Priceless

Palm Sunday, Year C
13 April 2025

Processional Gospel: Luke 19:28-40

Revelation 22:1-5
Philippians 2:5-11
John 12:1-8

Our son Elias was exited to move to Winnipeg and to set out on his own. During his year of working at Save-On he had figured out what he wanted to do, or at least take at university. Winnipeg was a good choice in many ways: The city in which he was born. A city in which he had friends from a French immersion program a couple of years earlier. A city more affordable than Vancouver. And, as we learned from Elias, the University of Manitoba has a great Labour Studies program.
As Jackie had started a new job and was unable to take time off it was Elias and I who set out for Winnipeg.
The first year was full of excitement. Living on your own, making new friends, learning new things, and exploring a newish city, for Elias was only three when we had moved away.
The next year was harder. There was a labour studies class commerce students were required to take, and at least in Elias’s perception they were preppy, privileged, and simply did not understand why there may even be a labour movement. It’s hard when you are passionate about something and others don’t understand. Then Elias started to see the poor. We had long lived in the suburbs and real poverty was not something our family had been exposed to. And when you discover something with your own eyes, you have to try make sense of it. For Elias, making sense of it involved emptying his wallet when he came upon someone who was destitute. There was no question for Elias that this was the right thing to do, but the sadness remained that there were so many people who were poor.

At the end of the story of Jesus’s anointing by Mary with an ointment that was worth an astronomical amount of money, Jesus quotes from the Book of Deuteronomy.¹ Jesus says, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
The part about always having the poor with us has often been misunderstood as a shoulder shrugging response to poverty, as if the poor didn’t matter to Jesus. But we know that the opposite is true for we just read the Sermon on the Plain where Jesus calls the poor blessed. We know that at the beginning of his ministry Jesus reads from Isaiah 61 and proclaims good news to the poor (Lk 4), and we know that Jesus instructs us to invite to our parties the poor, not those who would invite us in return. (Lk 14) We know that in a figurative sense we are poor, for we are the beggars of God’s love. Martin Luther, even though a man of great accomplishments, prayed at the end of his life, “we are beggars that is true.”

The verse Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy comes at the end of instructions about debt-forgiveness. While Jesus only quotes part of the verse, he means the whole verse (and passage). His listeners would have filled in the rest. We speak in the same manner.
The whole verse is this, “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbour in your land.’”

The whole passage in which the verse is written is central to the life the Israelites are to live in the land, and as such it is central to their faithfulness to God. God never wants only our prayers and devotions but that our devotion would shape our living. For us, who in Jesus have been grafted onto the vine that is Israel (Rom 11), the command has not lost its significance, for it is based on the provision of a gracious God, and who among us would say that God has not provided for us? Moses even asserts that such faithfulness to God’s commands will eradicate poverty, for such living will lead to ‘there not being anyone in need among them.’

The command to open our hand to the poor anticipates our resistance offered in the form of feared abuse of our generosity. Moses anticipates our fear that some are “playing the system” and therefore taking advantage of our generosity. And so Moses reminds the Israelites that everything they have is gifted to them by God, and Moses warns against hard-heartedness and tight-fistedness. “You should rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it may be. ⁹Be careful that you do not entertain a mean thought, thinking, ‘The seventh year, the year of remission, is near’, and therefore view your needy neighbour with hostility and give nothing; your neighbour might cry to the Lord against you, and you would incur guilt.”

It is not surprising that St Augustine would draw the conclusion that “charity is no substitute for justice withheld.” The instruction given in Deuteronomy is not about charity but about living as God’s people who answer to God and who are their siblings keepers. The poor are our neighbours.

How is it then, given then the understanding that caring for the poor is essential to being God’s people, that Jesus dismisses Judas’s objection, who had said, that Mary’s gift was a terrible waste and the money should have been given to the poor? After all, Judas offers us the voice of common sense.

When in 2003 the United States invaded Iraq, our family attended a demonstration against the war. Our eldest was 10 and it was the time of a clever credit card campaign that listed the prices of ordinary items and concluded with an experience that was priceless, like spending time with your child. While the campaign asserted that some things are priceless, it also suggested that those priceless experiences require us to be part of the money economy. You likely remember the campaign.
The sign our daughter had created for the march read, “Gas: $1.369. Life: Priceless.”

The anointing by Mary, as extravagant and deeply personal as it was, recognized that Jesus is priceless. That is why the nard was not too extravagant for Jesus. Jesus is priceless, as are all people created in God’s image.
And Mary saw something no one else saw. She saw that Jesus will soon die. How often have we thought after the death of a loved-one, had we only done this, or had we only not done this or that. It’s a normal part of our grieving, of trying to make sense of that which does not make sense. However, this is an expression of love. We love a person so that we wish we were still in the position to do all these things for them, whatever they are. Mary knows what is coming, and when she anoints Jesus she does what she needs to do because Jesus is priceless.

Even though Judas will soon try to force Jesus’s hand and deliver Jesus to the authorities, Judas neither sees what is coming nor does he understand that Jesus is priceless.
And because he does not understand that Jesus is priceless, he does not understand that the poor are priceless. He does not understand because for him it’s a numbers game.² It’s only math. The greatest benefit for the greatest number of people. Judas plays the poor against Jesus (and against Mary), and one who plays one against another does not understand that people shall know us by our love. (John 13) People shall know us by our love because “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” (1 John 4:16)

What sounds like a reasonable argument is thus only the presentation of false alternatives. The love of our neighbour does not preclude the love of God, and the love of God does not preclude the love of our neighbour.
In Trinitarian language, Jesus loves the Father and the Father loves him. And anyone who knows Jesus knows the Father, and Father and Son show their love by Jesus giving his life for the world. As Mary had poured out the perfume, so Jesus will pour out his life for the world, (and the Spirit will be poured out upon the Church). In fact, no saving can occur that is not carried by sacrificial love. Mary did not just pour perfume.

We are here because Jesus did not just lose blood but poured out his life for the world. And because he did, we can too. The world needs us to.

Amen.