makes me think about the following story in a different light.
This story I actually like, No, not just like- I love it. I was reminded about it this last weekend. It's the story about Mary who anointed the Lord's feet with pure nard. I heard that the equivalent price of that vial of perfume was worth $36,000. It was the woman's life savings. Her dowry. She didn't just dab a bit of that precious stuff on the Lord's toes; she broke the jar open. She let down her hair. Her glory. A sight in that culture that would have been reserved for her husband. Judas and the other men in that room smelled the perfume. They knew its worth; knew that it was costly, and in part understood what she was doing. Their reaction to what she did could be translated as that "they snorted" at her.
I wonder if her ears turned red.
I wonder if her hands shook.
But what stands out to me is that Jesus didn't react like the others. He said: "Leave her alone."
