Philippians 3.4b-14, John 12.1-8
The Fifth Sunday of Lent, Sunday 6 April 2025, Eldroth, Clapham
Begin with a recording of Sydney Carter’s “Judas and Mary”, performed by Jancis Harvey. Source: YouTube.
In 2008 Rebecca Solnit published an essay called Men Explain Things to Me. In it she describes the experience women have of having a man explaining to them, wrongly, things that the woman knows and they don’t. This is about the silencing of women, about the idea that men seemingly believe that no matter what a woman says, a man always knows better. Solnit insists that it is some men, not all men, who just get stuck in this “intersection between overconfidence and cluelessness”. [1]
Solnit gives the example of a man who, in a patronising and condescending way, explained her own book to her, even after she corrected him and repeatedly told him that she was the author of the book. Men Explain Things to Me went global, and in time led to young women coining the word “mansplaining”.
“Every woman knows what I’m talking about,” she writes. “It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.”
And so here we find Judas explaining to Mary in a patronising tone, that what she was doing was wrong. Here is Judas explaining to Mary that she didn’t appreciate the value of her offering; that she didn’t understand how it could have been used for something better.
But of course Mary would have well known that she was doing something extravagant; for her, that was the whole point. She wanted to make the loving gesture of anointing Jesus before his imminent death. And Jesus saw this, and defended her against Judas’ attack.
The problem with Judas – as the gospel writer John pointed out – was that he couldn’t see beyond his own obsession with money. He saw world through the distorted lens of economics. John went so far as to accuse Judas of thieving from the disciples’ common purse; but the issue for Mary was that his obsession with her spending meant that Judas completely failed to see the point of her gesture.
This was a clash of world-views similar to the clash today between those who would spend the exchequer’s billions on welfare and those who would spend it on warfare. But dissimilar, inasmuch as both of these points of view are materialistic: they have money at their heart. Likewise, Judas could only see the world through economic eyes: whereas Mary’s gesture came from a heart focussed on love and devotion and community, for whom financial considerations are secondary.
Reflecting on the success of Men Explain Things to Me Rebecca Solnit later wrote that “Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty. I’m grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.”
In our gospel episode from the home of Martha and Mary we see Jesus being attentive to the woman whose grand gesture of love and devotion is being rejected by a man with a loud voice.
For people like me, men who give sermons for a living, it’s a warning to be careful about mansplaining.
For all of us, it’s a reminder to check our values: and to reflect, as Paul did, on how the worth of knowing Christ Jesus as Lord surpasses all other
Notes
[1] Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me. Guernica, 20 August 2012.
