To Love and Not Count the Cost

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on The Fifth Sunday of Lent by the Rev. Holly Huff.

Today’s Gospel reading brings to mind a prayer attributed to St. Ignatius. There is a print of this prayer which hangs in one of the first-floor restrooms in the church offices and so I glance at it most days. It’s funny what seeps into your consciousness. The prayer starts out like this: “Dearest Lord, teach me to be generous. Teach me to serve you as you deserve; to give and not to count the cost.” To give and not to count the cost.

Jesus is having dinner in Bethany, at the home of Lazarus who’s been raised from the dead and restored to life again. Lazarus and Martha and Mary his sisters are some of Jesus’s dearest friends. The Son of Man has no where to lay his head, no fixed address but over and over he is welcomed and received in Bethany. And on this night, after busy and faithful Martha has surely whipped up her finest, Mary, ever attentive to the one thing necessary, approaches Jesus and kneels at his feet and anoints him with precious perfume. Not just a dainty dab either, no: “Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus' feet, and wiped them with her hair. And the whole house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”

Actions speak louder than words, and Mary’s anointing, silently enacted, expresses so clearly her love for him. It’s an act of intimacy, extravagant generosity, and devotion. She recognizes Jesus, her heart is fixed “where true joys are to be found” as today’s collect says, and so she bodies this devotion into the world in this outward and visible sacramental act of love. In Mark’s version of this story, Jesus defends the woman with the alabaster jar, who has cracked it open and poured it out over his head, from his stingy disciples, saying “She has done a beautiful thing to me.” She has done a beautiful thing. And it really is.

Part of the beauty of Mary’s gift lies in its extravagance. There is abundance and excess and apparent wastefulness here! I think of flowers, which we give as gifts not because they are useful or can be exchanged for something else of value or even because they can be owned long-term but simply because they are beautiful, fleetingly beautiful, not good for anything else but an end in themselves. Like the fine robes and gold ring and fatted calf of last week’s Parable of the Prodigal Son, the details that it is a pound of costly perfume—worth a year’s wages if one, like Judas, is counting the cost—this extravagance shows us a love that is not stingy or conditioned, tit for tat, but complete, nothing held back, overflowing its own limits because it is love’s nature to flow out for others: “My cup runneth over: surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” Adoration and love like that can’t be contained: they pour themselves out. “The scent of the perfume filled the whole house.”

Mary’s gift, seen through eyes of love, is just love doing what love does, giving itself away, not self-conscious of its own generosity but responding whole-heartedly to the moment as it presents itself. Her extravagant devotion flows out of her naturally, as just the next thing. She has saved this precious perfume, and it is fitting now to pour it out for Jesus, whose precious time with them she senses is running short. Nothing is too fine for her Lord.

It is a gift given and received in love. “She has done something beautiful to me.” Jesus receives Mary’s gift that is so beautiful and extravagantly loving and intimate, and he’s deeply touched by it. Just days later, gathered with his disciples at the Supper he knows will be the Last Supper, wanting to leave them not just with words but with a felt, sensed, embodied understanding of the love he has for them and the love he is calling them to be, he remembers what Mary did for him in Bethany. And he gives it to them, too. From where I’m standing you can see the connection between these stories in the stained glass windows here in the west transept that trace the last days of Jesus’s life. Here, below the triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, we see today’s gospel scene, Mary kneeling at Jesus’s feet, wiping them with her hair. She has done a beautiful thing. And in the Maundy Thursday window, we see the disciples in the upper room, gathered around bread and wine, and below, parallel kneeling figures: Jesus kneeling to wash Peter’s feet, giving away what he first received, and teaching them and us to do the same. It’s a matched set. “As I have loved you, love one another.” And in the Good Friday window, we see the crucifixion scene, and below Jesus kneeling in the garden, and in both he is pouring himself out for us in that same pattern of self-giving love: love that gives itself away and doesn’t count the cost, love that loves to the end and lays down its life for its friends. Love that says, “thy will, not mine, be done,”

At the far end of the Last Supper table, at the top of the window, Judas stands, as if in the act of betrayal, holding the bag. The purse. 300 denarii, 30 pieces of silver. Judas looks at the world with dollar signs in his eyes. More than anything, looking at him pushing his chair out and walking away from the banquet table, I feel sadness, not contempt or judgment. For Judas, everything has a price, and how often do we experience the world the same way. “I am about to do a new thing, [even] now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” the Lord says through Isaiah. “Mary has done a beautiful thing to me. Do you not perceive it?” No, Judas does not perceive it, not in that moment. He is not seeing the perfume being poured out, not really, and he’s not seeing Mary wiping Jesus’s dusty feet with her hair. You wonder if he even smells the perfume, so lost he must be in his fantasy of something else, something other than what is, an alternative reality where things go according to his plans, under his control, for his benefit. The logger looks at the forest and sees not trees but board feet of lumber, right. Every created thing turned into something else, instrumentalized so it can be acquired. And of course, after he’s made this calculation—that perfume must be worth at least 300 denarii!—there follows the post-hoc grasping moral justification—why wasn’t this perfume sold and given to the poor? As John tells us with a somewhat heavy hand, the outrage Judas voices isn’t coming from a place of truly compassionate devotion to the poor. The faithful Christian is called to pour themselves out for the least of these just as extravagantly as Mary pours herself out for Jesus, beauty springing forth as God does a new thing in and through her. 

Yet Judas is missing it. Looking at the world with mercenary eyes, he is counting the cost of this gift, and so he does not perceive it. Instead he finds fault and takes a blustering moral stand, inevitably falling into hypocrisy as he does so. The beauty of Mary’s act is lost on him. He’s trapped in a smelly haze of self-enclosure—and I think we can recognize in it our own hazes of self-enclosure. Remember Pig-Pen from Charlie Brown and the little stink bomb cloud that follows him wherever he goes? We each have our signature scent, to be sure. We could start an awful line of post-lapsarian deodorants, or just plain odorants. “What’s that you’re wearing?” “Oh this? I call it Fearful Spring Fog. …I just really like to be constantly breathing in the scent of scarcity, insufficiency, and hopelessness.”

Jesus is beautiful, and he can make us beautiful, too. All of us Pig-Pens need to be perfumed by his extravagant, prodigal generosity, and to let the swirling stinky haze dissipate as we come home to rest still at the feet of Jesus. By wasting time extravagantly in prayer and dwelling on the Word in scripture and worship, paying attention to the one thing necessary, in acts of service and mission and yes, giving to the poor, we practice giving ourselves away. We stop trying to earn love, stop tallying up our acheivements and failures and those of others. Grace wipes the accounting slate clean. We can stop trying to make the world our own, as Paul says, because Christ Jesus has made us his own. We’re saved in relationship, not because of anything we’ve done or failed to do. We can let ourselves be censed with God’s generous love, which is begging to pour itself out on us. Precious perfume is being poured out, all the time. That’s just the fundamental reality of the world created in and by and for love, and when our private smog dissipates, we can see it as it is. We can perceive the new thing God is doing, which even now is springing forth. And we can respond fittingly, aligning ourselves with the grain of the universe, joining the dance, jump into the stream, as love cracked open and poured out in a continual unbroken flow of giving and receiving. A fountain bubbling up to everlasting life.