John 12:1-8; Philippians 3:4-14
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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 “desolute 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 combined 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 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 in Jerusalem riding the escalator up in power and status. This culminated in his 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.
Paul realized he had wasted his life on doing what he thought God would expect of a zealous, faithful Jew. Then after the Damascus Road experience of meeting Christ his greatest desire becomes wanting to Christ Jesus and the power of his resurrection. To help maybe understand what Paul means by this this we can look to this young woman, named Mary, who wasted 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. She knows Jesus and her act of wasteful love foreshadows the power of his resurrection.
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; which is 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 year’s salary for any of us here. Yet, to Jesus she had done a beautiful thing that revealed the very heart of God.
You may ask, “How does wasting perfume on Jesus’ feet reveal the heart of God?” And also, in light of Judas’ question, we may 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’ wasting his life to 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 dwelling in us making us to become Jesus’ 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 the communion of the 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 (the 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. You should destroy us all and start again!”
Well, here is how Mary’s act is so significant, why it was such a beautiful thing. Of all the disciples, only Mary seemed to know who Jesus is and understood that her beloved friend was going to die. 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 wasted-ness and the inescapable fact that we, God’s beloved children, must die. God is a grieving God not an angry God who demands “obey me or else”. We are God’s beloved children and we, God’s beloved children, are dying by our own demise. Of course, he’s upset about that. God’s response to this isn’t to mope about barking out “They’re getting what they deserve”. Like Mary, God anoints us for our death and burial. Yet not with just any old perfume, but rather with his very self, the Holy Spirit, so that being made alive in the new life he created by Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection we also will live through death and be healed of Sin in our own resurrection.
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.
Just as we will live by the power of Jesus’ resurrection, we must now live according to it. We who know Jesus must waste our lives just as he did, just as Mary demonstrates, we must waste our lives doing acts of extravagant love. In acts of extravagant generosity and extravagant hospitality and extravagant service to others is where we will come to know what Paul meant by wanting to know the power of Jesus’ resurrection. Amen.
