How
does one define waste? One way is to say
waste is something that has served its purpose and is ready to throw away. A used tissue is easily defined as waste. But the conversion of trees to paper products
to be used for human hygiene is a huge waste of a tree when you consider that
trees are the largest producers of the oxygen we breathe. And since we are on the topic of waste, if
you have ever attempted to wipe a baby’s bottom with toilet paper, then you may
have concluded that this particular Modern convenience doesn’t really do down
there what we believe it does down there making the killing of trees for that
purpose all the more an utter waste.
So,
you may have noticed our definition of waste just expanded from something that
can no longer serve its intended purpose to using something for useless, futile
purposes. In that line of thinking we can
waste natural resources. We can waste
money. We can waste time. Above all, we can waste the lives that God
has so wonderfully entrusted to us.
There’s the Prodigal Son kind of wasting our lives where we spend
ourselves and everything we have on “wild living.” But, we can also waste our lives in the
pursuit of what many would call a successful life. We can work day and night for a nice house,
nice cars, fine dining, all the stuff that wealth affords. Yet, is being “wealthy”, being “successful”,
really what God gave us “life” for? The
fact that there are more poor people in the world than there are Middle Class
and wealthy should tell us something is askew with our definition of success or
at least with how we go about getting it.
Looking
at Paul here in our reading from Philippians we see that it is possible even to
waste our lives on godly pursuits.
Paul claims that he actually wasted his life pursuing what he thought
God wanted him to do. Prior to his
Damascus Road experience he was very zealous for an Israel that was
Law-abiding. He was a model Pharisee and
riding the escalator up in power and status.
But, soon he found himself willingly imprisoning the followers of Jesus
and desiring they be put to death for blasphemy. After his encounter with Jesus on the Road to
Damascus, he discovered that his zealous efforts were contrary to the life God actually
desires and were actually a waste of his life.
He considered his pre-disciple rise to success life to be dung and
that’s putting it mildly.
In
contrast to Paul here in John’s Gospel is a young woman, named Mary, who wastes
a bottle of very expensive perfume on Jesus because, unlike everybody else in Jesus’
day, she kind of gets who he is and especially that he is going to die. All the Gospels tell the story of a woman
anointing Jesus for his burial in the days following his triumphal entry into
Jerusalem. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s
version Jesus speaks highly of this woman saying that she had done a beautiful
thing and that everywhere the Gospel was proclaimed what this woman had done
for him in anointing his body for burial would be told also.
As
Jesus said, this woman had done a beautiful thing. In the Jewish faith one could say she
performed an act of Chesed, an act of
loving kindness that truly reveals the heart of God; pure, unconditional,
wasteful, and one could even say broken-hearted love. The perfume she wasted on Jesus in an
extravagant act of wasteful love was worth upwards of one years salary for
any of us here. Yet, to Jesus she had
done a beautiful thing that revealed the very heart of God.
“How
does wasting perfume on Jesus’ feet reveal the heart of God”, you may ask. In light of Judas’ question, we may also want
to ask how does wasting expensive perfume reveal the heart of God any more than
would selling that perfume and giving it all away to the poor. Well, her anointing of Jesus with this
perfume corresponds to Jesus’ wasting his life by dying for a humanity that
didn’t deserve it. There’s a Good Friday
Sermon here that we don’t have time for this morning, but it must be said that Jesus
wasted his life over to death to destroy death and its cause, which is the
disease of Sin. Then, by raising Jesus
from the dead God created a new humanity that would bear his Spirit and in
essence be his Temple, the Body of Christ.
The end result is that Jesus’ wasteful death restored value to human
life which we have wasted in Sin. We are
now also reconciled to God in an organic union kind of way; united to the Son
of God, the Living Christ, by the Holy Spirit to become his sisters and
brothers and beloved children of the Father just as he is. With the wasteful gift of his Spirit, which God
poured upon us similar to the way Mary wasted expensive perfume on Jesus feet, God
has truly united us to the love which God is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. By anointing us with the perfume of the Holy
Spirit, God has made us partakers of the relationship which Jesus the Son
shares with God the Father in the Holy Spirit.
Well,
enough of this theology stuff. God has
wasted the perfume of his very self on us.
He has wasted the life giving blood (life) of Jesus the Son on us in the
gift of the Holy Spirit to us. I have
said wasted. This is not a very nice
thing to say of us, especially as we know that God loves us dearly, indeed
loves all people dearly even the most evil of us who have ever lived. Yet, when we look at the whole condition of
human existence – the wars, the poverty, the diseases, the way we abuse one
another, our pride, our self-involvement, our self-indulgence, our
self-righteousness, the way we judge one another – it would make more sense for
us like Judas the thief and betrayer to turn to God and say, “Why have you
wasted the gift of yourself on us.
Destroy us all and start again!”
Well,
here is how Mary’s act is so significant, why it was a beautiful thing. Of all the disciples only she seemed to understood
that he was going to die. In fact, she
was the only human outside of Jesus who got it.
Even though his disciples knew who he was, they wouldn’t believe him
when he said he had to die. Instead, they
were blinded with their own hope and belief that he would ride into Jerusalem,
cleanse the temple, kick out the Romans, and establish the Kingdom and…they
would rule with him. Hmmm, we’re back to
that power thing. But Mary, knowing no
other way to express her overwhelming grief at knowing Jesus would die, she rather
spontaneously took a bottle of very fine, very expensive, very pure perfume and
wasted it on Jesus’ feet. An act that
simply says, “My heart is broken, but I understand that you must die.” All she could do with her grief was this
futile, wasteful act of preparing his feet for burial.
Mary’s
beautiful act mirrors God’s understanding and deep grief over our wastedness
and the inescapable fact that we, his beloved children, must die. God is a grieving God not an angry God who
demands righteousness from us in an “obey me or else” kind of way. God’s children are dying by our own demise. Of course, he’s upset about that. What else can he do for us other than to
anoint us for our death and burial with his very self that being made alive in
the new life he created by Christ Jesus we can live through death and be healed
of Sin in our own resurrection? God our
Father, Brother, and Constant Companion is not this sourpuss, judgmental, angry,
petty, old man of a God who demands an inordinate standard of morality from us
that we cannot possibly live up to. God
is not angry at us and wanting to destroy us if we don’t repent. God is not going to destroy us and start over! Indeed, not!
Rather, he loves us each as his own dear children. Instead of destroying us God the Father in an
act of wasteful love sent God the Son who wasted his life as one of us and died
so that God the Father and God the Son might wastefully give us their very life
in the gift of God the Holy Spirit that we might live through death. Praise be to God! Praise be to God! He understands. He understands that the end result of the dung of our lives is that we must die so
that the disease of Sin will end, but out of his love for us he will raise us
just as he did his only begotten and beloved Son, Jesus, because he has poured
upon us the same Spirit that lived in him so that he may live in us and we may
live through death. Amen.
