4/1/01 She Has Done a Beautiful Thing 01/10

Scripture: Isaiah 43:16-21

Matthew 26:1-13

"But knowing this Jesus said to them, ‘Why do you criticize the woman? For she has done a beautiful thing to me.’"

Matthew 26:10

We noted recently that the great festivals of the church are focused on the person not the teaching of Jesus. They pour out love for him and pledge loyalty to his person. The feast of the Transfiguration celebrates the radiance of his face, which disclosed his status as Second Person of the Holy Trinity, and the feast of the Resurrection celebrates his bodily rising from the dead, which inaugurates the New Creation. Both festivals fix our attention and our love on Jesus himself, at pivotal points in his self-disclosure and work for our salvation. Between these two glorious events lies the inglorious Crucifixion, when cruel, crude and vulgar people marred his face and covered his beauty with shame. The best that might be said of them (us) is that they did not know what they were doing. The beginning of our chapter draws this frame of reference, "When Jesus had finished all these teachings he said to his disciples: ‘You know that in two days it will be Passover, and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified’ (Matt 26:1)." The beautiful deed we remember today takes place in the shadow of death.

Actually it takes place at a house in the Jerusalem suburb of Bethany, a house that belongs to Simon the Leper! What an astonishing place to be – ritually the most polluted place imaginable! A leper’s house! A leper pollutes everything he touches! We might assume that Jesus had healed Simon of leprosy, but we are not told that. I wonder if Simon was the leper whom Jesus healed by a touch according to Matthew 8:1-4. ("And behold a leper coming to him kneeled and said, ‘Lord if you wish you are able to cleanse me. And stretching out his hand he touched him and said, ‘I wish it, be clean!" - Matt 8: 3). We see Jesus in the shadow of his impending death, and in the place of contagion. At this time and in this place an unnamed woman works a beautiful work. She lavishes love on the body of Jesus. She touches him in this house where once there had not been much touching because of the fear of contagion. Jesus says that she is preparing his body for burial; myrrh was one of the embalming spices at that time. We see her loving attention to his body, her outpouring of this most precious ointment, her reckless excess. We see love in action.

Jesus is eating in that house – another astonishing thing since the cups and plates and utensils of a leper were unclean – and so reclining at table. As he reclines the woman comes up behind him, strokes his hair and pours on it the luxurious oil of myrrh. The cost of the gift alone suggests that she was a woman of ill repute; where else would a woman get the money for such expensive exuberance? Jesus welcomes her touch. You remember in Luke’s variant version of this story there are Pharisees present who say, "If this man were a prophet he would know what kind of a woman this is who is touching him, that she is a sinner" (Luke: 7:39). Jesus knows what she is and he welcomes her touch. He who drinks from the lepers’ cup, why should he shrink from the touch of a whore? (It is interesting that in Luke’s variant, the host is also named Simon, but he is Simon the Pharisee not Simon the leper. Might we see here a not so veiled criticism of the Pharisees by the gospel tradition? Are they "spiritual lepers" whose teaching infects rather than heals the soul?).

There is a powerful message in these details of the beautiful work done in the time of death and the house of disease. God descends in the time of death and into the house of contagion, to meet the depths of our need. God heals our disease, covers our shame, and transforms death into life. This message proclaims the divine solidarity with us in Jesus. In him God assumes all the burden of human existence and lifts it, all the sickness of our malaise and heals it. We need no longer strive to ascend to heaven, because God has descended to hell to meet us there. This message of the divine identification with us in all the dimensions of our human need is powerful and present in the text, but it is not the message I want to emphasize today.

Today I want to emphasize the gratuity of what our text calls this "beautiful work." We are told emphatically that the ointment is "very expensive," or "very precious;" the disciples are rightfully indignant at the waste; or is this righteous indignation a cloak for some less admirable emotion? Let us consider the contrast between the woman and the disciples. She is recklessly generous, they are prudently careful, she is exuberant, they are judicious, she overflows with love for Jesus, they overflow with zeal for the poor, they criticize the woman for wasting resources, Jesus praises her. He calls her deed "a beautiful work," and promises that "… wherever this Gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her" (Matt 26:13); and we are fulfilling that promise of Jesus right now as we tell again of the beautiful work done by that unknown woman.

On the other hand, Jesus rebukes the disciples. "The poor you have always with you and you can do good to them at any time, but I am with you only briefly in bodily form." The poor are a feature of the general state of things but the presence of Jesus is an event that will soon be over. Do not sacrifice the particular to the general, the gospel of God’s presence for the law of moral obligation. God is here, drop everything and worship him.

The disciples seem to me to be very modern types. They deal with everything in monetary terms. They are like so many of us who must know the dollar cost of say an earthquake before we can really appreciate the magnitude of the destruction it has wrought. Jeremy Bentham, one of the founders of the discipline of Economics, said that we must be able to give a monetary value to every thing otherwise we cannot compare things. So there came into being the famous cost-benefit calculus, which is fine excepting for the important things like love and faith and hope, which are incomparable. The disciples are very much like us in this regard: they assign monetary value to an act of love because they want to compare and control it by integrating it into their system of order. The pouring out of a precious resource just to say, "I love you," insults their sense propriety.

They are very much like us too in their substitution of the love of the creatures for love of the creator, service of the poor for the personal service of prayer and devotion to Jesus. For how many of us is Christian faith at its core a personal love for Jesus, an ongoing desire to be with him and to lavish all our love and all our resources on him, that then goes out from there to serve the poor? And for how many is faith a moral impulse to serve others without any personal relationship of love with Jesus, that is, an ethical rather than a mystical stance. The disciples represent the ethical, the woman represents the mystical, and Jesus endorses the woman.

This is not to say that service to the poor is not an integral part of the response of faith. It is. But we have here a special situation: Jesus is two days from death and so all who love him should show that love now, and not criticize the act of devotion of the one who does show that love. The disciples sound very much like parts of the church I have known. They are concerned for the program, in this case the social program, and unconcerned about the person. Social service not spiritual worship is their idea of the Christian faith. Social service is not foreign to the faith, but it is not the heart of the faith. That is the worship of God, and worship is extravagant and total, and quite uneconomic.

Last Saturday evening I joined Karen and Zondra for prayer in the chapel. You know that we are waiting on God to see what he wants for that initiative. On the altar of the chapel that evening was an exquisite floral arrangement, glowing orange and pink between the candles. I wondered who had put it there. It seemed such an extravagant thing to have done. I knew the Altar Guild does things like that, and I thought of them with renewed appreciation. Those of you, and you know who you are, who simply and regularly place before God such beauty, are like the woman in our story, pouring out precious gifts just to say to Jesus, "I love you." And the choir and musicians are like that too, and so are all of us who make the effort to come together to worship God. We bring our selves to offer to him, and after all, the most beautiful flowers, the most sublime music, the most precious ointment are only symbols of the only thing that God really wants from us, namely our selves. He gave himself to us and for us; he wants us to give ourselves to him in return.

Let me leave you with this prayer of St Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order of the Roman Catholic Church. It captures the spirit of the woman’s gift. "Teach us good Lord, to serve thee as thou deservest, to give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to toil and not to seek for any reward save that of knowing we do Thy will."

Amen.