Then Mary took an extraordinary amount,
almost three-quarters of a pound, of very expensive perfume made of pure nard.
She anointed Jesus’ feet with it, then wiped his feet dry with her hair. The house was filled with the aroma of the
perfume. Judas Iscariot, one of his
disciples (the one who was about to betray him), complained, “This perfume was
worth a year’s wages! Why wasn’t it sold
and the money given to the poor?” (He said this not because he cared about the
poor but because he was a thief. He carried the money bag and would take what
was in it.) Then Jesus said, “Leave her alone.
This perfume was to be used in preparation for my burial, and this is
how she has used it. You will always
have the poor among you, but you won’t always have me.” (John 11:3-8)
In his early teen years, my son, like most teens, had his
rebellious time. One sign of that
rebellion concerned the Episcopal church we were members of at that time, an
Anglo-Catholic parish with all the “smells and bells,” and lots of beautiful
vestments and sacred vessels of gold and silver. Shouldn’t those things be sold so that the
Church can feed more hungry people, he asked.
Today, he and his new bride worship at that church in which he grew
up. And I look forward to seeing my
grandchildren raised in that church. In
case you’re wondering, none of that silver and gold ever got sold.
I wonder if John added that part about Judas being a thief
because he felt he had to refute the message by discrediting the messenger. In other words, did John realize that some of
his readers would ask the same question that Judas asked? It’s the same question my son asked, nearly
2,000 years later. Why spend so much
money on worship when that money could feed the poor, or help change public
policy and create a more just society?
As a priest who takes his worship very seriously, and is
paid to do that, I may be biased. But
here’s my answer. Christ’s church exists
to connect people to the mysterious presence of the God who made this world,
and who is no less real just because this God is, as we say every Sunday, “unseen.” I do my best to make our worship an open
window in which we touch the source of our life and our world.
I also try to create opportunities in the Church for people
to touch Jesus Christ the Son of God by serving the poor, the oppressed, those
in prison. Those are, after all, the
people whom Jesus promised that when we served them, we would be serving him
(Matthew 25:31-46). In that service, I
have seen the connections made. I have
also seen the cynicism that can come from seeing one’s help seemingly wasted on
those who waste what is given them. If
Christ’s church becomes primarily a social service agency, or a political movement,
its members will become cynical, and ultimately despairing.
The first responsibility of Christ’s church is worship which
opens the windows of human hearts to the awesome presence of our unseen God,
which feeds those hearts with Christ himself in bread and wine, and which sends
us back out on the breath of the Holy Spirit, breathing through us and around
us wherever we go.
But that nagging question is worth asking if our worship
becomes about us, our enjoyment of beautiful music and a beautiful
building. If we come to church as
consumers of beauty, then our worship is of much less “worth” than Mary’s
worship of Jesus. How long did it take
Mary to save a year’s wages for nard which came only from India? Jesus had given Lazarus’ life back to
him. Mary knew that Jesus would pay for
that with his own life.
Mary gave all she had, all she was worth, to Jesus in this
extraordinary act of worship. “Right
worship” isn’t about what we get out of it from God, but what we are prepared
to give back to God of what God has given us.
However it looks or sounds, that is worship worthy of the name.
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