5th Sunday in Lent
March 6, 2025
John 12:1 – 8
Father Donal Dorr is an Irish Catholic Priest and theologian; he’s near 90 years old now. He still writes books, but he’s not actively serving churches anymore. He spent most of his active ministry serving parishes in desperately poor regions of Africa and Central and South America. Back in 1984, at the height of the Cold War between the power blocs of the US and what was then called the USSR, he published a book called Spirituality and Justice. In the beginning of the third chapter, Dorr recalls a moment in his ministry. He writes,
“Just before I returned to Africa early last year, I visited a cleric who holds a very senior position in the Church. His sitting room was lavishly equipped with elegant, expensive furniture. Proudly he told me that he had not bought any of these items; they were all gifts from benefactors and friends – wealthy people, some of whom are prominent in the political world. Perhaps he sensed in me a certain questioning. For he went on to offer me this word of advice out of his experience and success: he said, ‘we have to learn how to receive.’…
I live now in an area where children are dying of malnutrition and where most people have to struggle to get enough to eat. I often reflect on that visit and that conversation. I ask myself: what did this clergyman give in return for those beautiful gifts? His soul? His integrity? Not really; for he remains a good, sincere, kind person. But I feel sure that without realizing it, he paid a high price – not so much for the gifts as for the friendships which they sealed. He came to share more and more of the values of his benefactors and friends. This lessened his chances of developing close friendships with poor people, or with hurt and angry people, alienated from respectable society. He lost sympathy for the struggles of people against oppression – except of course, against Communist oppression. His benefactors may not have bought his soul; but on the whole they got good value for their gifts.” (Dorr, Spirituality and Justice, p. 35)
That story hits differently today than it did 40 years ago when Dorr published it. Back then, the Catholic Church had powerful political influence, especially in poor nations. Third world Priests, trying to speak up for poor people, were often accused of being communists – and that was a very dangerous thing to be called at the time. That accusation could get you murdered by death squads working on behalf of corrupt dictators. It was a tremendously politically charged time – not that today is not, but it’s not the same.
But even though we’re living in a very different era, there’s something about this story that I find jarring. This picture that Dorr paints of the powerful church official, living in luxury, showing off all the expensive gifts he’s been given, surrounded by opulent furnishings, murmuring about how we must learn to receive…there’s something about it that just feels wrong. You know how every once in a while, you see a news story about how some prominent Christian Pastor lives in a ten million dollar mansion and flies around in a private jet? There’s no law against this. There’s no law saying saying that guy can’t take his obviously hefty salary and buy a $10 million mansion and a private jet. But there’s something about it that just feels off, right? Or at least it does to me. I think we have this intuitive sense that if a Christian leader is making a ton of money, something must be wrong: the church is using its money wrong, or the Pastor is a hypocrite, or whatever it is. Something about it just feels out of step with the Gospel.
But if we have that sense – and like I said, I know I do – it’s kind of hard to know what to do with this passage we just heard from the Gospel of John. This story is one of what are sometimes called “the anointing stories.” The anointing stories are a little bit different in each Gospel, but they show up in all four. In John, Jesus and the Disciples are at Martha and Mary’s house eating dinner. Jesus’ friend Lazarus, who he actually brought back from death a chapter or so before this, is at the table with them. And Mary kneels on the floor and pours expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet and wipes them with her hair – which is both incredibly extravagant and scandalous in that culture. A decent first century Jewish woman would never unbind her hair in the presence of guests, and cleaning someone’s feet? That’s something that would normally be done by a slave. It’s a deeply intimate moment, and like I said, kind of scandalous.
The Gospels of Matthew and Mark tell the story differently, but they have their own scandals. There, Jesus is at the house of someone called Simon the Leper – which tells us he’s spending his time with outcasts, people considered unclean. And while they’re eating, a woman who’s never identified by name brings a beautiful alabaster jar of very expensive ointment to anoint Jesus’ head. In Luke, he’s eating at the home of a Pharisee named Simon and another woman who Luke calls “a sinner” comes into the room, kneels, and anoints his feet with expensive perfume.
But no matter which version of the story you read, it’s clear this perfume or ointment is very pricey. Mark and John say it’s worth 300 denarii, which is about a year’s wages for a working-class person. So what would that be today – 30,000 dollars? 40,000? It’s a lot. This is not Axe body spray. This is high end stuff.
Luke focuses on the Pharisee who judges the woman. But in all three other accounts, Matthew, Mark, and John, somebody in the story says to the women, “Do you have any idea how many poor people we could feed, what tremendous good we could do, with 40 thousand dollars? You’re taking all that money and pouring it on someone’s feet? I mean, why not just burn some cash in the fire to keep us warm, while you’re at it?”
At some level, it’s an incredibly wasteful gesture. And I don’t know about you, but my first reaction is to agree with the people criticizing Mary. We maintain a fund here to help people in need; I’ve talked a little bit about it before. We can’t help a lot, but we can kick in a little money for medication if somebody can’t afford that, or groceries if they need food. We can sometimes give a few hundred dollars toward helping people make rent. And sometimes we can’t do any of that because we run out of money. But I will guarantee this: if somebody called me here at the church and told me they needed $40,000 to buy perfume for somebody’s feet, I would turn them down. We’ve never had even remotely close to $40,000 in that discretionary fund – but if by some miracle we did, there is no universe in which we would use it to buy perfume to anoint people. People need food and rent and medicine. They don’t need perfume.
But that’s not how Jesus responds to this unexpected, intimate, incredibly extravagant gesture. He doesn’t refuse the gift, or shame the person giving it, or moralize about the poor. He accepts it, lovingly and gratefully, and he tells the woman’s critics, “leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you. You won’t always have me.”
So Jesus is telling his followers two things. First, he’s telling them what they’ve already begun to suspect: that he will be arrested and killed. But the second thing, that line about poor people – where Jesus says, you always have the poor with you – that line has sometimes been used to say we’ll never wipe out poverty, so why bother? You know, poor people will always be here. What are you going to do?
That line has sometimes been read that way. But I don’t think that’s what Jesus is saying here at all. In fact, he’s citing a passage from the Jewish scriptures, from the 15th chapter of the book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy says, “the needy will never be gone from your land. Therefore I command you: you are to open your hand to your sister and brother, the afflicted ones, in your land.”
Jesus is not saying we don’t have to be mindful of poverty. In fact, he’s saying exactly the opposite. But at the same time, I do think he’s telling those who are criticizing the lavish gift that not everything can be measured in numbers or productivity or outcomes or effectiveness. Sometimes kindness, an outpouring of emotion and generosity, sometimes that just doesn’t add up. But that does not make kindness and generosity any less important or significant or beautiful.
Sometimes everything can turn on an act of kindness. In this story, it’s an extravagant, impossibly generous moment. Mary gives a gift that seems wasteful. She doesn’t solve poverty. She doesn’t reform economic policy. But maybe her gift cannot be described in that kind of metric. That spontaneous offering of surplus that doesn’t add up: maybe as much as anything, that kind of gesture makes us human and keeps us grounded in God. We can spend our time grimly evaluating everything we do by the measure of whether it solves some social problem. And I think that’s an important question to ask. But it’s not all-important. Kindness counts. Even irrational gestures can count. And they don’t have to be big or extravagant. Kindness still counts.
I love the work of the poet Danusha Lameris. She’s written one of my favorite poems about this. It’s called “Small Kindnesses.” She says,
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”