I love John 12:3. Mary sat down with an expensive bottle of perfume and ‘wasted’ it all on the feet of Jesus.
The smell of that sacrifice filled the whole house. No one could get away from it. The heavy scent enveloped you no matter where you were in that home. And you could smell it on Mary for quite some time to come, I’m sure. Hair dripping and her clothes also affected as she rubbed the perfume into his feet; the aroma soaked deep into the palms of her hands.
A sacrifice such as this draws our attention to the one worth focusing on and away from ourselves. It overtakes you and you can’t get away from it. The richness in that moment of hard sacrifice lingered for so long where it dripped on the floor and splashed the chair and rested on those who were most closely involved. The broken jar holding the fortune, now gone, becomes a thing of heartbreaking beauty. The worship induced by such lavish expense thrown in an unlikely moment to a humble audience will forever stop us short.
Mary breaking that jar of perfume was just a shadow of Christ’s own body that was to be broken… and it would fill the whole world with the scent of his beautiful sacrifice… Jesus was the expensive jar broken for us.
Judas was wrong. Indeed, it was used for the poor.
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