The Beautiful Scandal of the Gospel

Shelley Denison

Scripture: John 12:1-8

Today is the fifth Sunday of Lent and the last Sunday before Holy Week. Holy Week, as we know, can give us a bit of liturgical whiplash. It starts with celebrating Jesus’s arrival to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, when we reenact the crowds who welcomed him with palm branches and praise. On Maundy Thursday, we contemplate the solemnity of Jesus’s last meal with his disciples, when he washed their feet and asked us to remember him with bread and wine. And on Good Friday, we follow Jesus as he is unjustly tried, tortured, and crucified. All to be wrapped up on Easter Sunday when we worship him as the resurrected Christ.

But today in the Gospel story, before the events of Holy Week, we’re with Jesus and his disciples on their way to Jerusalem. They stop in a town called Bethany to see their friends Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Mary, likely well-aware of the contempt and animosity held by Jerusalem’s religious and political leaders towards Jesus after he resurrected Lazarus from the dead, may have understood the gravity of this visit when she anointed Jesus’s feet with a perfume made of the spikenard plant. Spikenard grows in the Himalayan Mountains of Nepal, China, and India only 2 months of the year. It would have been carried to Jerusalem by relay merchants almost 6,000 miles on the Silk Road. According to the reading, Mary used 1 pound of pure spikenard oil, which would have required 115 pounds of the dried plant. And if we are to believe Judas’s valuation of this perfume at 300 denarii, we can conclude that this perfume in today’s money was worth somewhere around $18,000.

In this Gospel story, we encounter a moment of intimacy and scandal. Mary’s anointing of Jesus fills the house with the fragrance of her devotion, an act so lavish that it provokes immediate protest. Judas argues, at least superficially, that the perfume could have been sold, the money given to the poor.

It’s a reasonable argument. It’s practical. It makes sense.

But love—true, holy love—is not always practical. Love, in the kingdom of God, doesn’t measure its cost or efficiency. It is reckless and it is extravagant. It is the love that leaves the ninety-nine sheep to search for the one. It is the love that welcomes home the prodigal child with a feast instead of punishment. It is the love that kneels to wash the feet of betrayers and deniers. And ultimately, it is the love that stretches out its arms on the cross, pouring itself out completely for the sake of the world.

Mary’s anointing of Jesus is not just an act of devotion but a prophetic sign. She is preparing him for his burial, though she may not yet fully understand it. Her extravagant love mirrors the reckless grace that will soon be poured out on Calvary. She does not hold back, and neither does Jesus.

So today’s Gospel asks us this question: Do we love in the same way?

Are we willing to love recklessly, not counting the cost, not hedging our bets? Are we willing to give of ourselves extravagantly, whether through acts of generosity, forgiveness, service, or compassion? Are we willing to love as Jesus loves—without reservation, without calculation, without fear?

And are we willing to love those whom we consider our enemies?

One of my all-time favorite movies is a German film from 2006 called The Lives of Others. It takes place in east Berlin in the mid-1980’s when it was common for East Germany’s state police, the Stasi, to spy on citizens. The protagonist is a playwright named Georg. We learn early in the film that he is growing increasingly critical of the government of East Germany, which was a crime punishable by indefinite incarceration. A Stasi agent is tasked with bugging Georg’s apartment and surveilling him day and night in order to gather evidence against him.

There’s this beautiful scene in which the shot goes back and forth between Georg in his apartment playing his piano and the Stasi agent in the attic of the building, listening. In an interview, the movie’s director said about this scene: “I suddenly had this image in my mind of a person sitting in a depressing room with earphones on his head and listening in to what he supposes is the enemy of the state and the enemy of his ideas, and what he is really hearing is beautiful music.”

A few years ago, in January of 2021, I was driving and (like any good Pacific Northwesterner) listening to NPR. Of course, as you can recall, nothing newsworthy happened in January of 2021. The reporters were talking about national politics, and specifically about a certain politician who I won’t be naming. But suffice it to say that as they were talking about this person, I was seething. I was incredulous and livid that this person achieved the position of influence that they did. I thought about how fundamentally evil they were. How without a single, solitary shred of redeemable moral character they were. But in the middle of this, I was hit with a thought like a semi truck: “Shelley,” it said, “he was made in God’s image too.”

Listen. I am so mad that that’s true. It would be so much easier and so much more convenient to believe that some people really are just evil incarnate. But the reality is that to be a Christian means to know that all the law and the Prophets hang on the two greatest commandments: to love God and to love our neighbors.

All of our neighbors.

Don’t get me wrong. To love someone we disagree with on fundamental issues or someone whose actions harm others does not mean that we condone their beliefs or their behaviors. It does not mean we withhold accountability for them. It means that we try to see them the way God sees them.

It’s this reckless, extravagant love that, as Isaiah says in today’s reading, “makes a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” And sometimes that wilderness looks like seemingly intractable disagreements about politics, and that desert a barren landscape of us-versus-them.

Christian love is not a transaction; it is an outpouring. It is not measured in careful increments but in overflowing abundance. It is the love that gives, even when it is not deserved. It is the love that washes Judas’s feet, too.

In a world that values efficiency, control, and self-preservation, this kind of love seems reckless. But that is the beautiful, intimate scandal of the Gospel.

May we, like Mary, be bold in our devotion. May we, like Jesus, be boundless in our love. And may the fragrance of that love fill our homes, our communities, and our world, bearing witness to the reckless and extravagant love of God. Amen.