While he was at
Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came
with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the
jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there who said to one
another in anger, “Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment
could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given
to the poor.” And they scolded her. [Mark 14:3-5]
A denarius
was roughly one day’s wage for a common labourer. This ointment, pure extract of spikenard, was
worth more than 300 denarii. And now it
was running on the floor. The alabaster
jar also was broken. We have no idea who
this woman was, but it was not the first time a woman had intruded while the
men were having dinner with Jesus, and had done something unexpected and
socially embarrassing. They scolded her… They would have made much better use of 300
denarii. But Jesus comes to her rescue
with what must have sounded like a black joke:
She
has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial.
It is finally a matter of what is in the heart. We can only speculate on what was in the
hearts of Jesus’s companions at Simon’s house at Bethany. Certainly anger – Mark tells us that some reacted
in anger when this woman did what she did.
But also, it is close to the time when Jesus is arrested and put on
trial. They must have had fear and
confusion in their hearts. We know that –
for all their criticism of this woman’s actions – they were not themselves busy
raising money for the poor.
In the heart of the woman, however, at that moment, was
single-minded love. She loved him, and she
was already grieving for his loss. Jesus
knew what was in their hearts, he knew what was in the woman’s heart. This is something that flows from quietness
and spiritual depth – the freedom to perceive, to discern, what is happening in
someone’s heart. It is an aspect of
mindfulness, and it entails the inner freedom, in contemplative life, to set
one’s own feelings and reactions to one side.
Most of us have known for years that both the Hebrew and
the Christian scriptures teach that God “looketh on the heart”. In a world obsessed with appearance,
superficiality and triviality, our faith always reminds us that what God sees is
very different, flowing from love and understanding, forgiveness and
compassion. A few years ago the guest
speaker at the annual John Main Seminar, that year in Dublin, was the Dalai
Lama. He spoke about his Buddhist sense
of the teaching of Jesus. Much of this
later appeared in a small book which he entitled, “The Good Heart”. Buddhist teaching is just that – it is the
heart always that needs to be healed, the broken heart.
Jesus had healed the heart of the woman at Bethany. She responds with a reckless extravagance of
love, and Jesus says: Leave her alone, she has done a beautiful
thing. When we extract some silence
and stillness from our busy, committed lives, this itself is an extravagance of
love. We are content for our hearts to
be open to God and to healing.
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