Parents know the feeling. You’re in the department store, cautiously weaving your way through the aisles. The deafening crash of breaking glass stops you dead in your tracks. You turn around and see surprise—and guilt—on your child’s otherwise innocent-looking face. Obviously he didn’t mean to break that expensive vase. But he did break that expensive vase. You never intended to buy it, and now it’s your responsibility.
You take it to the manager with words like, “I’m so sorry. My son broke it. It was an accident, but I’m willing to pay for it.” A good retail manager would refuse to let the customer do such a thing—“Don’t worry about it. These sorts of things happen. I’m just glad your son wasn’t hurt!”
Phew! You are off the hook. But the matter of the vase is not over once you leave the store. Someone will pay for what your child broke, even if it isn’t you. Someone absorbs the loss, and for something that wasn’t their fault.
Think of the scene in Mark 14 where an unnamed woman breaks her own vase, pouring expensive ointment over the head of Jesus. Obviously it doesn’t overlap completely with the kid in the department store. She broke it deliberately. She did it as a beautiful gesture of love and appreciation for Jesus. She might not have been fully aware of the deeper, darker, spiritual implications of her act—that of preparing Jesus’ body for burial—but Jesus sure interpreted it that way.
The disciples see something different.
Good heavens! Think of the money! Think of the expense! A vase and ointment like that was worth an entire year’s salary. Think of all the hungry mouths that could have fed. Think of all the cold children that could have warmed. How many nights at a shelter could that have financed for a homeless single mother of three? What a waste!
Who among us wouldn’t have scolded her in the same way? Such a thing has much more value as an investment opportunity with the money given to the poor.
Of course, the disciples don’t want it to be their money that feeds the hungry, clothes the cold, shelters the homeless. They, like us, were all too eager to spend someone else’s money and not their own. The disciples will do many things. Absorb the loss is not one of them.
She will.
She knows what she is doing. In addition to offering a beautiful gesture of love and appreciation, unknowingly preparing Jesus' body for burial, she willingly and deliberately absorbs the loss. She is not dumb; she knows the value of the ointment, and that is part of what makes it beautiful. She is like David, refusing to make an offering that costs her nothing (2 Samuel 24:24). At least in this instance here, that is not true for Jesus’ disciples. They are happy to donate to a good cause, just not if it costs them.
In the same way she might not have known the full symbolic extent of her gift, there is also a high likelihood that she didn’t know that in giving what she gave, absorbing the loss herself, she was performing a dress-rehearsal. In just two days’ time, Jesus would reenact her gift, giving his own dark and beautiful gift—that of his life.
Back to the department store. We are all the kids tagging behind our moms, smashing expensive vases on the floor. Will God make us pay for them? How could we? The cost is too great; we could never afford it. What we find, instead, is Jesus, crucified and dying on our behalf. He will pay for it. He will absorb the loss. Like the woman pouring expensive ointment on his head, Jesus himself pours out his life onto ours. Like David—like the woman—Jesus will not make an offering that costs him nothing.
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