Shumukh is the world’s most expensive perfume. It’s made from “a stunning combination of ingredients” including Indian agarwood, sandalwood, musk, Turkish rose and others that haven’t been made public. The packaging features a leather display case nearly 2 metres high, while the bottle itself – all three litres of it! – is decorated with symbols of the United Arab Emirates, who commissioned it. So it has three gold Arab horses and three silver clamshells on its base, each (naturally) containing a real pearl. Elsewhere there are three roses in pink gold and diamond dust, and a mini globe with gold continents; while three marble pillars support a golden dome topped with a diamond-studded gold falcon. Altogether the bottle is studded with 3,571 jewels: diamonds, gold, silver, pearls and topazes. I have to say that you can’t buy Shumukh at your local Boots or even on London’s Bond Street: there’s only one bottle in existence and it’s valued at well over a million pounds – which I think is pretty good value for what you get. I wonder if they throw in free gift-wrapping and delivery?

The perfume which Mary poured over Jesus’ feet a week before the Passover clearly cost less than that! But it was still very valuable: three hundred denarii, or about a year’s wages for a working man. In present-day terms it was worth between £15-20,000, although the precise amount is immaterial. What is important for us to notice is that Mary, realising that Jesus was soon to die, was willing – even enthusiastic – to lavish this perfume upon him as an anointing for his burial. Was she secretly in love with Jesus? – well, who can tell? And did she really need to all the perfume? – for a pint is a huge amount! What she’d effectively done was sacrifice her life savings, her pension provision, in one extravagant act of adoration. Everyone who watched her was speechless with shock; except, that is, for one man. “What a waste”, said Judas, “You could have sold that perfume and given the money raised to the poor”. He didn’t see Mary’s act in terms of love, but simply as a huge and wasteful debit in her balance sheet.

Now, we all know that Judas was a crook: John specifically tells us. Perhaps he really would have liked Mary to have given him the perfume to sell on behalf of the poor, as he’d have been able to siphon off a proportion of the proceeds for himself – a nice fat “commission” or “seller’s premium”, which no-one would have known about. Every drop of perfume running over Jesus represented money that he would never be able to get his hands on. That caused him real pain.

Well, we are not crooks. But might I suggest that some of us might secretly be agreeing with Judas: “What a waste”. For Mary was worshipping Jesus; and there are Christians who would say, “Why do you want to waste money on the accoutrements of worship? Because we worship God in Spirit and truth there is no need for any such frills”. These folk would advocate meeting together in very simple buildings, with nothing by way of costly ornamentation such as plush carpets, comfortable seats, works of art and stained-glass windows, or an expensive organ. “Those things are unnecessary”, they would say, “The money should be used for witness and evangelism and reaching the lost”. They might also add that many Christians around the world have to meet in the plainest of rooms or the simplest of shacks.

There is, of course, some truth in this argument and it’s difficult to get the balance right. For our human spirit craves beauty; beauty which speaks about our creative God and which can aid us in our worship. And, from a pragmatic point of view, we live in a world where people are very aware of their surroundings. They will look askance at a tatty building where they have to sit on battered tubular metal-and-canvas chairs: these give a poor impression of both our God and his Church. But where do we draw a line and say, “Enough is enough”?

One of the early leaders of the Charismatic Movement in Britain was a Scottish Baptist minister called Douglas McBain. For many years he led a large church in a poor part of South London. Now you’d have thought that he would have gone for utility in places of worship: after all, his congregation wasn’t rich and didn’t have spare cash to spend on fripperies. But in fact, towards the end of his life, he made a plea for Nonconformist Christians, in particular, to become more aware of their surroundings and to make their churches into lovely places full of art. Perhaps that came out of his experience of living in brutal, ugly, spirit-sapping inner-city London. He knew that beauty touches the human soul in a way which is hard to measure, but rich in value.

That’s one way of looking at Judas’s criticism: here’s another which (I guess) is much favoured by those who see Christianity primarily in doing works of mercy – indeed, serving the poor. They may say, “Why are we wasting valuable time doing religious things when we could be busy changing the world? Why are we indulging ourselves in worship when we could be serving the poor or feeding the hungry or lobbying for justice. Jesus didn’t lock himself in the Synagogue; we too need to be activists speaking powerfully to society and practicing God’s love”.

Again, there’s a lot to be said for this point of view, as these objectors are good and highly-motivated people who know that churches can easily be inward-looking, even cosy, communities which seem to ignore the world around. They also know that some congregations seem to spend far more time worshipping (or, if we’re honest, talking and planning and sitting on committees!) than they do in actually doing the work of God’s Kingdom. There definitely is a time when the talking, worshipping and fellowship must stop and action must begin.

But, again, we must be careful in the way we set our priorities in God’s Kingdom. Vigorous social action is certainly important; and we probably do far too little of it: it’s far comfier staying within the four walls of the church then doing ‘stuff’ in the community! Yet we mustn’t write off worship, as it’s the most uniquely Christian thing we do. Furthermore, we believe that God enjoys it; and we also know that the experience of worship and the stimulus provided by Christian teaching can be just what we need, not only to get us serving but to make sure we don’t give up on it as time goes on. Worship must never become self-indulgent; but it’s vital, and it gives us the inner strength and motivation to serve Jesus in whatever way he may ask us.

So far I’ve only talked about this story in terms of church life. But I wonder if it has a broader significance, which comes in asking where true value lies. For, as he does so often, Jesus seems to be turning our usual way of thinking on its head – in this case, quite surprisingly and shockingly. For we live in a world where so much seems to be assessed through Cost-benefit Analysis, defined as “an analysis of the cost-effectiveness of different alternatives in order to see whether the benefits outweigh the costs”. Its aim is to gauge the effectiveness of a new project or action relative to the status quo. Everything is given a value and the sums are shoved through the economists’ computers.

So, for instance, the cost of building a new by-pass is set against the costs to businesses of delays that will be caused if it is not built – not to mention the damage caused by heavy lorries rumbling through the town centre, cracking the road surface and damaging historic buildings. Fair enough, we might say; but there are other issues which are harder to value, such as the cost to people’s health of fumes in the town centre, the benefits of a clean, quiet and safe environment for shopping, the loss of farmland and animal habitats, the inevitable noise which will spoil the countryside’s peace and quiet – noise which will only get worse as leisure centres, supermarkets and warehouses are built next to the new road. I’m sure that there are sums to quantify these things; but I’m not convinced by them.

What about other values which are even harder to define? Royal Mail decides to close the village Post Office because it’s losing money, the bus service only runs once a week because it’s running at a loss, the Council downgrades maintenance of the park because it’s seen as a “drain on resources” rather than an important amenity, the Church declares a building redundant and asks parishioners to drive to the next village for worship – yes, we can see the cost savings there, but we also see the price that’s being paid in car mileage and pollution, the chipping away of yet another building block that supports a rural community, the increased isolation which will be the consequence for some. One of Oscar Wilde’s characters declared that “The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”: so is this money-based approach to life breaking our society? It can’t be helping it.

This can – and should – become personal, too, for all of us are consumers and we love bargains. Well, I’m not against getting value for money, and I know that we have to make every penny go as far as it can, especially in these straitened times! But we also need to ask ourselves when the cost of bargain-seeking becomes too high, if we are saving money but paying more in other, important, ways. That’s basically what people who support movements such as Fair Trade, Slow Food and Food Miles are doing (not to mention the folk who make a point of buying food at local shops rather than driving to Tesco’s five miles away) – they’re prepared to pay a bit more to make sure that manufacturers and suppliers enjoy decent conditions for the work, or to preserve the ozone layer from pollution and global warming, or to keep local businesses going and make sure the heart isn’t ripped out of our rural communities. These may be seen as middle-class concerns that can only be put into practice by people with money to spare; while there’s some truth in that all of us must realise that there are real values which can’t be counted in cash terms. I believe that Christians must make sacrifices to uphold them.

And, finally, what of the value of religion itself? It’s interesting to notice that the Charity Commission used to give churches an easy ride because it believed that religion in itself was good for society. The Commission doesn’t say that any more: religious organisations must prove that they are acting for the benefit of the public if they are to qualify for charitable status, and of course most churches, mosques, synagogues and other faith groups do a great deal of good. Nevertheless we must realise that many people, seeing us here today, would say that we are wasting our time. For there are many other things that we could be doing on a Sunday morning, some of them even productive, such as baking cakes, visiting the family, putting up shelves, digging a neighbour’s garden – or simply having a long lie-in! Most people in Cardiff will be doing things like that: so why have we wasted petrol, time and brain-power to be here? Is there any point?

The answer, of course, is “yes”. Quite apart from our beliefs, we know that religion does have positive effects on people. They tend to be more contented in life and less liable to be stressed by the consumer ratrace; they have found a basis for life and a moral system to guide them; they have made human friends who they can turn in times of needs and believe that they can tap into divine resources to help them through the vicissitudes of life. Christians would argue strongly that taking time to worship God and trying to follow Jesus’ example aren’t good for them alone but also for society as a whole.

And it’s with Jesus that I want to finish, noticing along the way that his human life began with the Magi’s incense and ended with Mary’s perfume. Both those gifts were expensive, even preposterous; but they pale into insignificance when we think of what Jesus was about to do on the Good Friday Cross. For Mary may have offered a year’s salary to Jesus; but Jesus offered even more, his entire life for the world. Surely this self-giving was the ultimate, most costly and extravagant gesture of love: an offering whose effects continue till now, and for ever. How dare we not offer him back “our souls, our lives, our all”?