Texts: 
John 12.1-8, Ps 56.1-11
Some of the most memorable dinner parties don’t quite go according to the script. The prominent guest gets drunk and makes an ass of themselves. The catering flops terribly with an eminently forgettable dish put before the visiting gourmet. Any number of sundry disasters can occur to be retold as anecdotes over future and less memorable dinner parties. But you’d be hard pushed, no matter how much hard partying you’ve done in your lifetime to have seen anything like this.
When the fragrance first tickled their noses, they must have been a bit surprised. Pretty expensive stuff to be splashing about at a party like this. As the smell wafted through the joint they must have been intrigued. There must be buckets of it. When they came and saw just how much, and all of it puddled on the floor around Jesus’ feet the first response must have been shock.
Those who knew the price of things quickly did the sums. About a year’s worth of average male earnings was dripping through the floor boards. Today maybe $50 - $60,000 dollars worth. It was some gesture that girl made, and not one of them forgot it!
As the aroma of all that ointment spread through the house, it made quite an impression. Such an impression that the stories about it moved through all Jesus’ circle and eventually made it into all four of the gospels. Everybody had their own spin on events of course, but some things were clear. It was clear that the noses of those present couldn’t have have wrinkled more - they were affronted and scandalised by the waste. Nobody quite remembered who was most upset. Mark says it was some of the guests – perhaps even gate crashers who got in somehow. Luke says it was the Pharisees, but he seemed to think their noses would wrinkle at anything. Matthew remembers it being the disciples who would rather have used the money for charitable purposes and dear old John, well he remembers Judas as the villain, just wanting to get his hands on it by milking the poorbox. I suppose in a way that they’re all right – most of us know how other people’s money can be better spent, whether for noble or selfish ends.
The one thing that everyone remembers, is that Jesus was on the side of the woman. This fellow who never seemed to have any cash, who had no fixed address and no visible means of support sat there smiling at her, as more money than he had ever known, dripped slowly between his toes.
He had preached often enough about the needs of the poor. He’d told his disciples before to buy bread for the masses, and when they couldn’t he’d fed the mob by himself. He had challenged the rich to surrender their wealth and give to those with nothing. He was committed to justice and generosity and making the world a better place and he just sat there smiling as she wiped up that fragrant waste with her hair.
Even for those days it was not politically correct. The social justice types were quick to comment: how much could have been done for the poor! The good religious types sniped: Doesn’t he know what kind of woman this is?
But Jesus was even quicker to defend: “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, but you do not always have me”.
Jesus points us to the heart of one of the dilemmas and tensions of spiritual life. It is the tension between caring and justice-making in the world, and celebrating, acknowledging and honouring the presence of God in human life. This story suggests that this celebrating and honouring is not a token thing – it is done best with abandon, with reckless generosity and with feeling.
This is not in keeping with the tenor of our times – we are a people of fixers, a culture of problem solvers. We live in an ambience of accountant-keeping in which the bottom line is all important. In any cost-benefit analysis worthy of the name, putting a year’s worth of work into a footbath doesn’t add up. Whether we are earnest disciples, or disapproving Pharisaical wowsers, or self interested con men like Judas we all have sensible financial strategies.
But Jesus points to moments that don’t fit into our schemes and our plans, moments when God is present to us and the extravagent response, the sacrifical response, the worshipful response is what we must do if we are going to be authentic to the moment. There is a moment when God is present when we must celebrate and respond. When we experience the amazing drama of a God who in Christ is not only real to us and present with us, but who in love will die for us, none of the usual strategies of justice and charity and political action are anywhere near good enough.
The simplest and best definition of Spirituality that I have heard is: “Spirituality what you do with what you value”.
What is it that we value? What’s in the bottle? Many people in our culture find their values expressed in material things. Michael Leunig has a little cartoon of Noah’s Ark with people carrying in their TV sets and lounge suites two by two.
Others find a different set for values. Some long for a renewal of the natural order. Others work towards a greater wholeness in family relationships. Others are seeking beauty and structure in their homes and their lives. People are concerned as never before about values, but seem to think that values can be selected like goods from a supermarket shelf. They wander through seminars and lifestyle programs and self-help books with their shopping trolleys as if we human beings can choose and package them together as we wish.
Whatever life has bottled up in us, is only the overflow of what God has done in us and for us. We often think rather selfishly of what we contain as something of our own, and not the result of God’s gracious action in our lives.
And yet the bottling activity of God values different aspects of our experience to those we hold on to. We value our strengths, God treasures our weakness. We exult in our power, God rejoices in vulnerability. We live as if suffering is to be left behind, as if all the pain and sorrow that we have known, just ebbs away. We want to forget it, and yet when grief wells up afresh and overwhelms us we know again how much we are carrying deep within and trying to forget. “You have kept count of my tossings. Put my tears in your bottle – are they not in your record?” sang the Psalmist of ancient Israel (Ps 56.8). “Put my tears in your bottle”: What we try to push away and repress, God has carefully kept in his own bottle, entered in his own records, and, if the gospel is to be trusted, even carried in his own body.
When it comes to what we do with what we value (our lived spirituality), we are a generation like the Pharisees and the disciples and dear old Judas. Some of us to moralise about social ends. Some of us seek to use the world’s resources for justice. Some of us manipulate things to suit our own ends. That’s what we do with what we have in life’s bottle.
There are some who want to pour it all out at the feet of Jesus. Whatever the bottler things of life, they are given us for the service of God. They are to be poured out because we have found in God a moment when nothing less than all can be offered. It comes about because of how we have experienced God and his care of us. We have come to value different things that have been canistered up in us. Our sorrows and weaknesses and tears are just as important, perhaps more important than our competencies and strengths.
As you worship here today – what’s in the bottle? What do you bring in yourself as you sit there in the pew? Is it material things, and social and intellectual power? Is it your ability to fix problems and solve dilemmas? Do you bring your competence, your skills developed in this world’s obsessed with technique? Are you a top lawyer or a great accountant, or a hot-shot policy analyst? Or is your security a little more local, that you know everyone around here – that you know this church and its people inside out? What’s in the bottle?
Or do you come with an awareness of your own suffering, of deep pain? Are you fragile and vulnerable and afraid? Have your tears gone into the bottle, to be treasured and understood and held in the heart of God?
What are you going to do with it? If spirituality is what you do with what you value you must work out what you are going to do with the bottle. Are you going to break it and let that stuff flow out to God, or are you going to keep it bottled up, fenced about with competencies and strengths and adequacy and a concern for all the ills of the world thinking that if you can fix things out there you might feel more sorted in here?
When people really learn to worship, the jars get broken and all the precious, costly stuff inside gets poured out. Our own suffering anoints, and is anointed by, the suffering of God and in it we find a fragrant healing. In that pouring out we know ourselves to be ordinary, fragile, empty little bottles.
‘What use is a church like that?’ I hear some of you asking. But you see, then a great miracle happens. The bottling activity of God goes beyond storing up and treasuring our weaknesses. Paul says that into common clay jars, into the empty fragile bottles we are, God pours the great treasure of the gospel (2 Cor 4.7). Yes, we find ourselves emptied, but then filled to overflowing with the abundant life of Jesus, spilling over and energising everything we do. That’s when we know how much we are loved, how strong we can be in weakness and how the vulnerable and fragile vessel of our lives, our thoughts, our hearts can be filled to the brim with the goodness and the power of God’s love for us in Christ.
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