Exegetical SWOP quotes

on anointing woman

(Mk 14:3-9, Mt 26:6-13, Lk 7:38-50, Jn 12:1-8)

The woman who anointed Jesus was a sex worker. I would have made the assumption even if it didn’t come out and say: ‘this was a prostitute.’ It’s because the righteous women were very rarely mentioned, the women who stayed at home with their husbands and cared for their children and the house, they are rarely mentioned. So this is sort of an assumption, but this wouldn’t be something a respectable woman, single or married, would do to a stranger. Coming into somebody’s house and anoint? Only a prostitute would feel good about doing it. It was traditional to have prostitutes at such a gathering.

Then as now women in this profession are almost always in it because they can make very good money for the amount of time they spend, and they need that time to work on their masters degrees of to take care of their children or to pursue their other career in painting or writing, or what ever, to join the revolutionary Jesus movement! So the fact that she definitely has enough money to buy this expensive ointment means that she is respected in that way anyway, because she would be able to pay her taxes and who is to say that she doesn’t give money to the poor? Wasn't that an assumption!

It is not unusual in my practice, with my clients, to pamper them. In fact, that is part of what I do, it is, sorry, that is MAINLY what I do.I pamper them and I stroke them from head to toe, and I also give them a really good massage which includes the feet and the head. So it just depends on what kind of service you provide.I don’t differentiate that much between the sensual and the sexual. It is for the receiver to determine what belongs in what category.It is a total experience and in addition to any of the more overt sexual practice, there is the touching and the holding and the caressing the cuddling and sometimes bathing together, which could be interpreted as a form of anointing.

I have seen clients who climax within minutes, you know, you get close to them and they are just done.Now you have got this guy still who wants the other 58 minutes of his appointment and you’re done! And every single time I have lifted out the exfoliant and a bowl of hot water and a cloth and I wash their feet. That is what I do. It is like this client right now needs something, he needs you to connect with him and there is a level, like I can lay with them and cuddle with them or whatever for five or ten minutes but I can’t do it for fifty minutes, it just like, it starts to interfere with my personal boundaries. And so, it’s like I have this sense that this person really needs to connect with me and I wash their feet. But I exfoliate, I do a whole thing…with the ones I need to take time with. And they love it, and they don’t ever receive that, and so that is the only way it overlaps for me. It is definitely a form of worship and sexual.

I seem to end up a lot of the time kissing somebody’s feet all over the place and it seems to be very well received as well. I have to say, the rubbing of the hair, that’s very erotic. What about the just kissing of the feet? How can you possibly kiss somebody’s feet without being erotic? I was going to say, that whole time she was just kissing his feet? Right, uh huh! Lots of foot fetishist clients I see are totally into feet, and that is all I do. It is a very erotic part of the body. I have had an orgasm from just having my foot rubbed. You know, only on my feet.

So it sounds like Jesus considers prostitution a sin (in Luke’s version). So, OK, I do not think this passage is liberating to prostitutes. I just think this is obnoxious because here is Jesus and then he is so cool, that he just can come in, like he is the dominant guy, its like he is the A male. So the other guy is not cool enough and doesn’t forgive this, thinks he is better than this sinner whatever, who doesn’t think that, but Jesus is so cool that he meters out his forgiveness to the poor person that is all like, at his feet, ya know, like the big sinner, and then really, Jesus is playing a domination game and he like totally wins. But he is just like, I think he is being a really jerk and teaching people that, ya know, well that you have to go around and both buy into these subtleties that I am putting out about who is dominant and part of his trip for domination is to be like, generous. I think it is really nasty.

I kind of felt that crux of it too maybe is that he justifies her that, they are supposed to have this vow of poverty or whatever, but of course she has this expensive perfume for my feet, and you will always have the poor people but you won’t always have me. So it is ok for us to indulge when it’s about me but, you know, we have this vow of poverty otherwise. I think ew, Jesus must have been hot, and that is just totally bad because there is this totally self deprecating thing about being attracted to guys that are dominating pricks! I just broke up with a dominating prick. So, that behavior, the way you describe the domination by doling out his compassion and generosity but then saying I am so much better than you, I dominate you because of this generosity. That was so right on.

On the other hand, I think a lot of times when Jesus talks in parables, he, I mean, it, is coming from his cultural reference, but usually he is trying to push people’s paradigm a little further. And so he comes and says ‘actually if you come and take a look at this, these people are more gracious, more humble, more helpful. That’s why there is the parable about the Good Samaritan, the reason he picked a Samaritan is because these were a people that were reviled.So it was like, ‘I want to show you what a good person does.’ I don’t think he was necessarily saying ‘I believe that Samaritans were bad people,’ but he was saying ‘I understand that you think you are better than them. Let me tell you a parable about a Samaritan doing a good thing’ cuz I want to get you to start thinking about what really matters.

Notice too that in Matthew and Mark she is not a sinner. Or at least she is not pointed out specifically as a sinner, though. If you read the whole bible it is doesn’t mention women without them being of sin. Eve’s origin is sin and all the women that intersect with Jesus, except for his mother, are sinners. Everybody is a sinner. I never read a good woman except maybe Ruth. But Ruth is giving Boaz a blow job.

That version (Mk 14) is very different. It doesn’t sound so self-serving. This sounds more generous and giving and kind to me. In the previous version it is like the poor are going to be around forever, but I am not, so let her do what she want disrespecting herself cuz I’m Jesus. One of the most obvious differences, I just want to show in terms of the last two that we just read, is that there is much more reference to the woman in the Mark version.

She was trying to seduce him, that is what I saw, and that the other guys are jealous that she tried to seduce him and not them and that is why they got mad. Exactly! Which is where all this righteous comes to the fore. Which is so much worse! Now she is a whore because ‘we are trying to care for the poor and we’re all righteous’. I think it goes beyond expunging sexuality; it is expunging any kind of pleasure, period, fun, enjoyment, because you should just be miserable and help the poor all your life. Something I learned very early on in life, is that those who claim to believe in happiness but attack luxuries, are forgetting that happiness is essentially about leisure and time off for aesthetic embodiment.

The other characters, like the master of the house is the traditional macho uninformed man who really has no idea of what goes on in real life.And he also has money. And he doesn’t have any concept of those who are of lower station than him can actually be very wonderful people.The fact that he gets Jesus into this, it is almost like he is criticizing Jesus too.And Jesus was poor too so he is just critical of anybody that is not of his class.

Whoever these were saying ‘how dare you! Why didn’t you sell this and give it to the poor?’ Now she doesn’t defend herself and say ‘I did sell some yesterday and gave 12 million denari, whatever it is, to the poor.’ But she doesn’t have a comeback.But it is a very false assumption.Personally I give so much to charity.I give more than 10% of my income to a variety of important charities. I think it is the least I can do.Organizations like the Women’s Building in San Francisco that helps mostly poor Hispanic women get education and helps with childcare and how to educate your children. I think it is a false assumption that we’re greedy.I think it is a wonderful example of her humanity.I don’t see a conflict between her action and the needs of the poor.I could see Mary doing the same thing out in the market place for somebody, who is obviously really poor, that wasn’t Jesus.This is someone, like ‘Oh, look at this person, they need some kindness’ or something like ‘Look at their poor feet, or HER poor feet’ and just do it.

Apparently, I came up with some cockamamie idea that spirituality and prostitution can coexist. There is no separation for Mary between the sacred and the profane as they would say, or the sexual and the erotic.Her behavior demonstrated her integration of the spiritual and the sexual.

The truth is that whores were goddesses and were worshiped. Because you are a goddess, you are absolutely a vector for all the love and the hatred that people hold around on sexuality, and that is god, god is that force, that creation, that creative force, that birth force and that is what a vagina is, and that is what women symbolize as prostitute, specifically as prostitutes.

Is not typical of me to defend Christianity or Jesus but this story has a very different meaning to me, anointing, yes, is a symposium gesture; you have to understand “context symposium.” Socrates’ teacher Diotima, who is an hetaera, she is also a sacred prostitute priestess, it is very unclear historically how closely those roles were linked, but there is a heavy religious component even in Greek culture. It is even more obvious when you look at Mesopotamian, or if you look at the cultures that all become Phoenicia. You anoint in a sacred prostitution ceremony and anointing is typically a prepatory phase in the ceremony. The same thing is true I believe, though my research is incomplete here, of the Eleusinian mysteries. But this is very much a part of a religious ritual. And specifically what it does, in either a male or female, the Canaanite priest, the pagan, would take on the guise of the Baal or Ashtorah, as in either male or female, in an Adonis or Aphrodite figure. And the point is that I think what it is saying, what Jesus is saying, ‘use that oil on me’ the point is that it is a stage, if you think of this strictly in terms of the mystery of the Trinity which actually makes a bit of sense to me, oddly enough, I see this as a nexus point of Jesus qua immortal and Jesus qua Baal as a ceremony of realization. Mary of Bethany, or Mary of Magdala taken as an equivalent, is, takes on a goddess figure, that is a classic pose of sacred prostitution from Gilgamesh all the way to the 21st century. That is what it seems to me is the reason it is worth putting this 300 denari in. Well around here, how many people have been paid 300 denari for a night? I mean that may seem odd but I think that is very much the point, in that the amount of preciousness worthwhile to have the excellence of achieving this kind of ex-temporal aesthesis or aesthetics, or incarnation, to use the Christian sense, this is an example of it and a crucial one.

Can I point out something what I think is interesting in what you said, because whether it is a “sacred” act of prostitution or regular act of prostitution but bottom line is that it is sexual, erotic, whether she was the holiest priestess in the joint, or was a woman off the street. It does not matter, it was still sexual, it was still an act of gratification taking place.

But it is only prostitution if is she is getting compensated for it. I don’t see her getting any compensation any where at all this story.

That is not true. Legal codes in many states still define prostitute as someone who gives herself generally and in the ancient concept. Prostitutes have been equated with actresses in many cultures. Wives? Only if she gives herself sexually to all comers, to many people. No, actually that is very much not true. Prostitution, both as a positive spiritual experience and as something with negative connotation in patriarchy, especially in societies which have no distinctions of money and non money as we have, in the middle ages and in Ancient India and Japan prostitute and actress were sometimes the same word.

I think it is important to keep in mind that in antiquity during the whole matriarchal cultures, graves were shaped like vaginas so when you died you were put back into a vagina. Exactly, that was the whole thing, so the whole idea of lubing up before you enter a woman’s vagina…I am wondering…Anointing for burial, anointing before….?

Whether or not she was a rich lady apostle or if she is a hooker, and which one is more empowering? I am personally kind of split down the middle. If the objective is to say ‘oh, we want get her as far away from sex as possible,’ I have a problem with that.

But on the other hand, I also like the idea of her being a role model for women who want to see themselves in a more powerful roles, vies a vie I guess what the culture considers powerful, so that is where my spilt takes place. I can see where changing the paradigm might be useful to young women growing up, to think that there was a female apostle. I am split. I can see where it could have a positive impact on women. Just because people right now have a hard time with the sex thing, and as a feminist sometimes I feel like certain sacrifices have to be made in order to go forward. I am real glad that I get to wear my lipstick and high heals but I am glad for all the women with their asexual hats on who bust into corporate America. That is what I am saying…half measures. I am not always going to fight my sisters even if they don’t care about my rights to live; sometimes I just see the worth of their work. Even when they are out to get me, I can still see the worth in their work. I am more inclined to say, to have a woman who was powerful and sex positive in terms of her view on the world is better. I agree that she can be a very powerful woman and a sex worker and my hope is that these women who are very powerful in bible scholarship and they are trying to rewrite Mary Magdalene as a powerful woman and not necessarily a sex worker, that eventually they will discover the power of their own sexuality they will eventually be able to rewrite Mary Magdalene as I really believe she really was. Just because it doesn’t come out and say, ‘Mary Magdalene is a prostitute’ doesn’t mean that she wasn’t, because of her behavior. I mean again, why can’t you be rich and smart and beautiful and make money and still be drawn to Jesus because of his purity of heart and the great message he brought?

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Exegetical SWOP quotes

on anointing woman