It was just another ordinary Monday morning for me, a time for running errands. I had checked everything off my shopping list as quickly as I could. I found a checkout line that wasn’t too long, and I was rapidly plopping item after item on the conveyor belt. I put the cold items together, and then I threw all the others down, scooted to the end of the counter, and attempted to bag everything as quickly as I could. I wanted to get home and move on to the next thing.
But she took her time, not in a careless, lazy way, but in a deliberate, careful, almost touching way. First, she reorganized all the yogurts, counting and neatly stacking them. She carefully sorted the other items, too. She had a system and wanted to navigate it with thoughtfulness. But more than that, I noticed that she really cared about her job. It seemed to be more than a job for her, although it could easily have been just a mind-numbing task. She took her time because the job was worth doing well.
As I whipped out my credit card to pay for the items and to complete the transaction, I noticed that she was spraying the surface of the item scanner, wiping it clean. She was preparing for the next customer, but she wasn’t in a rush. And this little gesture moved me in an indefinable way. There, at a numbered checkout counter in a factory of transactions, a few pointless, unnecessary actions mattered a great deal.
The job of scanning and ringing up the items could have been done more quickly, perhaps even more efficiently, without the pre-organizing, and the scanner would have worked perfectly well for the next customer without being cleaned. Those small acts of attention were above and beyond the requirement, superfluous even, but they couldn’t be assigned an economic value. At that checkout counter, for a few minutes on a Monday morning, perfunctory consumerism rubbed edges with timeless, gratuitous, extravagant care.
At this point in the season of Lent, we’ve made a hard turn towards our landing on Easter Day. We’ve been heading tenaciously towards the cross, and soon, we’ll be at the empty tomb, staring into its mysterious silence. So, too, in the Gospel of John, when Jesus returns to Bethany—where he had raised Lazarus from the dead not too long ago—we’re on the cusp of the Passion. Tension is building as more and more people refuse to accept the gift of Jesus’s life. A bounty has been placed on his head because his signs are disturbing the peace, and the raising of Lazarus was the final straw. We know how this story is going to end, and we’re eager to move to the good ending on the other side of the suffering.
But John slows us down in this tender scene in the house of Mary and Martha. We’re only six days from the Passover and the clock is running out. By the world’s standards, we should be anxious, tense, and fearful, racing ahead in the drama. Nevertheless, here we stumble upon a leisurely entr’acte between two sections of this grand play, between Jesus’s working of signs and miracles and his steady progress to the cross in his Passion.
It’s as if John is deliberately trying to suspend time before we attempt to interpret the meaning of the cross. The little vignette of the supper in Bethany is redolent with meaning, and we can only find that meaning by savoring this moment. Mary takes a prodigious amount of expensive scented oil and lavishly anoints Jesus’s feet. It’s a profoundly wasteful act, if we measure it by consumer standards. It will serve no practical purpose, for Jesus will soon die. Those precious feet, once anointed luxuriously with oil, will be ravaged by nails and smeared with blood. Jesus is already the Messiah. He has no need for traditional anointing as King, but Mary does it anyway.
Jesus and his friends partake of a supper, reveling in each other’s company, reclining at table, foreshadowing that fated meal a few days later in the Upper Room. Mary massages his feet with oil and wipes them with her hair, just as Jesus will soon wash his disciples’ feet at his last supper with them. These gestures have no utilitarian purpose. They’re extravagant, poetic, and astoundingly beautiful.
And then, Judas speaks. If we weren’t already biased against him, his words might not seem so inappropriate. He has assigned a value to the oil, weighing its quantity against the standards of a commercial economy. Surely, if this oil had been sold, the money received could have been used to aid the poor. We know this feeling of weighing competing goods, of assigning market value to all our actions. Surely, those moments at Mass or that luxurious time in prayer could have been better spent on a work assignment or in precious sleep. Surely, the time polishing the brass candlesticks or straightening the pews or rehearsing the organ voluntary could have been used in personal fulfillment. Surely, the time spent at the bedside of an unconscious loved one who will never feel the warmth of our hand in hers was just a futile effort. Surely, all those actions were prodigiously wasteful, if quantified in transactional terms, just as Judas greedily eyed the quantity of costly oil that Mary slathered on Jesus’s tired feet.
But Jesus hushes Judas’s mercantile rationalizing. Enjoy my presence while I’m here, he seems to say. In a similar way, he will soon command Peter to put his sword back into its sheath after cutting off the ear of the high priest’s slave. That moment, as Jesus’s will is perfectly synced with his Father’s, is not a moment for revenge and retribution. A life will be taken on the cross, but it’s by no means a life wasted.
And maybe this is exactly the reminder we need as we approach the cross. We’ve heard it said that Jesus must die for our sins to be forgiven, that in some kind of vicious bloodlust God the Father required the death of his Son so we could have salvation. But Jesus says to us that all his life—all the healings and miracles and feedings and time spent with his friends—could never be reduced to a mere transaction. Jesus came so that we might have life and have it abundantly. We can’t run Jesus’s life over a checkout line scanner and put a price on it. We can’t quantify salvation in the way we’ve been trained to do.
The most telling way in which Jesus can express the beautiful mystery of the cross is in a touching domestic scene, giving off a fragrance of profound theological meaning. In that house in Bethany, the abundant meal hearkens back to Jesus’s feeding of the 5,000 and looks ahead to the Last Supper. Martha’s quiet acts of service foreshadow the acts of selfless service to which Jesus will call each of us. Judas’s greedy appraisal of the value of a pound of nard anticipates his own betrayal of Jesus, when a price is assigned to the world’s salvation. In that house at Bethany, ruthless calculation is paired with liberal spontaneity. Fear of scarcity rubs uncomfortably against a reckless sense of abundance.
And it will be so on the cross, too. The world that couldn’t contain the excessiveness of perfect Truth itself will demand its retribution on a weighted scale. For offenses perceived, a penalty will be exacted, at least if we look at it through the eyes of Judas and the world in which we live. But as we see in the profligate anointing of Jesus’s feet by Mary and as we understand those seemingly wasted hours of fellowship on the threshold of death’s door, Jesus’s life has always been about abundance and life and timeless companionship.
On the cross, where an eye is demanded for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, love spills out, pounds and pounds of it, immeasurable quantities, and the glorious fragrance of new life fills the air. A life was taken but in the selfless, willing, wasteful giving of that life, new life was received by those who had stuck through it all with their friend and Lord. And despite their own betrayals and faithlessness, the One hanging on the cross refused to counter betrayal with its own deficit in the accounting charts. Instead, he gave a surplus in return, forgiving and healing and loving to the end.
To many outside the walls of this church on this morning, our time of praying and singing, of offering up incense and marvelous music, and of receiving Bread and Wine that will hardly fill our stomachs seems extravagantly wasteful. We could be on the tennis court or reading the paper or catching up on sleep, or better yet, earning more money. But this time spent in the presence of our Lord and one another is the truest way of reveling in the meaning of the cross. In our extravagant worship, we have no agenda except to worship the living God. Here we learn to be less like Judas, always assigning a price to every minute of our time and grinding through the cogs and gears of consumerism, and we learn to be more like Martha and Mary, serving selflessly and spending our precious time in the company of the risen Lord. Here, we receive a foretaste of that heavenly banquet to come, where there’s no clock, no schedule, and no lack of anything. But for now, it’s enough just to be here and to know, that in the kingdom of God, no price tag can be put on love.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifth Sunday in Lent
April 6, 2025