What is your name that I might address my praise to you? I don’t know. Were you someone’s mother? …Were you old, bent by years of experience? Were you a prostitute? Or praiseworthy for purity and virtue? …I don’t know. Mark never says. I know nothing about you save this: that you anointed the head of my Lord.
Ah, but that’s enough to know! That deed alone is your identity, your entire being: your self. It memorializes you forever. …I marvel at you. I pray God that I might do – and therefore be – the same.
For what was your gesture? An act of pure love for Jesus particularly. It was an act so completely focused upon the Christ that not a dram of worldly benefit was gained thereby. Nothing could justify this spillage of some three hundred days’ wages, except love alone. The rulers who sought to kill Jesus were motivated by a certain reasonable logic; but your prodigality appears altogether unreasonable – except for reasons of love. The disciples, in fact, were offended by an act that produced nothing, accomplished nothing, fed no poor, served no need. They reproached you as a wastrel.
They were offended by the absurd, an act devoted absolutely to love, to love alone.
But Jesus called it ‘beautiful.’
Who else anointed our High Priest, as priests should surely be anointed in office? Who else anointed our King, the son of David? Who else anointed the body of our Savior for burial? No one but you. I don’t know that you consciously recognized these offices of the Lord; but love instinctively sees the truth. Love enhances and names in truth. No one else anointed him and by that gesture declared him Messiah, the Christ. The act, therefore, was more than beautiful. It was rare and rich with meaning.
And since the act is all there is of you, since humility has reduced you to this single thing alone and now you are no more nor less than your love for the Lord, you yourself are beautiful and rare and rich with meaning.
You are the beauty of faithful loving.
To those who do not truly love, you will ever be ephemeral or else an offense, either a shadow or an idiot. To me you are a model. You gave up all; you became nothing at all save love for the Lord; and exactly so you are remembered. Here, ‘wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world,’ is love’s monument!
You, nameless, anonymous, lovely indeed: thank you.
Drawn from Walter Wangerin, Jr.’s Reliving the Passion; Meditations on the Suffering, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus as Recorded in Mark (Zondervan, 1992). This is found in his meditation on Mark 14:1-9, pp.43-44.
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