Unfortunately, popular reading (and some scholarship) has conflated the two events, then further conflated the woman with Mary Magdalene, none of which is really justified.) The accounts in Matthew, Mark and John correlate, though only in John is the woman named as Mary, and Luke’s account is of a ‘sinful woman’ and takes place in the north of the country early in Jesus’ ministry, not in the south and late. (There are four accounts of a woman anointing Jesus’ feet, in Matt 26.6–13, Mark 14.3–9, Luke 7.36–50, and John 12.1–8. (These parenthetical explanatory asides are characteristic of the Fourth Gospel, for example in John 1.38, 41 and 3.24.) Since we have not yet read the account of the anointing of Jesus by Mary, since it comes in the next chapter, the narrator is assuming we have read it already in Matthew 26 or Mark 14. The narrative refers to Mary and Martha whom Jesus’ met Luke 10.38–41 (the only place outside the Fourth Gospel where Martha is mentioned), but assumes only that we already know Mary her name is mentioned first here, whereas elsewhere Martha is mentioned first, indicating that she is the older sister, and in fact her name is the feminine form of the Aramaic for ‘master’. This is a common way of referring to a man, the alternative being to refer to his occupation. Some modern translations smooth out the opening introduction, but the text actually talks of a ‘certain man’, who is ‘Lazarus of Bethany’. John plays with epithets and allusions to underscore that Lazarus’ story foreshadows Jesus’ death and resurrection in a variety of ways (p 170). Jesus raises Lazarus to life, and the authorities plot to take both their lives. Grief and censure turn to an expression of gratitude-the anointing of feet-that in turn comes to signify a funerary rite. The principal action is a reversal-the dead one lives-but to the simplicity of this reversal, John adds the complexity of emotion, allusion, report, reaction, and counterreaction. Jo-Ann Brant, in her Paideia commentary, observes:
#Lazarus story full#
The narrative itself is vivid and compelling, full of arresting detail and emotion. However, the signs are quite clearly depicted as partial revelations which point forward to ultimate reality, and it makes more sense to see each of these seven pointing forward to the eighth, the reality of Jesus’ resurrection, which (if ‘seven’ signifies this age, with its seven days of creation and rest) depict this as the beginning of the new age to come.
There is some debate here, because they are not each explicitly identified in the narrative as a ‘sign’, so some readers see the feeding of the 5,000 and the walking on the water as one, combined, sign, making Jesus’ own resurrection the seventh.
(In a previous scholarly generation, these were understood to reflect two different sources behind the final form of the gospel but we don’t need to have this obsessed with sources to note that there is different language, a different emphasis, even a different ‘feel’ in the first half and the second half of the gospel.) The seven signs in the gospel are most commonly understood to be: The gospel is commonly seen as being in two halves, the so-called ‘ Book of Signs‘ running from the prologue until now, and the ‘Book of Glory’ which runs from chapter 12 to the end. This remarkable extended narrative forms a turning point in the Fourth Gospel. Next week, on Palm Sunday, we will return to our gospel of the year, Matthew, in the lead in to Holy Week, Good Friday and Easter Sunday. This Sunday, Lent 5 in Year A, we come to the last of our for explorations of Jesus’ encounters with individuals that formed a catechumate in the early church in her raising of Lazarus in John 11.1–45.
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