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| Spikenard plant |
A key element in efficient time management, everyone agrees,
is the establishment of priorities – allocating your time to the most important
matters and leaving the least important to be dealt with when -- and if -- time
permits. This is a truth about life as a whole, and not just daily diaries or business appointments. A ‘wasted’ life is one in which
things that aren’t really important regularly and consistently displace things
that are. It can't but be a central concern, therefore, to ensure that over the course
of our ‘three score years and ten’, we give priority to what truly matters, and
do not fritter our lives away on trivialities.
This seems obvious. It
doesn’t actually tell us what to do, however, unless and until we decide where our priorities should
lie. What should we value above all
else?
In this week’s Epistle,
Paul tells the Philippians what his
priority is. With the extravagant language characteristic of the Middle East,
he declares that compared with ‘the value of knowing Christ’, everything else is
‘rubbish’! He includes in this category his personal possessions, his health,
safety and social standing – all of which he has sacrificed. We can admire Paul
for his discipleship, but it has to be remembered that he was both unmarried
and itinerant. Unlike him, most of us have homes, jobs, families and friends. Even
the most ardent Christian cannot seriously regard these as ‘rubbish’, or
countenance the implication that they could just as well be thrown away.
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| Mary anoints Jesus' feet from The Macklin Bible (1798) |
Still, if Christian life
is to mean anything, it must extend beyond the conventional Sunday morning. So we
do need to ask what priority we give to discipleship in the daily round, and what
it must take priority over. The Gospel this week poses an especially telling
challenge on this score. By anointing Jesus with a rare and very expensive oil made
from the roots of the spikenard plant, Mary of Bethany unmistakeably gives her devotion to
Jesus a higher priority than she gives to helping the many poor people with whom her world was filled. Judas criticizes
her for this, and whatever his motives may have been, lots of people would say
he was right. Yet, in contrast to a common assumption in contemporary Christian
ethics, Jesus commends Mary. In so doing he relegates the needs of the poor, and thereby makes this Gospel passage, and the episode it records, one
that challenges us to think a lot harder than we normally do about our
priorities as Christians.
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