Long ago, and far away, I was once a young man in my twenties, and I took private pipe organ lessons from Mark Sedio, a bright and talented organist in Minneapolis. In one of our lessons, I was playing the notes of a little piece by Cesar Franck, and Mark was doing his best to help me make music. He tried everything. He told me about French organ instructors and the various methods they applied to get their dull students to understand the music, not just the notes. He played bits of the piece himself, and asked me if I could tell the difference. (I couldn’t, to be honest.) Finally, Mark sighed and looked at me and asked, “Stephen, have you ever been in love?”

I was all of 23 years old. I was struggling. I was still, in a lot of ways, a little kid. I sheepishly answered, “No.”

And Mark (very gently) said, “Well, you know, then I think we should probably wait on the French music.”

Today’s Gospel reading is a love story. A powerful, fragrant, potent, and even (dare I say) erotic love story. And Mary of Bethany is quite French in her love for Jesus: graceful, lavish, impractical, lovely, fragrant, and generous. Generous perhaps to a fault: the amount of money we’re talking about here is the living wage for 300 days of work, which is to say, roughly the annual salary of an average worker. In our dollars, it’s something in the neighborhood of $28,000. Mary of Bethany spent $28,000 anointing Jesus’ feet. I wonder—did she attend the wedding in Cana, where Jesus turned 180 gallons of water into wine? Perhaps that’s where she got the idea. What is the meaning of all this extravagance?

First off—and perhaps this sounds strange coming from me, since I play a role in a lot of the social-action projects of our parish right now—it’s not about a requirement to spend our time and treasure on the poor. Judas, that most troubled disciple, played the foil for that insight. “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” he asked, and even though his motives were suspect, he asked a reasonable question. This is wasteful, all this love. This is silly, even. I can rationalize buying a $28 jar of ointment, but this extravagance is a thousand times more generous than that.

But Jesus is not impressed with reasonable arguments. It makes sense in his upside-down view of things to spend thousands on an expression of love. And here’s one reason why I think that is: Judas’s view is not sensible so much as it is cheap. The poor he pretends to care about are in much deeper need than he is prepared to admit. And they need far more than money. 300 denarii is hyperbolic in the extreme: it’s like saying “This perfume costs a gazillion dollars.” So one thing that’s being said here is this: we could give a gazillion dollars to the poor, but that still wouldn’t be enough. We would still be missing the point.

And here’s the point: life with Jesus costs us everything in a lavish, extravagant outpouring of love. We are invited to pour out our whole selves in love for Jesus, to anoint his feet with every bit of our life, every shade of our emotion, every dimension of our being.

To understand this a little better, I think it would be good to look at it the way one of our children might look at it in the Godly Play liturgy. In Godly Play, when the children encounter stories like this story of Mary and Jesus, they are encouraged to wonder where they enter the story—and they’re also encouraged to wonder with a child’s curiosity. That is, you don’t have to enter it in the usual ways—I’m Mary, I’m Jesus, or I’m Judas. You can enter the story as one of its inanimate objects.

Like this: I wonder if we are the ointment jar.

If so, then we are worth a gazillion dollars. And if so, then we are broken open. And if so, then we are broken open, and our fragrant, loving ointment is poured over the Body of Christ in love.

Fragrant ointment serves a few purposes. First, its fragrance delights the senses. How delightful it is when we pour out our creativity—in the arts, in our skilled professions, in our relationships—upon the Body of Christ. How delightful it is when we sing, or paint, or sculpt our love, and give it all away.

Next, fragrant ointment soothes and replenishes. How comforting it is when we soothe and comfort those who are distressed, those who are grieved, those who are alone. How nourishing it is when we offer our companionship and hospitality to all whose feet are dusty and weary.

And finally, ointment of such priceless worth—ointment of such matchless quality—fills the whole house with its ravishing and intoxicating loveliness. I wonder how uncomfortable you might feel right now, being compared to such a lovely substance. But this is part of what I think happens when we are baptized: we are broken open, and our loveliness pours out…our delightful, powerful, and even dangerous loveliness. Dangerous because of its wildness, its potency. Mary of Bethany was, let’s face it, out of control. She was expressing a love that no keeper of the money box like poor Judas could tolerate. “You always have the poor with you,” Jesus said. That is, you will always have opportunities to serve, to work, to attend to the business of life, the task of ministry, the everyday occupations. There will always be opportunities to volunteer, contribute money, build and repair. And these are all good and right things to do.

But Jesus wants more. Jesus wants our rich loveliness. Jesus wants us to play music, not notes. Jesus wants your incredible compassion, and your incredible heart. Jesus wants you to care so much that you start to lose it—you start to lose control.

So I’ll close with a story. It’s a story from a musical … some would say the musical. It’s a moment from (please just bear with me!) The Sound of Music. Fräulein Maria, our heroine, has been leading the von Trapp children all around Salzburg dressed in play clothes fashioned from old drapes. They’ve been rowing in the river, and they all tumble into the water in their excitement upon seeing Captain von Trapp and the baroness waiting for them at the dock. They stumble up the dock and quickly assemble in a straight, military line, their infuriated father barking orders to them. But Maria is not intimidated by the captain’s rage. She challenges him: does he know that Liesl is about to become a woman? Does he know that Friedrich desperately wants him to teach him how to be a man? Does he know that Brighitta notices everything, Kurt is only pretending to be tough, and that Louisa is still a mystery? And above all, does he know that the little ones just want to be loved? “Oh, love them, Captain,” she said. “Love them, love them!”

She knew that his children didn’t just want a decent, dutiful father. They wanted their father’s whole heart, his whole being. They needed him to break open.

Love them, love them. This is our calling, and our privilege. This is our gift, and our challenge. We are invited to be broken open—often painfully—so that our rich, luscious, crazy, wicked, dangerous, and delightfully unbounded love can pour out.

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