Bible reading: John 12:1-9.

I wonder if you recognise these gentlemen? Well, I wouldn’t have either; in fact I’d never heard of them until I started preparing this message. So let me tell you that these men – Gopichand Hinduja, Leonard Blavatnik and Simon and David Reuben, together with their families – top the current “Sunday Times” list of the richest people in Britain. They have a total net worth of something like £90bn. It was only when I got to numbers 4 and 5 on the list that I encountered people whose names were familiar: Jim Ratcliffe, who recently bought a sizeable chunk of Manchester United football club and has grandiose plans for a new stadium, and James Dyson, the vacuum cleaner inventor; these two are worth nearly £50bn. Most of these peoples’ assets are presumably in stocks, shares and property rather than ready cash, but the figures I’ve quoted are nevertheless huge and may speak of personal lifestyles which we struggle to imagine, let alone aspire to.

Let’s go to the other end of the spectrum and think of food banks. The Trussell Trust, which runs two out of every three food banks in Britain and operates in 1200 locations – including here in Llanedeyrn – was founded in 1997, initially to help homeless children who were sleeping rough on Sofia’s central railway in Bulgaria. In 2000 they opened their first British food bank in Salisbury, after being contacted by a mother who was struggling to feed her children. The Trussell Trust keeps very careful records which say that in 2006, the first year for which I have figures, 2,814 parcels were handed out. The figure first topped a million in 2015, while last year it was over three million. The Trust says that the top three reasons which drive people to use a food bank are “income not covering essential costs”, “delays in paying benefits” and “benefit changes”. I’m surely not alone in being shocked when I first heard about the existence of food banks in what is still a relatively rich country; we should probably be more shocked by the way we’ve now accepted them as an almost normal part of the landscape.

I suspect that everyone who witnessed Mary pouring a whole pint of precious perfume over Jesus’ feet – her sister Martha, her brother Lazarus, Judas Iscariot and any other disciples who were present – was shocked at Mary’s spontaneous and extravagant action. We can imagine their eyes opening wise in amazement, their noses becoming overwhelmed by the heady smell that filled the house, their minds working overtime to make sense of what had just happened. We can perhaps imagine a few seconds of startled silence after the perfume had flowed out of the jar, then an excited jabber of conversation: “Did you see what I’ve just seen? Why did she do it? What does it mean?”. However it’s only Judas’ words that are recorded; he says, “What a tremendous waste! That perfume could have been sold for charity”. That sounds like a worthy sentiment – but the words ring hollow when we read John’s footnote: “Judas was a thief”. As the disciples’ corrupt treasurer, he saw a wonderful opportunity to make a fortune slopping out of that jar and over Jesus’ feet. But he could never say anything to the others: to them, he was just one of the gang.

Before I go any further, I’d like to talk about two things: the perfume and the poor. First nard: this is an aromatic amber-coloured essential oil which comes from a plant in the honeysuckle family which grows in the Himalayas of Nepal, China, and India. However the word ‘nard’ was sometimes used as a label for other perfumes, so we can’t be 100% sure of what was in that jar. The one thing we can be definite about is that it was very expensive as it cost 300 denarii; in today’s money that probably equates to around £20k or £30k. But why did Mary have the perfume in the first place? The answer to that may well lie in this story’s context. For we are in John 12, and chapter 11 tells us about Jesus’ greatest miracle, the raising of Lazarus from the dead – Lazarus who was Mary and Martha’s brother and present at this meal. It therefore seems very likely that Mary had bought the perfume in order to anoint her brother’s body, ready for burial – but that was no longer necessary. So Mary (who I sometimes think had a bit of a “thing” for Jesus) makes a decision: “I’ll show my gratitude for what Jesus has done by anointing him instead”. The parallel stories in the other Gospels suggest that Mary’s act foretold the foot-washing that Jesus would receive on the night before he died.

That’s the perfume; what about the poor? Well, there are two words for poor people in the New Testament. One simply means the ordinary folk who had to earn their living: in other words those who weren’t members of the gentry or leisured elite who were free to give their time to politics, education and war. The other word for ‘poor’, however, means the people who were at the very bottom of the economic pile, destitute of resources and, at a time when there was no state ‘safety-net’, reduced to begging. One historian says that these people had lost many or all of their family and social ties; they were often wanderers and hence outside any social group who might be able to offer support. We know that Jesus often encountered such folk – the poor people that Judas was referring to – in his travels and usually reached out to them. So we might expect Jesus to have endorsed Judas’ words; but he didn’t; quite the opposite. For he commended Mary for her over-the-top act of devotion and said, “She did the right thing; there will always be poor people among you, but you won’t always have me”.

If Mary’s act was extravagant and uncalled for, Jesus’ response seems to be shocking, even callous – it seems totally out of character for a person we think of as going out of his way to care for the needy. One writer says that these words sound like “a shrug of Jesus’ shoulders in the face of the enduring problem of poverty”. The same writer goes on to say that, if he could ask Jesus to take back any of his teachings, this would certainly be on the short-list. However, things are not quite what they seem to be, as the people in that house may have realised.

For this phrase, “You will always have poor people with you” didn’t come out of thin air. Just as, when Jesus is dying on the cross, his words, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” are in fact a quotation from Psalm 22, so these words are a quotation from Deuteronomy 15 – which is why we read it earlier. The full verse the words come from goes like this: “There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be open-handed towards your neighbours who are poor and needy”. This, I think, puts a very different complexion on things: yes, Mary’s incredible generous to Jesus should remind people not just that they have a responsibility to support the poor but that this is nothing less than God’s command. Her action should be an inspiration rather than a target for criticism (and, in any case, if Mary had given that perfume to Judas and asked him to sell it for charity, not one penny of the proceeds would have gone to the poor anyway).

Let’s go back to “the poor” – not in AD30 (or whenever this incident took place) but in 2025. According to the highly respected Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which seeks to analyse and alleviate poverty, more than 14.3 people in the UK – or slightly over 1 in 5 – were in poverty in 2022/23, the most recent year for which there are figures. Digging down a bit further, we find that 1 in 3 children are living in poverty. This situation is proving hard to change: while there do seem to be slightly fewer poor pensioners, the number of poor children continues to rise. It’s more than 20 years since we last saw a lengthy period of falling poverty, and the number of people classified as living in “deep poverty” has actually risen by almost two-thirds over the past 25 years, especially since 2017, These are very depressing statistics, and we must wonder what effect the Chancellor’s recent announcement on benefits will have on them, for better or for worse. Certainly many Welsh Labour Councillors and MPs in places such as Merthyr Tydfil and Blaenau Gwent, some of the most deprived in the whole of Britain, have written to her to express their very deep concerns and fears.

It clearly sends the wrong message for churches to spend huge sums of money on themselves – whether that be on imposing buildings, costly art works, elaborate ceremonies or the like – when so many people would say, “How does any of this help us?” (which is not to say it’s bad to invest in beauty which inspires our spirits). It’s also important for us to think how we use our own resources: do we really need that home improvement or “holiday of a lifetime” which cost thousands of pounds; should we be less self-centred with any wealth we may be fortunate enough to possess? These are hard issues for us, indeed for me, to face; yet face them we must, as responsible, caring Christians.

However there is one point I haven’t made about this story. Mary could only anoint Jesus while he was present – which wouldn’t be for much longer. She seized the occasion of this dinner part which, you’ll remember, was quite possibly a celebration of Lazarus’ miraculous restoration to life, to perform this extravagant act of adoration. The circumstances of time, location and opportunity all fell into place together; would that ever happen again? If Mary had not anointed Jesus’ feet then, she might not have had another opportunity – as Jesus himself recognised. So perhaps there might be times when we, too, might want to abandon caution and carry out some spontaneous act of devotion to God or, indeed, to someone we love.

Jesus is not dismissing the poor. His reply to Judas isn’t meant to be a general instruction about how his followers should relate to those who are in need; Jesus’ whole life demonstrates that. In fact, he may want us to see Mary’s extravagance as an object lesson: “Look how much she has given to me; you, in turn, must give generously to others”. It’s been said that those who are miserly in their devotion to Jesus will be miserly in their care for the poor, but those who respond extravagantly to Jesus’ extravagant grace will respond in the same way toward those in need around them. I finish with a quote from a Catholic priest who has written about this story: “In his death and resurrection, Jesus has thrown open the doors of heaven in the most extravagant act of hospitality imaginable. … For we who live on this side of the resurrection, our task is to take the same kind of extravagant hospitality that Mary offered to Jesus and to offer it instead to those most in need of welcome: the poor, the oppressed, the disheartened, the downtrodden. This is the great commandment. This is the extravagance to which we are called”.