If you want to understand what Gothic architecture is really about, start with the highest vaulted roof or the most obscure corner. Examine the finials on a cathedral tower. Notice the finest details on the hand of a saint poised above the doors to a church. Or research the structural proportions that render mathematical ratios symbolizing the perfection of God. The real meaning of Gothic architecture is found in those places usually invisible to the human eye.
If you really want to understand the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, move beyond the beautiful counterpoint and adventurous harmonies of this musical giant. Look to the hidden messages encoded in the music, those cryptic compositional features that most people never know are there. You will find Bach’s own name spelled out in musical letters or the shape of a cross created by inverted musical lines of a sacred work.
If you really want to understand the culinary arts, before you shovel a piece of food into your mouth at a fine restaurant, notice the arrangement of the food on the plate before you: the visual appeal of contrasting colors and textures, the carefully dripped sauces in patterns, the precisely measured portions of food.
In a functional and mechanistic world, it is perhaps only the arts that have retained the wonder of play. Art, at base level, still prizes the creation of beauty for beauty’s sake: not to win a prize or make money but to offer something beautiful to a demystified world. In most universities, arts programs are the first ones to have funding cut when there are financial challenges. Many parents are quick to redirect their children to other disciplines when they want to study music, art, or dance. What’s the purpose of spending money on college to study the arts when you will never have a financially lucrative career? To artists, making art is a vocation, while to the rest of the world it seems like a waste of time and money.
Of course, medieval sculptors assumed that they would be the only ones to behold the exquisite details on the claw of a gargoyle perched hundreds of feet in the air. I’m sure J.S. Bach knew that few people would be able to decipher the musical codes in his compositions that rendered his own praise of Almighty God. Most chefs assume that the average restaurant patron will immediately destroy and devour their culinary creations. But the point is not so much in customer value as it is in creating art for art’s sake.
For the medieval artisan or J.S. Bach, it takes on another meaning. Art is prayer. Art is praise. Lavishing hours and hours on a work of art that will only ever be seen by the artisan and by God can be nothing other than an act of prayer. But if this is considered a waste, it is very much a holy waste.
There is perhaps no better Scriptural image that represents such seeming wastefulness than Mary anointing Jesus’s feet with oil. Jesus has just raised her brother Lazarus from the dead, and he is the dinner guest of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Everything about what Mary does is utterly extravagant. She uses a pound of oil, worth nearly a month’s wages, if we insist on putting a numerical value on it. It is pure, unadulterated nard. There is no functional reason for this anointing. Jesus has no need of it, nor do his feet. Mary wipes his feet dry with her hair, which means that now her hair is oily and reeking of perfume. Indeed, the entire house is permeated by the smell of this oil. Mary has even risked her own good image by engaging in such an intimate act.
What purpose could this gesture have served? We can’t help but see in it a foreshadowing of Jesus’s own washing of his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper, as well as the anointing of Jesus’s dead body after his crucifixion. But in that moment when Mary anointed Jesus’s feet, there were undoubtedly starving people on the streets of Bethany and nearby Jerusalem. And the smell of nard threatened to overwhelm the smell of the food prepared for Jesus. And Jesus was less than a week away from death, so what purpose could Mary’s anointing have served except no real purpose at all? It was a waste unless you could see it from the eyes of Mary, who wished only to honor Jesus for his own sake and enjoy just a few moments of his glorious presence.
It was Judas who ruptured the beauty of that moment with his cynicism and false self-righteousness, but his voice rings familiar to us doesn’t it? This voice rings down the millennia to our own day mocking us for spending so much time in prayer when we could be out on the streets helping the poor. This sly voice still enters our thoughts when we are taking a moment to be with those we love rather than toiling away at a thankless job. This voice fusses when we insist on beautiful churches and organs, glorious choirs and transcendent worship. This voice argues that we could worship in a much plainer setting and spend the money on those who are hungry. This accusing voice haunts us when we set grand visions for ministry in a parish that relies too heavily on investments. Logical voices say that it would be much wiser to make budget cuts and preserve our meager savings.
Before long, this persistent voice has convinced us that we are left with a moral dilemma and an either/or proposition. Either spend money on those in need and forego art and beauty, or pour it into lavish, self-serving worship and feel guilty forever. But Scripture tells us that Judas’s critical question rang hollow from the start. We know that he had no real interest in the poor. And it reassures us that the accusing voices in our heads and in the world ring false, too. There is no dichotomous choice to be made here.
Nowhere does Jesus say to ignore the poor. Indeed, if we followed Jesus’s own statement back to the Book of Deuteronomy, we would know that because the poor will always be with us, God’s mandate is to care for them.[1] To enjoy God’s presence in prayer, praise, and worship simply for its very enjoyment is no alternative to caring for those in need. It is, in fact, the very source of that care.
The more we are extravagant with God—in our prayer, praise, and giving—the more we can’t help but be extravagant with the poor. The more we engage in holy wastes of time, we will see that lavish worship of God for no other reason than to be with him draws us out of our own agendas. In such praise, our actions are no longer directed towards some end, which often is designed to make us feel good. Wasting time with God reminds us that we must rely on God’s grace alone rather than on our pet projects and task lists.
When Mary revels in Jesus’s presence as she anoints his feet with oil, there is no other purpose than to be with him. It serves no end. She gets nothing from it except a precious moment of being with her Lord. It is an utter waste in the eyes of the world.
And this wastefulness is but a shadow of God’s own wastefulness. What kind of deity is committed to saving a group of people that so persistently turns from him? Could there be anything more wasteful than sticking with a bunch of fickle sinners? Is there anything more wasteful than an act of creation that will be marred time and again because of human arrogance and neglect? It’s all so incomprehensible, and yet it demonstrates the extravagant love of a God who seems to want nothing more than to be in our presence and to love and treasure us as we should love and treasure him.
God’s unflinching devotion to us his sinful children seems to be noticed by fewer and fewer people these days. Like the eyelash of a saint sculpted in stone on the portal of a medieval cathedral or a nod to the Holy Trinity in the key signature of an organ piece, it seems wasteful in its futility. Often, God’s wasteful extravagance goes unnoticed even by us, the recipients of his grace and mercy.
But there is no better way to waste time than to pour it all into being with a God who cannot get enough of being with us. God doesn’t do it to get anything from us, nor should we do it to get anything from God. Wasting time with God humbles our grandest human projects and our sterile mechanization of a world created by a God who longs for us to enjoy it and his own presence. God does not force false choices on us. God is extravagant with us so we might be extravagant with him and the poor and needy. If we can only enjoy his presence, then we will find that such a holy waste of time is, in fact, no waste at all.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Fifth Sunday in Lent
April 3, 2022
[1] Deut. 15:11