A reading from the Gospel according to Mark, chapter fourteen.
"And being in Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at meat, there came a woman having an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard very precious; and she brake the box, and poured it on his head. And there were some that had indignation within themselves, and said, Why was this waste of the ointment made?"
And a little further on. "And Jesus said, Let her alone; why trouble ye her? she hath wrought a good work on me."
And then this. "Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her."
Here ends the reading.
Come and sit down. You have been standing a long time.
Picture the room. A house in Bethany. Men reclining at a table, bread and oil, the ordinary noise of a meal. Then a woman comes in carrying a small stone jar. Nobody invited her to speak, and she does not speak. In all of Mark's telling she does not say one word.
She breaks the jar.
Hear that. She does not open it. She breaks it. A sealed jar can be opened a little, and a little can be poured, and the rest saved for later. A broken jar holds nothing back. Whatever was in it is given now, all of it, and there is no later.
Then the smell fills the room. Spikenard is heavy and sweet. It would have been in his hair, in the cushions, in the clothes of every man at that table. They would carry it home whether they wanted to or not.
And the first word spoken about her is waste.
They had done the arithmetic quickly. The text tells us it might have been sold for more than three hundred pence, which was most of a year's wages for a working man. They knew the price of the jar before the oil had finished running. And the text says they murmured against her.
Notice how good their reason sounds. It could have been given to the poor. Who can argue with that? This is how it is usually done. People are seldom put out of a room with an ugly reason. They are put out with a fine one. Somebody says a true and worthy thing, and uses it as a stick.
Some of you know that stick. You gave years to a marriage, or a congregation, or a parent who could not love you back, or a calling that closed its door. You poured out what you had. And when it was over, someone at the table looked at the floor where it had spilled and said, what a waste.
Maybe you have said it yourself. Maybe you say it at three in the morning.
So listen to what is said next, because it is said for you.
"Let her alone."
Three words. Before any explanation, before any teaching, he puts himself between her and the table. Why trouble ye her?
And then he does the thing the whole story turns on. He renames what she did. They said waste. He says a good work. Same jar, same oil, same floor. A different name.
Then he says something smaller and kinder still. "She hath done what she could."
He does not say she did everything. He does not say she did it correctly. She did what she could. She could not stop what was coming for him. She could not argue with the priests or turn back the soldiers. She had a jar, and she had her hands, and she used them. He tells them she has come beforehand to anoint his body for the burying. Everyone else at that table was still pretending he would not die. She alone acted as if what he had told them was true.
That is what was called waste. The one person in the room who believed him.
Now turn to the other telling, in the Gospel according to Luke, chapter seven. It is a different house, the house of a Pharisee, and the host is also called Simon. A woman of the city comes with an alabaster box. She stands behind him weeping. The text tells us she washes his feet with her tears and wipes them with the hairs of her head, and kisses his feet, and anoints them.
Here the name she is given is not waste. It is worse. The host says within himself that if this man were a prophet he would know what manner of woman this is that touches him, "for she is a sinner."
And the answer comes as a question. "Seest thou this woman?"
Simon, do you see her? He had looked at her. He had not seen her. He saw a category. He saw a word he already had in his pocket. And he is told plainly that she gave what he, the host, did not give. No water for the feet. No kiss. No oil. She brought all three.
"Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much."
And to her, directly, the last word. "Go in peace."
Now we owe you some honesty, because this church stands very close to this story, and it would be easy for us to take more than the text gives.
The Gospels never name this woman as Mary Magdalene. In Mark she has no name at all. In Luke she has no name. In the Gospel according to John, the woman who anoints his feet at Bethany is Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, and that is another Mary. And nowhere, in any Gospel, is Mary Magdalene called a prostitute. What Luke tells us of her is that she was one "out of whom went seven devils," and that she followed him, and all four Gospels put her at the tomb.
The joining of these women came later. In the year five hundred and ninety-one, Pope Gregory preached a sermon in Rome in which the sinner of Luke, and Mary of Bethany, and Mary Magdalene became one woman. And from that sermon, for some fourteen hundred years, Magdalene carried a name the Scriptures never gave her.
So you see it happened twice. In the room, a woman was named by the men at the table. And centuries after, another woman was named by a man in a pulpit. Sinner. Harlot. Waste.
In this church we read the Scarlet Woman of Revelation as Mary Magdalene, and the Scarlet Beast as Jesus Christ, each handed a wrong name by a frightened age. That is our reading. It is not the plain sense of that book, and we will not pretend it is. But we hold it because we have watched how names get handed out. We have watched who does the handing.
There is a later text outside the Bible, called the Gospel of Mary, in which Peter doubts that the Saviour would have spoken privately with a woman, and another disciple rebukes him for it. It is not Scripture. It is only one more old witness that the argument at the table never quite ended.
So here is the question the story leaves us. Who gets to name what you did?
Not the ones who priced it. They are always quick, and they are always sure.
The one who names it is the one it was poured on. He knew what it was. He called it good. And he tied her to his own story so tightly that it cannot be told without her. Wherever this gospel is preached, he said. So here we are, on a Sabbath, a long way from Bethany, and we are telling it. A memorial of her. We do not have her name. We have what she did.
If you poured yourself out and were told it was nothing, it was not nothing. If love was the thing you spent, it was not lost, even where it was not returned. The room still smells of it.
And if you are empty today, if the jar is in pieces and you have nothing left to bring, then bring nothing. Sit down. Rest is not waste either. You have done what you could.
Let us pray.
Lord, you saw her when the table would not. See us. Where we have been called waste, give us your word for it. Where we have named others too quickly, forgive us, and teach us to look again. Keep those who are tired tonight, and those who are alone, and let them go in peace. Amen.