Lent 5C – Byron Tindall
Matthew and Mark record an incident in Jesus’s life similar to what we read in John’s gospel today. Both of the synoptics have the event taking place at the house of Simon the leper, also a resident of Bethany, rather than at the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.
Matthew and Mark have an unnamed woman pour the ointment over Jesus’s head rather than on his feet. Both Mark and John said the anointing oil was made of nard.
Matthew, Mark, and John are not in agreement about who complained about the perceived costly waste of money by either Mary or the unknown woman.
For Matthew, it was the disciples. Mark reports, “But some who were there said to one another in anger, ‘Why was the ointment wasted in this way?’” In John’s gospel, it was Judas Iscariot who raised the possibility of selling the nard. The complainers in Matthew said it could have been sold for a large sum of money. Mark valued the ointment at more than 300 denarii while John reported the cost that could have been obtained by selling it at exactly 300 denarii. The denarius was the usual wage per day for a laborer. Any way you look at it, that would have a tidy sum of money for the poorer residents of Palestine at that time.
John has Martha in her apparent usual place — that of preparing the meal and serving it.
For those who are curious, true nard is a flowering plant akin to honeysuckle. It’s found in the Himalayan sections of China, India, and Nepal. There are, apparently, other closely related species which have been known to be substituted for the more expensive nard found in the Himalayan mountains.
All three of the evangelists have the anointing take place shortly before Passover and Jesus’s final meal with his disciples. For them, this was the end of his public ministry just prior to his death.
I have to say it. There are a lot of people who echo Judas Iscariot’s statement today. Think about it. How many times have you heard someone say something to the effect that if the church took all the money spent on constructing magnificent buildings and equipping them with the finest musical instruments available while adorning the walls with almost priceless trappings, the problem of world hunger could be nearly, if not completely, eliminated.
And when you give it serious thought, there’s a lot more than a grain of truth in that statement. There’s so much truth in the statement, actually, that Hollywood made a movie out of it.
“The Shoes of the Fisherman,” starring Anthony Quinn, was produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1968. Morris West, an Australian novelist, wrote a novel with the same name in 1963. The movie was based on West’s novel.
Briefly, after being elected to the papacy, the new pope decides to sell all the church’s property in order to feed the Chinese people and avert a world war. Needless to say, the decision did not meet with enthusiastic approval from all quarters. If you haven’t seen it, I’m sure the movie is still available from one of the many streaming services.
There’s an extremely fine line between being overly extravagant on how much we spend on our worship spaces and doing it right and for the right reasons.
First of all, why do we spend so much in building such splendid edifices in the first place?
Our so-called bricks and sticks buildings are supposed to be erected to the glory of God and as houses of worship, not as elegant showcases of how much money we have or how much we can raise.
The organs that have been installed throughout the ages are to be used in helping us praise our creator and redeemer, not just as an instrument in a recital hall.
The stained-glass windows built into the old churches were there for a purpose. The vast majority of the people in the building on any given day were illiterate. The events depicted in the windows referred to stories in the scriptures. These pictures were instructive to those who viewed them.
And I can’t recall ever seeing a plaque near a window that didn’t say, basically, “Given to the Glory of God and in loving memory of… or in honor of….”
I remember a saying about putting on your Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. These were the nicest duds one had available. Why were one’s best outfits reserved for church attendance or for an important meeting? I think a major portion of the reason was out of respect. Respect for the God who created us, the God who redeemed us and the God who sanctifies us and out of respect for those with whom we were to meet.
Can we worship God in a triple-wide trailer as well as in a beautiful building like we’re in here at Holy Family? Can we worship God in shorts and flip-flops as well as in a coat and tie or a dress? Of course we can! But somehow, I get the feeling that I need to offer God the very best I can. Our creator endowed us with a beautiful planet on which we live and move and have our being so why should we offer him anything less than our best?
But this is only one part of our relationship with God, and it may very well be the easiest part to grasp and to accomplish.
Jesus referenced the other part of our relationship with our heavenly father when he said, “…You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
During his earthly ministry, Jesus cast his lot with the outcasts of society. He seemed to favor the poor, the sinners, the lame, the sick, and even on occasion, the dreaded Gentiles.
The rest of our relationship with God rests on the way we treat the other parts of creation. How do we care for the environment? How do we treat our fellow human beings, especially those with whom we differ politically; those who don’t look like us; those who don’t speak like us; the poor; the sick; the lonely; the widow and the orphan; those who don’t worship like us; those who don’t believe like us? I think you get the picture.
When we spend lavishly on our buildings and everything that goes along with them and forget the rest of God’s creation, we totally miss the mark of what it means to love God and follow Jesus. Jesus said that whatever we do to the least of our brothers and sisters, we do to him. Do we give him our dead level best?