Sermon: Not Counting the Cost

Texts: Isaiah 43:16-21; John 12:1-8

Date: March 21, 2010

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

            Preaching professor Thomas G. Long links today’s gospel lesson with an experience he and his wife had. “One Saturday afternoon,” he writes, “my wife and I escaped to the movies. We had barely slipped into our seats and positioned the bucket of popcorn between us when a gaggle of teenagers jostled into the row behind us. They were having a great time together, noisily talking and teasing and laughing. During the previews, the conversation became even more animated as each kid weighed in on the merits of a coming attraction. Every so often I would turn around to dart a glance in their direction, a look I hoped would come across as a serious but not-too-parental appeal for theater courtesy. I was relieved when the opening credits of the feature finally started to roll and the group quieted down.

But not for long. One of the teenagers had evidently already seen the movie, and was eager to serve as plot guide for the others. "Omigosh," she croaked in a stage whisper, as the male protagonist made his first appearance, "he is going to like fall for her so-o-o hard." Now my wife and I had guessed that there might be a romantic spark between the male and female leads, this being the movies and all, but it would have been nice to watch it unfold ourselves. "Look, look," our cinematic herald shrieked a few moments later, "he forgot to put the key back under the mat. Did’ja see that? That’s how the cops are gonna catch him!" With one huge "whoosh," all dramatic suspense rushed out of the room.”

Long turns to the gospel story, saying, “Look carefully…Mary is anointing Jesus, and at first the narrator seems like the teenager in the theater who was providing play-by-play commentary.  Notice the whispered asides. "Look," John confides, turning around with his box of popcorn, "there’s Lazarus! He was raised from the dead in the prequel." Or he hisses, "Hey, keep your eye on that guy Judas! He’s about to betray Jesus!" And, "Don’t believe a word of that caring-for-the-poor stuff. Judas is really a thief!"

What is going on here? Can’t John just allow the story to unfold on its own? Do we really need this voice behind us constantly spilling the beans on the plot?

In the case of John, this tendency to give whispered asides is not a narrational quirk, but rather a profound mark of John’s theology. John is convinced that life is double-plotted, that ordinary events unfold around us but that hidden among all the mundane props are signs of the eternal. The wine is in the water, the light in the darkness, the Word in the flesh. For John, belief is the capacity to see not only life’s surfaces but also its holy depths, to be able to look at events unfolding around us but also to look through them, above them and beneath them to perceive what is truly happening.  We need, then, two sound tracks -- one to tell the story and the other to tell God’s deepest truth about the story.”[1]

            Two sound tracks, one to tell the story, and the other to tell God’s deepest truths about the story.  What an intriguing idea.  I find it pretty irritating when people talk in the movie theater, especially if they are giving away the plot.  But what if you could have someone leaning over the back of your seat, whispering in your ear about the deeper meaning of your own life story--that would be pretty cool!   

            In a way, the grand narrative of faith does just that.  Alfred North Whitehead once wrote, “Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within the passing flux of immediate things.”  Take it out of the realm of the eye, and instead of saying religion is the vision, say it is being attuned to the sound of something which stands beyond, behind and within the passing flux of things.  The second sound track.  The ability to hear the music of the spheres humming above the noise of the world,  or to hear the voice of the meaning-maker interpreting what is taking place.

            The difficulty is that the sound track of the world is turned up pretty loud, in dolby THX multi-channel high fidelity surround-sound.  It’s practically deafening.  I got to musing on the sound track of the world, and hit on the sound that I think was filling Judas’ ears, based on his comments in this story.  It’s the sound of an adding machine.  The sound of accounting. 

            You can practically see Judas’ eyes bugging out when Mary brings in the jar of pure nard.  He knows quality when he sees it.  Maybe he has a fleeting hope that she is going to donate it to the cause—the common purse was pretty much flat as a pancake, and besides buying bread for breakfast, there were always a swarm of beggars buzzing around Jesus these days.  He liked having some small change in the purse to hand out to those whose hands were out.  And, yes, he occasionally pocketed a bit of cash; he considered it a fair wage for his management work.  So what.  It was a common purse, and he was a commoner, a hard-working man. 

            So he sees her bring out this incredibly expensive jar of perfumed oil, and he starts figuring in his head how many days’ bread it would buy, how many beggars could be satisfied with a reasonable handout, how many pairs of sandals might be purchased for the foot-weary band of disciples, what size his commission should be for managing the money…and then he watches in horror as she pops the cork on the jar and pours the whole thing on Jesus’ feet.  Oh, my Lord, what is that ditzy dame doing?  Every ounce that pours out sounds like money down the drain to Judas.  It’s all he can hear. 

            He’s a practical fellow.  He makes a practical, reasonable protest: “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?”  He is marching to the beat of a mundane drummer, the ca-ching, ca-ching that has been the rhythm of his life.  And, to be honest, he speaks for a whole lot of us who have been brought up by pragmatic people.  One commentator I read talked about how he was encouraged always to play it safe.  His parents taught him to hold on to a job for life, to save money for a rainy day, and to eschew prodigal pursuits like gambling and extravagant shows.  They recollected how their first marital argument was about Dad frying eggs in butter when frying them in lard had been good enough for Mom for the twenty-one years of her life till then.  “Cautious Calvinism” was what the writer said he had been brought up on.  My own parents, while not stingy, instilled in us an aversion to waste, food especially, and trained us to look through what was on sale at the store before glancing at anything else.  We were raised to be bargain hunters.   Look at the price before you decide what to order off the menu.  Pragmatic. 

            It’s all well and good, unless or until the sound track of the adding machine drowns out every other sound.  What if accounting becomes a way of life to such a degree that one never makes a move without counting the cost?  I’m not talking only about things that involve an exchange of currency.  I think we humans are apt to keep an awful lot of balance sheets in our heads.  Will we invite the Joneses over for supper?  Well, didn’t we invite them last time?  Don’t they owe us one?  Should I call Felicia?  How come I’m always the one who has to do the calling—why doesn’t she call me once in a while?  That sort of thing.

            Without meaning to, I suspect we can treat relationships like commercial enterprises in which we dole out what we think we can afford of ourselves.  We cautiously spend only what we think we can afford in terms of time, energy, and so forth.  And if pride is at stake, a person might find maintaining it very expensive indeed.  Fred Craddock was flying on a small plane once when he sat across the aisle from a woman in her forties who was crying, noticeably crying.  He said to her, “I see this is not a very happy trip for you.”  She said, “No, it isn’t.”  “Well,” he answered, “I’m sorry.”  She said, “I’m going to my father’s funeral.”  “Oh, well, I’m sorry,” he said again.  She kept crying.

            He wondered what else he should say.  “I can tell by your tears that you and your father were very close.”  And she said, “No.  On the contrary, I haven’t spoken to my father, written to my father, seen my father, in seventeen years.”  “Really?” Craddock asked.  “In fact,” she said, “the last time I saw him I was in his home, and we got into a quarrel.  I left the table, threw my napkin in my plate, and as I slammed the door leaving his home, I said, ‘You can go to hell.’  That’s the last thing I said to my father.  And now he’s dead.”

            I don’t know anything more about this woman’s story.  I’m guessing that the sound track of the relationship between her and her father sounded like an adding machine, accounting who owed who an apology, whose pride was deemed too expensive to put on the line for reconciliation.  William Sloane Coffin wrote “Nothing separates us more from God and our fellow human beings than our grievances.  If you want to avoid God, concentrate on money, status, health, but most of all your grievances.”[2]  How true, and how tempting it is to keep a mental spread sheet, an account, of grievances: who has done us wrong, and how much, and what we are owed.  It’s all part and parcel of being pragmatic people, not just with our bank accounts but with our emotional reserves.

            In the gospel story, Mary is marching to the beat of a different drummer.  She has seen through Jesus to the depth of Divine love he is illuminating with his words and actions.  She is hearing what one favorite hymn calls “the real, though far-off hymn, that hails a new creation.”  She is hearing it beyond, behind, and within the passing flux of current events.  She is hearing it above the near-deafening human sound-track of accounting.  And so she mirrors the marvelous self-giving she sees in Jesus.  She runs to get the most valuable thing she has short of her own life-blood—the jar of perfume that would cost a laborer a year’s wages.  Pouring it out lavishly on Jesus feet, she then spends her dignity freely as well, unbinding her hair and wiping his feet with it--shocking to those who witnessed it, since a proper woman only let down her hair in private, with her husband.  You see, she is spending her social capital as well as her economic capital in this one astonishing act of extravagance.  She is giving herself to Jesus, modeling unstinting discipleship.

            Jesus then acts as the narrator interpreting the meaning of her act for the obsessive bean-counters frowning down on her.  He suggests that she has anointed him for burial.  It’s not clear that what he interprets is exactly what she intended; but it doesn’t really matter.  That she was caught up in the flow of self-giving love; that she was able to help Jesus face his coming sacrifice with an act of loving solidarity, refusing to flinch in the face of almost certain death, that’s what mattered.  That she was able to stop accounting the cost for this spectacular episode of generosity as a model for all disciples, that’s what mattered.

            Oscar Wilde once defined a cynic as “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”  In the gospel story, Judas is the model cynic by this definition.  Knowing the price, but not the value, not only of the perfume but also of Mary’s over-the-top demonstration of devotion.  But don’t be too hard on him.  He is really the Everyman in this story, much as we might hate to admit it.  He’s the one doing what is normal and expected.  He is the one who holds up a mirror to the rest of us and asks if we resemble him in our way in the world.   

            Take “the poor,” for instance.  It’s good that Judas is thinking of them when there was a potential source of money that might be spent on relieving their misery.  Set aside for a moment the question of whether Judas was being sincere in his concern about them when he was critiquing Mary’s extravagance.   I get the impression that even if the perfume had been sold and entrusted to a fund for the poor, Judas would have “accounted” his way through the funds.  He would have been judging each individual as to whether they deserved a share, putting a price tag on their needs, weighing each penny spent over against potential outcomes.  Do you know what I mean?  Everyman usually does that with his charitable dollar.  Everyman knows the price of relief, the price of welfare, the price of the cup of coffee the beggar is asking you to buy.  Everyman cogitates on just how much  he can afford to give away, and wants to know his money is being well spent.  The sound track of accounting doesn’t disappear just because there is charitable activity.

            What Everyman often misses is the value of the person.  And even more, Everyman overlooks the value of a community or society in which people of every level are considered valuable, priceless even.  That attitude requires a shift in perspective, a conversion to self-giving, unstinting love.  Judas didn’t seem like he was attuned to the brand-new thing God was doing in the world through Jesus.  Mary was.  She is therefore the model of discipleship in this instance, even though she didn’t cash out her most valuable asset and parcel it out to the poor.

            I am pretty sure that when Jesus says, “You always have the poor with you, but you don’t always have me,” he didn’t mean for a minute that the poor were none of our concern.    He wanted to hold Mary up as an exemplar of the kind of giving of self  pouring itself out in a demonstration of generosity that goes beyond reason.  He appreciated what she was giving, and received it graciously on what he suspected would be one of his last days on earth.  I think what he most wants is that his followers would take up that same enthusiasm for giving what they have to share in sheer passion for participating in what God is doing in the world.

            It’s quite remarkable that Mary went for the most expensive, valuable thing she owned and poured it out for the sake of love.  Most of us, me included, tend to reserve our valuables for ourselves or for our children.  We might do some figuring about what we think we can afford to give away and do it, maybe even a little gladly.  We might drop some of our leftover change in the paper cup of the representative of the poor we meet on the street, maybe even a bit cheerfully.  But that is different from what Mary is doing here, isn’t it? 

            Suppose all of us who follow Jesus were genuinely ruled by Love that didn’t constantly count the cost of everything we part with, from the charitable gift to the grudging apology?  That would be a whole new life, wouldn’t it?  That would create a whole new world, wouldn’t it?  Like a desert suddenly flooded with a  river of grace.

[1] Long, Thomas G. “Gospel Sound Track”  http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2167

[2] Coffin, William Sloane  Credo  Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004, p. 131