With modern cultivation, harvesting, processing, and extraction, a pound of pure nard is around a thousand dollars — rather more costly than the coins Judas would eventually accept for his part in the death of Jesus. Mary of Bethany, whose brother Lazarus has only recently been raised from the dead, knows many things that Judas does not. She knows that death is too high a price to pay for anything, and that for the chance to love someone well, even for one more instant, you would give everything you have.
***
I don’t know how to love like Mary loves. I can’t even really imagine what it would be like.
I have spent enormous sums of money on travel to see loved ones, for flurries of activity and long, lingering seasons spent in the company of people dear to me. That time is worth anything, and has always been filled with good things. I think, too, of good meals, but the most opulent of those still at least masquerade as sustenance, and the prolonged entertainment, say, of watching the sunlight disappear at the Richmond Night Market.
As indulgent and ephemeral as travel and food can be, there is still something tangible to be had.
Mary, though, offers only perfume and touch: pure gestures of experience and presence.
With that kind of love, you pour everything you have into a single moment, and everything that brought you there and everything that follows is irrelevant. That instant is exquisite and sublime.
***
St. Gregory of Nyssa describes the journey towards contact with the Transcendent as like ascending up a sheer, steep crag, reddish in appearance, which juts out perilously into the abyss. Through exhausting labour, we at last reach the peak, and there we are drawn to gaze into the vast expanse that surrounds us. What we encounter at that point, everything we have ever known, and every way we have ever known fails to prepare us for. There, there is neither height nor depth, there is no beginning and no ending. It is disturbing, it is exquisite, it is sublime.
We cannot remain in that place. There, time has no meaning, and our confrontation with the Great Unknown ends as soon as it begins. There is nothing we can carry back with us as we return to that which suits our nature. We cannot say any more about God than before we made our way up to the cusp of the abyss beyond, but we are content simply to know that such transcendence even can exist, and continues to exist beyond our knowing.
***
It is a quirk of our values, and the structures of our minds as shaped by living in a world of cause and effect, and beyond that a world of rules and laws, that we look at so much of life through the lens of memory. We think it actually quite wise to think of what we do in terms of the memories it will make. We do not want to look back with regret, either at things done or left undone.
The moment is not actually so very much like memory. The moment is a flash of so many things which are filled with all kinds of qualities and potentials. There is more that exists, and more that happens, in each and every moment than we could ever possibly say or fully recall. I do not even mean to say that it is better or worse, just that it is different. The here-and-now is just a different beast entirely. When we engage with the past, in memory and in the reading of history, we find all kinds of possible meanings that emerge. We could be here for hours just considering different ways of understanding the Gospel text this morning, and not even begin to scratch the surface. Some of us would even have a good time (while others would have the good sense to leave.)
The present, though, is fluid and responsive, and we participate in it, and it in us, fully. Like any instant of a dream, we can direct our attention to any thing and find the whole scene changes. You notice a thought passing through your mind, a feeling moving through your body. You feel your breath, you notice something moving. All these infinities stretch out around us before we even act.
This is what the moment is like, and here, too, we have not even begun to scratch the surface.
***
Judas disingenuously invokes the moral weight of choices made, and to an end that he can control. Judas works towards the end that he has already decided is best, and he continues to do so at least up until the betrayal of Christ, and I would say he does so even in his death. Judas suffocates under the weight of how things will end up, and how things are supposed to be. Like the prodigal son and his brother, like the man who owns the barren fig tree, he is bound up in the lifeless certainties of endings.
There must have been some love in Judas, too. Maybe he even tried to love the world by attempting to make it end up the way he was sure was right, until, at last, it became unbearable.
I do not know how to love like Mary, but I have glimpsed something like it through her actions. She left that encounter with nothing to show for it, and gave a great deal in a very real moment.
We do not get to keep anything from our encounter with the Holy, and neither do we get to keep anything from this life but that which we could never lose, anyway. We are bound up with one another in a series of moments which cannot be lost or destroyed, but also cannot be kept or possessed. Each moment is a gift, and each encounter brushes up against the Transcendent.
***
May each moment be filled with the abundant Grace and love that is poured out so abundantly upon us. May we give ourselves fully to the present moment, and experience the glorious beauty that fills our senses and our souls in every circumstance. May we come to love even that which the world has forgotten and cast-off, and those who have given up. May we love the dead and the dying. May we love all that lives in memory, and all that lives on beyond it. May we love the one from whom all things come, and also love all things that return.