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Not long after we moved to Owen Sound Dana took William and Alice down to Caledon to visit the grandparents. Coming hope late in the day they had a good view of the sunset coming up Highway 10. William, who was at the time six or seven, said to Dana, “Look Mommy, isn’t it beautiful?” She was so impressed by that observation that it was the first thing she told me when they got home. I also was impressed, impressed that a child that young could see and express a sense of beauty and awe with respect to that beauty. I was very well-pleased that “my boy” could see the beauty of a sunset.
Beauty is there to be seen but it is hard to define it. We could all agree that there is beauty in a sunrise and sunset; beauty in the way that the colours, the shapes of the clouds, and the shadows all come together in a way that gives a sense of pleasure and awe. But what is it? More often than not beauty is something that we associate with the feminine. If we saw a buck, a doe, and a fawn out in a field at sunset, we would call the whole scene beautiful. We would call the deer family beautiful. We would call the doe and fawn together beautiful. But we typically wouldn’t refer the buck as beautiful. We would call him majestic or handsome or just say “Get my gun.” Mother Nature is beautiful but Father Time…? It’s like Duck Dynasty. The women are sexualized in the image of Barbie dolls and the men are…well, we can’t say what the men look like due to the Father Time beards.
A problematic side of beauty is that they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder which means everybody must have their own idea of beauty. I’ve heard people say something as strange as the moment of the death of a loved one was beautiful, peaceful; and it can be. People go and fill their faces and lips and even their butts up with Botox thinking it makes them look young and beautiful when in fact they look like a lumpy sea cumber with eyes. Beauty is something readily found in nature, but because of this “eye of the beholder” thing and the “association with the feminine” thing and “greed” there is a huge industry associated with beauty that really warps this innate sense of Beauty that we have from a young age.
Looking here at Mark, we find Jesus entering into the discussion of what beauty is. Jesus calls what this woman did to him with the perfume not just a “good work” as it so often gets translated, but rather a “beautiful work”. It’s better to translate it as a beautiful work. This woman was likely named Mary. The Mary we would identify as Mary the sister of Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead, depending on which Gospel you read. Luke would have us to think that this woman was Mary Magdalene, a prostitute from whom Jesus cast out many demons. Regardless, I’ll just call her Mary.
Jesus calls what Mary did a beautiful work not because a woman who had strong affections for him did an almost erotic thing to him. In Luke and John, she washes his feet with her tears and dries them with her hair and then pours the perfume over them. In that day, that would have been TV-MA. But here in Mark, Mary simply pours it on is head. Something everybody else in the room indignantly saw as a waste of an expensive resource that could have been sold to give money to the poor. Incidentally, selling the perfume for money to give to the poor, in the world of Judaism would have been considered a “good work”. But what Mary did was something more than just doing ‘good”. Jesus calls it beautiful.
Jesus says that opportunities to do good will always be available because we will always have poor people. Mary, on the other hand, was doing something else. Jesus said she had anointed him ahead of time for his burial. You see, tending to the bodies of deceased people that otherwise would not have been tended to, in the Jewish world was was and still is a beautiful thing. It’s an act of Chesed. That’s the Hebrew word for unconditional love. It’s the steadfast love of God. The type of love that God shows and is. The Greek equivalent is agape.
Jesus knew he was soon to die and likely to be crucified. Roman crucifixion was the most dehumanizing way a person could die. You were stripped down to your undergarment or even naked and made to carry the beam you would be nailed to through town while people yelled insults and spit at and even assaulted you. The place of execution was always prominently public. You died slowly and painfully on display while people continued to insult you. When you finally died, they threw your body in heap to be burned or dropped in a mass grave. The point of crucifixion was to dehumanize a person.
Jesus knew crucifixion would be his end. He would die in Jerusalem, far from his Galilean home. So there, would be no family plot to bury him in. He knew his disciples would desert him for fear of being accused of following a blasphemous leader of a revolutionary movement, so no one was likely to come collect his body and dispose of it properly, with respect. Jesus’ death would be difficult and dehumanizing. Jesus was the Son of God become human. It is profound that his death would be in such a dehumanizing way, ugly way.
So, Mary did something beautiful. She tended to his body that evening as she would have after he had died because she knew she would likely not get to pay him this act of loving kindness afterwards. Wasting this bottle of expensive perfume on Jesus as she did was a beautiful way of restoring the humanity, the human dignity, to Jesus that Roman crucifixion would soon strip from him. Wasting this perfume on Jesus was her way of saying despite how worthless Roman crucifixion would make his life appear, Jesus’ life still had worth.
Mary’s beautiful act strikes a chord with me. I’ve lost family members to terminal illness. As a minister I have walked with people and families through terminal illnesses. A terminal illness is dehumanizing. Its progression strips a person of their dignity. This is why I have the utmost appreciation for Hospice. They do everything they can to do the beautiful work of helping people leave this side of things surrounded in love with their dignity intact.
I served as interim chaplain for Chapman house for a couple of months in pre-Coop days while their chaplain finished some education stuff. My first day there, I walked in the door, the nurses were very busy, and there was a woman who was in her last hours. It was very important to them that no one die alone and yet they were unable to go and sit with her. So the asked me to go sit with here. I was honoured to do so. I went in, sat down, listened to her laboured breathing. I told her who I was. I prayed with her. Said a couple of Psalms. Hummed a little. Within a half an hour she drew her last breath. She died with dignity, a valued person. Her life was not in vain. Hospice is a beautiful work.
Back to that question of what makes something beautiful. Looking at this passage here, it would appear that something is beautiful when it reflects the nature and glory of God. We can look at “big things” like vistas and sunrises and sunsets and it strikes us as beautiful because they show us the infinite beauty and love of the one who made them. Even if we look in the other direction, to the very tiny, we see beauty there as well. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen magnified images of bugs, of feathers, of the inner workings of a cell. If you think a flower itself is beautiful, you should see the microscopic details of a flower petal. Even in the microscopic details of something as vulgar as of those green flies that eat manure there is beauty. God has made beauty every evident.
So, since beauty is everywhere present, Jesus calls us to live in beauty. Not the artificial beauty of lust, greed, Botox, and a fake oddly orange tan from a can applied in an effort to look young and full of life. But rather, he calls us to live in the wasteful, lavish, selfless way of unconditional love that looks like him. He calls us to do things that uphold a person’s basic human dignity regardless of who they are and what they have done. Living a life that respects and even gives worth to others, that’s beauty. Even when we know they have tragically wasted their own lives, we must regard them with beauty. Even when we know our efforts will be wasted on that person, we must still regard them with beauty.
To live in this Beauty is to bring forth into this world, into the lives of people, the healing beauty of the beautiful work that Jesus as the Son of God did by dying for humanity. In Mark’s Gospel, the only thing Jesus has to say with respect to the meaning of his own death is “The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” What he means by ransom there isn’t something that gets paid to a kidnapper. He’s not saying what we so often hear bad TV preachers say; that Jesus gave his life to the devil as a ransom because the devil has kidnapped us and holds us captive in sin. He is referring to something in the Book of Leviticus called the “life price”. The life price was an amount of money paid to a victim’s family by somebody who accidentally took the life of another. The idea was that the inherent worth of the victim’s life can in no way be determined or equalled with money, but simply that paying this “life price” recognized that the person whose life was wasted by negligence had worth. They tried to recognize the created worth of a person.
So then, Jesus gave his life so that our lives could have back the worth God created us with, the lives which we all have tragically wasted on our own selfish pursuits and on hurting others for our own gain and pride whether intentionally or unintentionally and made to be worthless in comparison to the beauty in which God created us and the good for which he created us. Jesus gave his life unto death in order to pour the perfume of the Holy Spirit upon us and into us in order to restore our worth and dignity as being created in the image of God. Now that there’s some theology for you to ponder on.
To close, Jesus said that wherever the Gospel is proclaimed the story of this beautiful deed that Mary did of wasting that jar of nard on him to pre-prepare his body for burial would be told. I am pretty sure that Jesus commanded this story to be told because what Mary did is the best example there is of what it is to be his disciples. We must waste our lives in acts of sacrificial love for others no matter who they are or what they have done in order to let them know they have worth and dignity and life in Christ and do so expecting nothing in return. Living in beauty is how racism is cured, how poverty is cured, how sexism is cured, literally, this is how everything wrong in this world that dehumanizes humanity is cured. Amen.
