Seeking God’s Ways: From Scarcity to Abundance
Scriptures: Isaiah 43:16-21, John 12:1-8
I grew up in a family that valued simplicity and frugality pretty highly. This was partly to do with the money available, particularly when I was younger, but I know it was just as much a matter of values and priorities. We always had enough, and I didn’t ever have a sense of being in need, but I also learned very quickly that we didn’t buy a lot of fancy things. Clothes from the thrift store, haircuts at home, vehicles always used, and a lot of recipes featuring canned soup. We lived in an old century home, which we never renovated but tried to keep fresh with untold layers of paint – often right over the untold layers of wallpaper underneath. It was never clear whether the walls would stand if the wallpaper was removed. My Dad did lots of little home improvement projects, but they were always creative jobs making do with the materials that happened to be around. One year we drove from Manitoba to Southern Ontario on a camping vacation. We needed extra space for equipment and luggage, so my Dad used cardboard and a tarp to fashion a cartop carrier that we lashed to the roof of the van. It was pretty impressive – why buy a sleek piece of plastic from Canadian Tire, if a bit of duct tape can do the job?
But on the flip side of this thriftiness, my parents were generally ready to spend money on the important things. Which often ended up being experiences. We regularly travelled to BC to spend time with my mom’s family. My Dad quit his job while we kids were still young and spent a year re-training for hospital chaplaincy. My siblings and I all went from grade 7-12 to the Mennonite Brethren Collegiate Institute, our local private church school. And when I was in grade 9 we spent four months living in Eastern Europe connecting with Lithuania Christian College.
But I certainly grew up with this clear sense that you don’t throw money around on unnecessary things. Which, in my mind, included such extravagances as matching dining sets, sturdy pots and fluffy towels. All of which goes some way towards explaining why the day that Pam and I went out to the Bay to choose items for our wedding gift registry was among the most terrible in our whole relationship. Pam was very reasonably excited about picking out the household items that would furnish the home we would share together. She didn’t have particularly fancy taste, but she did figure that some things ought to match, and that if we expected our relationship to last more than 5 years we were going to need a decent quality vacuum cleaner.
Somehow, I could not agree. I had objections to every item she found. “Do we really need a new can opener?” “That’s way too much to spend on a mixer!” “There are tons of sheets at the MCC thrift store!” I pointed out that everything my parents owned was mis-matched, well-worn and 25 years old. She reminded me that this was because all their stuff came new from their own wedding 25 years before! I granted her the point, but not the battle. I wet-blanketed my way through the whole exercise until Pam was ready to send me back home on the bus and complete the project herself.
And fair enough. It was a very poor showing on my part. I couldn’t let go of the calculation between cost and use, even for a wedding where our friends and family wanted to give us nice things as tokens of their love and as investments in our life together. For the sake of money, I took a swing at our relationship and ruined a shared experience. Which is, ironically, the opposite of what my parents’ approach to their resources should have taught me.
I have come to see that a faithful relationship with money or wealth is more complicated than I might have recognized at earlier stages of my life. And it has everything to do with how we understand scarcity and abundance. My hang-ups with spending and even with receiving, actually gave money far more power over my life than it should have had. My tightfistedness signalled my priorities – what is actually most important. I held tightly to money – whether mine or someone else’s – and begrudged every cent that disappeared. I wanted to be responsible and thrifty, not wasteful or careless. But I was living as if the stuff I had was what really mattered. I was living in a world of scarcity in which I could not trust that there would be enough.
Over the years, I’ve thought about this with the image of a closed fist. When we’re holding on so tightly, we’re saying that what’s inside is too important to let go. And so I’ve worked hard learning how to open my hand. To recognize that wealth or possessions really aren’t the most important thing. Money comes and money goes. It’s not important in itself, it’s just a tool that we use to make our lives work in our modern societies. And so the first step for me has actually been learning how to spend a bit more freely. And from there learning also to share and to give. I need to steward my resources well, use what I have faithfully, share it with others. But I don’t have to hold onto it so tightly.
I have to be a little careful when I talk about this, because it’s easy to say that money isn’t so important when you’ve got enough of it. It’s easy to not worry so much about where the money goes if there’s plenty more coming in. And I know I’m in a privileged place of steady income and reasonable expenses. I don’t have to make a whole lot of hard calls about what I can and cannot afford.
But we know that the flip side of this is often true as well. That the more we have, the tighter we hold onto it and the harder time we have letting go. Many of us have had the experience of receiving amazing generosity from people and places that we know are living with little. Sometimes wealth actually teaches us to assume a narrative of scarcity, while living with less allows us to recognize true abundance.
All of these dynamics and more are at play in our story from John 12 as Jesus comes for a meal at the home of his friends Mary, Martha and Lazarus. It starts out as a normal enough dinner party. Normal enough, at least, for a group that includes someone who not so long before had been dead and sealed in a tomb. Jesus had called Lazarus out and raised him to life, so everyone was feeling pretty happy to be together. But while Martha is busy getting dinner ready, her sister Mary comes to Jesus with a whole pound of expensive perfume. Pure nard, distilled from the roots of Valerian flowers that grow only in the Himalayas. This is a truly excessive purchase. It would have cost the average worker nearly a year’s wages. Where did she get the money? Who knows. But it’s not the sort of change you just have lying around.
And then what she does with this perfume is more excessive still. She could have dabbed a bit around Jesus’ neck or on his chest. She could even have given him the whole bottle to keep and use or share as he wanted. But instead she opened it and poured it all out on his feet. All of it. None remaining, none held in reserve. Can you imagine the scent in that house? The fragrance rising to every corner. And Jesus’ tired, worn and dusty feet bearing this gift that would not quickly dissipate.
Mary’s gesture is extravagant, even wasteful. It defies the proper stewardship of resources, it responds out of proportion. And Judas voices what everyone must have been thinking. “Why was this perfume not sold for the fortune it would fetch, just think what it all could have done?!?” With each drop pooling under Jesus’ feet, another family could be fed for the day – perhaps for longer. How can this be an act of faithfulness? How can this be a gesture in keeping with the Jesus whose mission is to bring good news to the poor, release to the captive and freedom to the oppressed?
Of course, the narrator offers a little sidebar here – explaining that Judas wasn’t actually concerned about the poor. He just had sticky fingers and wanted to skim a little off the top of the common purse. But I think we can cut him a bit of slack on this. Or at least recognize how common his divided loyalties are. If I’m honest about my hang-ups on that fateful day picking out registry items at The Bay, I wasn’t actually hoping people would spend less on us and maybe cut a cheque to MCC with the extra. Deep down, I wanted them to go for the dollar-store can opener and send us the extra cash! What I resented as much as anything, was the thought of all that good money stuck in quality house-hold items that I didn’t really care about but now could never re-sell without offending great-Aunt Gertrude! It’s a good reminder for me, at least, to check my deeper motivations before I join Judas on that moral high ground.
But what Judas ends up offering is a false binary, and Jesus calls him on it. Judas names an either-or, and Jesus counters with a both/and. The either-or is between the gesture of love and practical rubber-meets-the-road assistance. Either extravagant devotion that makes no earthly difference, or a social conscience that actually responds to the needs of the world.
Jesus responds with a quote from the book of Deuteronomy: “You will always have the poor with you,” but then he adds his own conclusion, “but you will not always have me.” This line from Deuteronomy is interesting, because it actually continues beyond the section that Jesus makes reference to. “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth,” it reads, “I therefore command you: Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land” (Deut. 15:11). You will always have the poor with you, so you can never cease to be generous, caring and hospitable. That’s the basic instruction. But, Jesus says, you will not always have me. And I am the one who inspires your generosity, deepens your caring and enlivens your hospitality.
We need both together. If we do not sit at Jesus’ feet and pour ourselves out in extravagant devotion we will have a hard time opening our hands to the poor and the needy neighbour in our land. For indeed, what we have to offer to others is finally Jesus poured out – not our own generosity, but the generosity of God who gives us all that we have. Nothing truly offered to God can be a waste, for it’s God who gives and gives again, pouring out abundantly for the world.
I need to learn to live and to let go, to appreciate and enjoy the good gifts of this world, to meet God in the abundance that drains out irresponsibly all around me, before I can actually escape from scarcity and into the kind of simplicity that’s ready to share. Otherwise I’ll be stuck with Judas, throwing up nice sounding words to cover an empty heart and empty actions.
On this fifth Sunday of Lent these scripture texts take us around the final bend in the road that reveals the cross waiting for Jesus and for us at the end. From here on in, we are confronted at every step by Jesus’ impending death. The whispers begin already after Jesus raises Lazarus. News travels fast, and all this chatter has the Pharisees and religious leaders concerned. If the people all go after this wild-card Jesus, it could sway the delicate political balance and bring the fury of Rome down upon the Jewish people. And so as Jesus makes his way to Mary and Martha’s for dinner, these leaders start making plans to find and arrest him.
Perhaps Mary could sense this change in the wind. Perhaps that’s why she chose this day to offer her priceless gift. “Leave her alone,” Jesus says, “She bought this perfume so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.” Mary’s gift is a funeral balm. An anointing for death. I think it’s interesting that the most exquisite of scents are complex and layered. They tickle and tease, because we can’t quite put our finger on what they are. They can’t be grabbed or held, but always lead us into something more. Often they name and evoke the experience of sorrow, of wounds that still linger within the promise of beauty. They grab so deeply because their freshness has not forgotten the long, hard road.
I think this is the kind of abundance that God offers. Rich and full, complex, requiring vulnerability and open hands. It resists clenched fists and every effort of containment. It counters scarcity not by filling it up, but by flowing through it so that there is enough for all. This abundance calls for celebration, not pious wet blankets, even as it inspires us to share with the same generosity that we have known. Mary pours out her gift as Christ will be poured out for us. And we stand with open hands as this most precious gift freely flows and fills the room.
Amen