St
Luke’s,
“Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’
feet, and wiped them with her hair.”
Today in our church calendar has traditionally
been known as Passion Sunday, although that’s changing. It used to be that on
this Sunday, a week before the beginning of Holy Week, we would hear the story
of Christ’s passion, but there are those who argued this didn’t make much sense
and logically they were right. How sensible is it to go from Christ on the
cross, then back the following week to the triumphant entry into
So we changed it and now we usually include some
of the Passion Sunday focus with Palm Sunday next week, and we will, but the
name Passion Sunday has still stuck to this week, despite the change of focus,
and I’m actually thinking that’s worked out quite well.
The story of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet that
we’ve heard in our gospel reading this morning is a story of a very different
kind of passion to that which we’ll think about next week. Here we have Mary,
the daughter of Lazarus, offering hospitality to Jesus, the man who saved her
father from death, and being so overcome by her gratitude and love for him that
she literally pours out her most precious possession when she takes a pound of
the most expensive and rare perfume you can imagine and pours it on his feet.
It is an act of utmost extravagance, and Judas’
response, I believe, is actually quite fair. John adds in the little comment in
brackets about Judas stealing from the common purse and maybe he did, maybe he
didn’t, but I think regardless if most of us were in his shoes we’d react in a
similar way. Here they were – Jesus and the disciples – faced daily with a
virtual sea of the sick and the hurting and the poor, and here was Mary
seemingly wasting a resource that could have possibly provided food and
resources for an entire family for months – why would you do that, he asks? Why
indeed.
Much has been made of Mary’s actions in this
reading and Jesus’ response to Judas, but this morning I want to pick up
particularly on Judas’ question because I think it touches on a crucial question
for the Church and for all Christians and goes to the heart of what it is that
makes us what we are, or at least what we should be.
What is the Church? It’s not a simple question
and there is no simple answer to it. The Church is many things for many people,
and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But the question I guess I
really want to ask is what is the Church most
of all?
Wherever I go I find people answering that
question, even though they probably don’t realise they’re doing so. In many places,
for instance, what I see is people saying the Church is mostly a social service
agency. It’s an institution, an organisation, dedicated to offering help where
help is most needed. Elsewhere the message I get is that the Church is mostly
an upholder of morals and values. It represents and imparts a sense of decency
and ethics. And then in some places I get the idea that the Church is most of
all a social justice body. That is, a group committed to working for change and
a fairer and more just society. And again, all of those are good and honourable
priorities and ones that the Church, I believe, must embrace, but none of them,
in my opinion, are what the Church is or should be most of all.
Despite the fact that we are no longer at the
centre of most people’s universe, there are many out there who admire and
respect the Church for all that we do in all those areas I’ve just mentioned,
but – and this is where we part company with some – above all, before all,
despite all, regardless of all, the Church is first and foremost the Body of
Christ, and as such, most of all, we exist to worship God.
It’s really that simple. Our most important job,
our very first priority, must always be to worship God. We try to make that
clear at baptisms when we promise to share with the newly baptised what we
ourselves have received: a delight in prayer. From that moment we are devoted
to a life of worshipping in God and one cannot worship just a bit.
I suspect we who have been doing this church
stuff for a while have become desensitised to that word worship. To us it means
Sunday services – prayers and hymns and readings and sermons, and that’s all
part of it, but it’s not the whole story. To worship, if we take it seriously,
is to follow the example of Mary – to pour out with passion and extravagance
our love for God, to give all we’ve got in the pursuit of that.
Should we be extravagant in all those other
things? Yes. Of course we need to help those who need it and work towards
making our world a better place. Naturally we need to advocate for values and
morals that uphold a sense of decency and respect. But even more than those
things we need to be worshippers of God, because that’s why we exist and what
we exist for. Faith without works is dead, as the book of James makes clear,
but works without faith is simply no faith at all. To those who say they’re
Christians because they live a decent life, I say it’s just not enough.
Christianity is more than just being a good person, it’s about giving your all
in the worship and service of God, which is what makes us more than just a
social service agency or a liberal lobby group or a bunch of moral campaigners,
but some people don’t get that.
Judas didn’t get that. Judas couldn’t see that
what Mary was doing was really important. It was about worship in the true
sense of the word. It was about finding the most passionate, extravagant way
she could to express her love for Jesus. It was about doing what she had to do,
no matter what it cost to do it.
I wonder when the last time was we worshipped like that.
As we approach this Easter I want to invite and
encourage us all to be passionate, to be extravagant, to give our time and our
money and all that, yes, but most of all to offer our worship, heart and soul,
with all we have and are, knowing that we are doing what we were called to do,
what we were born to do. Thanks be to God.