In Praise of Wasteful Love

Only once did Jesus ever say to tell what someone did during his ministry. It happened just a couple days before the Romans crucified him in Jerusalem. Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus, took some expensive ointment and poured it on Jesus’ head and feet. The spikenard in that alabaster cruise was worth nearly a year’s wages for a common laborer in Palestine: 300 denarii (John 12:2-8; Matthew 26:6-13; Mark 14:3-9).

The disciples were dumbfounded. Influenced by Judas, they criticized her for wasting so much money. It could have been a tremendous aid to poor people that lived nearby, and what was the point of such waste anyway?

Mary did it for exactly the right reason—as an expression of love. It was not to prove a point, to get something in return, to meet a requirement, to accomplish a goal. It was not to produce anything all that long-lasting or wide-reaching; it would evaporate with the fragrance that filled one house where a small group was eating a simple meal.

Her anointing shows something even more profound. It transcends quantification as the arbiter of goodness because it sets aside any kind of calibration for measuring comparisons—with other people’s work (“the widow’s mite”), with what we could be doing instead (“feeding the poor”). Without quantification we cannot even measure how we are doing (1 Corinthians 4:13). So love is the great leveler of value for human endeavors.

Interesting that it was Judas who most clearly missed the point in this incident—Judas who managed the purse for the Messiah group, Judas who sold out the Lord for thirty pieces of silver, Judas who goes down in history as the one that most misunderstood the anointing by Mary and the ministry of the Messiah itself.

As widely as the disciples were to preach the gospel, they were to recount this expensive gesture. Jesus interpreted what she did as applicable to his soon burial. He instituted this likewise universal observance in memory of that death. We observe it to honor Christ’s self-giving, not just in one act but in coming from heaven to earth to complete the ministry that culminates here.

For all of us, communion is a “performative act,” one by which we say something about our whole life and ministry too. Here we confess all that his death for us means and vow our devotion to him in return. We do so, understanding from Mary’s example that God measures our devotion more by the love we express in it than by what we produce by it. That is encouraging to us who have limited resources and keeps us humble when circumstances enable us to magnify our efforts. We need only to remember that “whatever we find to do for him we do it as well as we can” (Ecclesiastes 9:10). Mary demonstrated what Jesus himself demonstrated in the self-sacrifice this observance memorializes and motivates us to emulate.

God never disregards our expressions of love nor regards any of them as wasteful.