One particular day about forty years ago — as a new youth pastor at Bel Air Presbyterian Church — a missionary took me, a friend, and my father on a tour of the Old Tijuana City Dump. I saw the worst poverty that I’ve ever seen, all within a couple of miles from California. For $1,000, my youth group could build a little house in that dump that might house 12 people — and over the next few years, we built several.

On the way home to L. A., near Disneyland, someone spotted the recently finished “Crystal Cathedral,” and we decided to pull off and take a tour. At one point, our tour guide showed us the organ. With great admiration, she gave us the specs and the cost (something like $2 or 3 million). Then she caught herself and said, “But of course, it’s not our organ. It belongs to Jesus.”

In an instant, I thought of the people in the dump and the fact that whatever we do to “the least of these” we do to Him. I did some quick calculations in my head and then grabbed that woman and screamed in her face: “Jesus doesn’t want a pipe organ! Why wasn’t this organ sold, and the money given to 26,000 of ‘the least of these’ just a few miles away from this very spot?” I grabbed her and I screamed . . . in my mind — not in reality. However, I was filled with what I would call “righteous anger.” I felt wrath; I was a vessel . . . of wrath.

In John 12, Jesus stops in Bethany, where He recently raised Lazarus, on His way to Jerusalem to be sacrificed for Passover.

John 12: 2-7, “So they gave a dinner for Him there. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him at table. Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples... said, ‘Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?’ He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief ...Jesus said, ‘Leave her alone, she has kept it for the day of my burial.”

Ouch! Judas makes a lot of sense to me. A denarii was a day’s wage. If you have a full-time job, how much do you make in a year? That’s what Mary poured out on Jesus’s feet (as well as body and hair, apparently) at a dinner party! And in Matthew and Mark, Jesus calls it a “kalos ergon: (beautiful thing).” This is the first and only “work” that Jesus calls “kalos: beautiful and good” in all of the Gospels.

People want “practical application points.” Here it is: Do this. Next Sunday, we’ll invest the annual budget in a communal holy pizza party and foot massage to the glory of God! ...Or not. Although we’d have the facts, we might be missing the plot. So, what was it about Mary that made her deed so “good”? Here are a few ideas.

Something about Mary:

#1. Mary was impractical. When people ask, “Why be good?” it just reveals that they don’t know The Good and don’t love “The Good.” What Mary did was good for nothing, just Good. . . like God.

#2. Mary was unrestrained. She was following no program. There was no “law” that she was trying to fulfill. Mary chose the Good in freedom. That’s what I call “free will.”

#3. Mary was free. So, what was she thinking? Maybe she wasn’t thinking....

#4. Mary wasn’t calculating. She wasn’t asking “Is 10% enough?” She broke the bottle.

#5. Mary was passionate.

I’m guessing that Mary doesn’t even know that Jesus is going to die in six days; she just knows that He is Good and in Him is Life. “It is for my burial,” says the Plot . . . after the fact. Mary wasn’t comprehending; she was being comprehended — seized by the power of a great affection.

I once experienced Jesus, weeping in me, for me, and through me. We wept over a trauma that I had refused to feel that had turned into anger, bitterness, and wrath, all dammed up in my soul... We forgave it, we “let it be,” and wept it out of me. He wept the trauma out of me and turned it into Joy. It was the Mary that wept with Jesus at the funeral, who also anointed Him at the great banquet.

#6. Mary was living in the Now. Now is the moment in which the Plot writes His Story in us, in time. Now is the moment eternity touches time, and time becomes eternal. You can only dance “Now.”

#7. Mary is dancing, and it was an intimate dance.

#8. Mary was intimate.

Each and all of us have surrendered to the wrong helper, been abused, sealed our souls, and assumed that our True Helper — our ‘ezer’ — does not desire our unrestrained, free, intimate, and passionate surrender. But apparently, He does.

#9. Mary was sacrificial. And

#10. Mary was Happy.

Whenever I talk about “sacrifice,” I sense this dark cloud settling over the room, and I think it’s because we’ve been told that sacrifice means that God hates one thing in order to feel better about another thing — that God kills his own Son to feel better about us. That may be what pagan deities (like Molech) desire, but that’s not what God, our Father, desires.

Think about it: Mary is sacrificing everything. And Jesus doesn’t hate the sacrifice; He delights in the sacrifice. And Mary is swept away in this communion of delight.

Have you ever given like that? I bet you have. Perhaps you don’t remember it, for you weren’t calculating; and if you do remember it, you probably didn’t call it “sacrifice” but something else.

I once bought a diamond for my girlfriend whom I planned to make my wife. When the jeweler would show me a diamond and quote me a price, I found myself wanting to grab him and yell, “Harry, I don’t’ care about the diamond; charge me more! Harry, I’ve got this girl! Harry, I can’t buy her love; she’s already given me her love, and I want to give her mine! I want to serve her! I want to bleed for her! Harry, I’m breaking the bottle and pouring it all out! Harry, I don’t have to do it; I want to do it! Harry, I’m a prisoner of Love.” I called it Love. “Harry, it’s impractical (I was spending all my student loan money). It’s extravagant. It’s Love! Is that wrong, Harry?”

You can make an argument that Judas was right. Judas didn’t dislike Jesus; he greatly admired Jesus — he wanted to be Jesus. And so, he could use Jesus to feed the poor, heal the sick, banish the oppressor, and establish the Jewish Nation State of Israel — "his nation” and “his place.” And so, he judged Mary’s sacrifice to be a “waste,” just as I judged the worship of that tour guide at the Crystal Cathedral to be a “waste.”

All the work we did in the dump would’ve been a waste, except that we found ourselves worshipping Jesus in temples of clay. And, weirdly, the kids in my high school youth group never seemed happier. It wasn’t a waste.

Mary would’ve gotten this smelly oil all over Jesus: feet, clothes, head, and hair. When He hung on the tree, the sky grew black, and the earth shook, I bet He could smell Mary and know that He wasn’t alone. To Him, that was worth more than 300 denarii; it was worth His body and blood. Perhaps He is alone in your trauma and on your tree, waiting for you to weep with Him there in order that you would laugh with Him at the Great Banquet.

Jesus broke for Mary at Lazarus’s funeral, and Mary broke for Jesus at the dinner. And Jesus would be broken for all in six days. And we will all be broken for each other until all are bleeding and none are broken, for all are one and each is constantly lost and found in an ecstatically happy communion of Sacrificial Love called Eternal Life.

But Judas, like the Sanhedrin, is dammed (for a time). . . like the creek is dammed next to my house.

Each one of us in an alabaster flask (an earthen vessel), containing the “breath of life.” God creates this self, and yet at some point, each of us begins to create a self-centered self. And so, the Life of God is dammed in a prison that I think is myself. The Judgement of God is to save me from that old vessel of wrath and turn me into a vessel of Mercy — a blood vessel in the living body of Christ. The Judgement of all is to unite each and all in Christ, constantly losing our lives (The Life is in the blood) and finding our lives and the Life in each other in Him.

The Old Stone Temple was to be a banquet hall in which the fragrance of sacrifice would fill the house as a pleasing aroma. And yet, because it seemed that we are the sacrifice that God desires (and we are), and because it was required by law (and it was), and because people thought it was a way to get things from God (they didn’t understand), it was all TERRIFYING.

And yet, all of this is now happening at a house in Bethany, six days before Passover, because Mary chooses to sacrifice herself in freedom — not because she has to, but because she wants to; not to get from God but to give to God. And she’s not dead but fully ALIVE, and not terrified but ecstatically HAPPY.

Mary is waking up to the eternal Judgment of God. She’s waking from the illusion that she’s writing the story, and she’s surrendering to the story that has always been written. We all take The Life, trying to make ourselves Good, and we all die; we sleep, according to Jesus. But God gives His Life — who is The Good — and when we know it, we wake from the dead and begin to Live His Life. We become what we truly are: The Beautiful Thing, The Body and Bride of Christ, His Living Temple, The New Jerusalem coming down.

He is the Seed in the fruit (Eve’s Apple) that rises from the dead in each and all of us, drawing us back to the tree, where together we surrender “The Life.” And lo and behold, He pours it right back in... from the bosom of the Father. And the moment of giving becomes the moment of receiving. That’s no longer death; it’s Eternal Life in the Temple of the Living God.

#11. Mary is worshipping. A sacrifice of praise costs a self-centered ego but returns all things new.

#12. Mary is alive; Mary is awake. “As in Adam all die, so in Christ will all be made alive.”

So, Worship. That’s the impractical practical application point: Wake up, Dead Man.