COUNTING NOT THE COST
By the Rev. C. Silvester Horne, M.A.
"When His disciples saw it, they had indignation, saying, To what purpose is this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor."—St. Matthew xxvi. 8, 9.
Blessed is the love that counteth not the cost of sacrifice! Thus I read the meaning of the Master's recognition of this act of homage—the form in which a devout and eager spirit of reverence found expression and articulation. This woman, by surrendering herself to the impulse of adoration and affection, laid herself open to the criticisms of the self-constituted champions of common sense, utility, and philanthropy. We shall see, as we look at her story, how, in the regard of Heaven, what I might venture to call a genuine and spontaneous extravagance ranks higher than a legal and mechanical economy.
There is a truth we have not anything like exhausted yet in the great words of Christ, "He who saves [or hoards] his life shall lose it." Parsimony, if we knew it, impoverishes as well as extravagance. If the prodigal had turned miser, he would have remained just as far from the father's house. We do not accuse the disciples for a moment of selfishness or greed. If they misconstrued Mary's motive, let us beware lest we misconstrue theirs. Say they were honest and genuine, but that they lacked insight and that emancipation from the commercial spirit which saves men from estimating all precious and lovely things at their market value.
We need the lesson. No century has needed it more. While love in self-forgetfulness and holy passion is spending itself in the tenderest offices that an overflowing heart has suggested, the disciples are engaged in problems of valuation, working out calculations in arithmetic—so much ointment at so much per pound. But that would have been condemned by many who would yet ask themselves seriously whether their main contention was not right. Their blunt and rude interruption showed lack of feeling; it was vulgar and inexcusable. Granted. But if they had quietly sympathised with the good intention, and yet afterwards had clearly represented that here love had loved "not wisely but too well," and had done better if it had selected some more practical method in which to exhibit its reality, would they not have commanded a very general assent? Would not nine out of every ten have said that she could have laid out the money to better advantage, and that it was a holier thing to clothe and feed the persons of the poor than even to anoint the person of the Christ?
Now let me say that I do not think we can understand our Saviour's commendation of this deed of love, and this apparent disregard of principles of utility and practical philanthropy, unless we take at once a large and a deep view of life—its purpose and the methods of its education. The pressure of the material necessities is constant and urgent, I know; but God does not mean us to believe that the supreme questions of life are "What shall we eat, and what shall we drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed?"
When Christ propounded His query to the multitudes on the mount, "Is not the life more than meat, and the body than the raiment?" He demanded in reality their assent to the proposition that the spiritual life is the supremely important. The fact of the matter is, God has never treated man as if he were made to eat and drink because to-morrow he must die. The world is not designed simply to promote our physical well-being, and conducted on purely utilitarian principles, as if it were some sort of gigantic store in which all men were shareholders, and the sole business of which was to produce certain annual profits. That mode of regarding the universe is popular, but false.
Have you ever asked yourselves the question, "What do the spring flowers mean?" I have sometimes tried to fancy men gloomily riding to the city and sulkily pointing to the wealth of ephemeral beauty that has glorified the world, and demanding, "To what purpose is this waste?" There the flowers bloom, so fragile, so delicate, so short-lived; here to-day, and faded and gone to-morrow: to-day, a quivering point of beauty and fragrance, to-morrow touched by the withering finger of decay. And so "they bloom their hour and fade," and we say in wonder, "To what purpose was this waste?" What did it all mean? One sudden, genuine gush of sacred feeling; one burst of almost overpowering glory that shone steadfast for one brief hour and then faded into nothingness. Why lavish such wealth of colour and sweetness on fabrics so short-lived as the flowers of spring? Ah, why, indeed! Long years before man brake the first poor spikenard vessel of worship and adoring love at the feet of the Eternal, God poured His precious gifts of bloom and scent in bewildering profusion and prodigality upon the listless sons of earth.
I have sometimes wondered whether man might not have gone on conceiving of the world as no more than so much food, and clothing, and shelter, if God had not startled him by this annual miracle of spring to ask the question, "To what purpose is this waste?" Just so soon as man found himself appealed to in the higher faculties and senses, did he begin to suspect himself above the brute; did he begin to discover beneath the form of things a gracious and bountiful Spirit, whose attitude to him found voice in these tender and winsome words of Nature's lips.
Flowers "born to blush unseen and waste their sweetness on the desert air"—to what purpose are they? Surely, surely (as Mary's offering of sweet spikenard) they are God's approach to man, if only we would accept them as such. That is the inner meaning of this sudden gush of sacred feeling; that is the purpose of this "waste."
We are reaching, then, this conclusion, that if love is the soul of life, you must expect no mere dead level of respect, but occasional inevitable outbursts of feeling, love's sweet surprises; times when the ordinary prescribed channels through which habitual affection flows are inadequate, and when there must be room for the sweet extravagances of love. The strong, deep love of a father may no doubt be felt in the steadfast care that provides food and clothing, and shelter, and all things necessary for his child. But, after all, home would not be home if there were not room for the rarer gifts, and the moments of sublime abandon, when all the love of the heart breaks forth in unconstrained demonstration of affection.
Life that is love cannot be reduced to formalities; there must be a place in it for the spontaneous, the unpremeditated, the irresistible impulse. Love cannot live and thrive amid conventions merely. It has an etiquette of its own. It must be allowed to make its own proprieties. If you cannot appoint to it an object, and command one mortal to love another, neither can you prescribe the manner of its operation. You cannot control its whims, and freaks, and fancies. It has ten thousand devices that are all enigmas to the uninitiate.
"Love only knoweth whence they came, and comprehendeth love."
Its sanities are stark madness to the matter-of-fact man of affairs. He curtly denominates nonsense what to love is inspiration. He stares in blank incredulity at the simple and magnificent prodigalities of love, and begins to wonder whether he is himself quite sane to-day, and to ask in sheer stupor, "To what purpose is this waste?"
It would not do, perhaps, to make too searching a scrutiny into private personal histories, or it might transpire that, after all, behind even the most stolid of demeanours there lay experiences which memory treasures still, and which are the vindication to them of Mary's sublime extravagance. Yes, perhaps those you least suspect—the level-headed men who are feared for their hard thinking and steely, immovable stolidity, have secret drawers somewhere, with strangely unintelligible relics of a yesterday that was the greatest day of their life—and the least defensible day on any rationalistic view of it! On that day they lost either their head or their heart, or both, and love and reverence found expression; and the spikenard that they broke that day is the one precious memory in what people with unconscious irony are calling a successful career. Yes, the one thing they are proud to have done, the one thing they sometimes think may stand them in stead in a world where wealth and fame will be as nothing, is a thing which none could justify on commercial principles—which stands in conflict with the great aims and efforts of their lives—an action that sprang inevitably from a spendthrift love, and of which the world in which they move might well demand, "To what purpose is this waste?" I venture to say that by that very chapter of their history the possibility is proved that, some day, they may discover a more amazing loveliness and a more overpowering love; and may offer even nobler offerings of life and treasure at His feet, and go forth again, not in shame, but in holy pride and devout thanksgiving that at last they have learned to love with a love that counteth not the cost of sacrifice.
I have seen this exquisite story quoted as a defence of mere ritual. The method is obvious. The hardened lover of simplicity is represented as one of the disciples; and beholding the beauty of architecture, and the stateliness of the ceremonial, and listening to the superb eloquence of the liturgy and grandeur of the music, he asks, "To what purpose is this waste?"
There is a superficial justification for such teaching. But it is only superficial. For if from this incident it be attempted to establish a precedent for permanent elaborate ritual of worship, it must be said this incident goes to prove its impossibility. For ask yourselves, What gave this deed its peculiar and unrivalled power and influence? There is only one answer. It lies in its solitariness. It was spontaneous. It was unique. It could not bear repetition. To repeat it were to rob it of its bloom.
We repudiate, then, the idea that the form of this deed can become the basis of Christian worship. But we are now able to consider the truth that, when love realises itself thus in deeds of worship, it often receives assurances that it has done more than it knew. God interprets our poor intentions so liberally, so largely. He reads into our broken speech such divine meanings. It is ever so. We give a cup of cold water to a thirsty bairn; and lo! we have done it unto Him! We utter our coarse earthly strains of music; and, one day, He bids us hearken! Then there falls upon our ears ravishing heavenly music; and when we could fall down and worship, He tells us it is our own.
Heaven's great melodies are perhaps no more than earth's poor ones, composed in pure love and praise of God, redeemed from their limitations and imperfections in the home of all true worship. So Mary struck her trembling chord, and waited fearful; broke her spikenard, and then marvelled at her own daring; and while, when love had spent itself, a colder mood began to question the propriety, and to strike fear to her woman's heart, Jesus spake and said, "In that she hath poured this ointment on Me, she hath done it for My burial."
Would she ever have dreamed, think you, that she was doing what He said? Would she ever have dared to entertain the thought that He would bear to the grave the incense of her adoration, and that with the final victory of His resurrection her love and worship would have eternal association? Would she ever have dreamed, here in Simon's house, where she was esteemed so meanly and treated so basely—here, amid the splendour of a rich man's entertainment—that in the days when the world had no feasts for Him, but only a cross and a tomb, that then the perfume of her love, the fragrance of her offerings, would surround His form and sweeten His resting-place. Never; but so it was, for the Divine Love caught up the simple act of worship, and gave it eternal distinction. Yea, He who had come to seek the love of men deigned to associate with the time of His own immortal sacrifice this sacrifice of hers.
It were, perhaps, to require too much of this story to make it convey the great truth that in Christ's sacrifice all our sacrifices have a place. Yet, verily, every true sacrifice hath association with His. Every death to self is an anointing of the Holy One to His burial. He gathers up the perfume of all simple deeds of lowly sacrifice; for this is His reward. Only from the great Love does our love flow. We love because He loved. His sacrifice is the basis of all sacrifice; and all true sacrifice of ours hath this relation to His own. We did not think when we did it of anything but that we must do it unto Him; and in grace He showed us afterwards that we had indeed anointed Him—we had in our own poor way honoured the Divine sacrifice.
It would but mar the solemn influence of such a sacred reflection to deduce the obvious and inevitable lessons. I forbear to treat it thus. I can only say, let us pray and let us strive to love Him with the love that counteth not the cost of sacrifice.
