Crazy extravagant love!  John 12.1-11

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“Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume, and she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair.  And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume … wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”  John 12.3, Mark 14.9

We have heard Jesus say to his mother, ‘Woman, it is not my time,’ when she asked him to rescue the wedding couple in Cana, whose wine had run out; we have seen him wait to go to Jerusalem, behind the disciples … we have seen him slip into the countryside to avoid the Jewish leaders and early arrest—Why?  Because it was not the time his Father had given him to go to the cross.  Until now. 

Now Jesus returns to his resting place, the town called Bethany, and we find him at dinner with his friends.  Apparently, he has finished eating, and is reclining at the table with the new and improved Lazarus … (who would have had a good scrubbing by now to get the burial spices erased from his resurrected body) … when Martha and Lazarus’ sister Mary does something quite unusual.  She gets up from the table, kneels at Jesus’ feet, and breaks an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume; then the stunned dinner guests watch as she lavishes the perfume on Jesus, taking down her long hair to wipe his feet with it. 

Judas speaks up to say what everyone else is thinking—‘that is such waste, when there are many poor to feed!’  But as always, Jesus knows.  “You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.”  Jesus knows that Judas speaks out of his self-centered, dark heart, while Mary gives out of her extravagant, crazy love for him.  What a contrast! 

Mary expresses a magnanimous love for her Lord, giving the most precious material gift she possesses.  Jesus would be reminded of her gift over and over in the next six days after that Bethany dinner, as the perfume would linger on his body all the way through his arrest and crucifixion.

O, Jesus . . . that I might love you and desire to give to you like Mary . . . open my small heart to a crazy, extravagant love for you.  Amen.

Christine