I wonder how many of us belong
to the “clean plate club.” That nomenclature
lands on those who were raised to eat everything on their
plates because there is some vague relation between not
wasting our food and starving children in China. At least
they were in China when I was little. Today’s parents
probably refer to the starving children in Darfur instead.
Personally, I think every effort
should be made to provide nutritious and tasty food for
starving children—or any children, for that matter.
But I never did figure out how cleaning one’s dinner
plate correlates with alleviating the problem of impoverished
children going to bed with empty stomachs. It does however,
correlate with obsessive eating, weight problems, and
a formless sense of guilt that haunts many people about
being wasteful.
When a woman pours a bottle
of pure perfume on Jesus’ feet one day, one of the
disciples took her to task, essentially saying, “What
a waste! If you wanted to get rid of that perfume, we
could have sold it and fed a lot of starving children
with this. How dare you pour your wealth away in such
a useless manner?”
That perfume very possibly
represented the bulk of this woman’s accumulated
wealth. It was her nest egg. And she poured it on Jesus’
feet. Terribly symbolic act, the feet being the least
honorable part of the body of a person in that time and
culture. Dirty, ugly, misshapen, smelly feet. For a few
moments, drenched in perfume, wiped clean with this woman’s
hair, those feet took on glory worthy of a woman’s
life savings.
Very troubling story in a world
concerned with material resources. Will there be enough?
Are we going to run out? Financial wizards piercingly
scream, “Have you saved enough for retirement?”
Educational consultants sternly warn, “It’s
going to cost $150,000 to send your teen to a decent university.”
It’s no wonder when the church says, “Give
and it shall be given to you,” that such gentle
invitation falls on unreceptive ears—those eardrums
have been rendered impermeable by the stern warnings and
loud screamings from the marketplace.
Very troubling indeed. A life
savings wasted on Jesus’ dirty feet, the very feet
soon to experience the pounding of a sharp spike as they
are pierced in preparation for a humiliating death. Very,
very troubling. What is this story about? More on Sunday
. . . .
