It was while our Lord was reclining at an evening meal, where Lazarus and many other guests were present, and where the less contemplative, but probably, not upon the whole less exemplary sister Martha was in attendance, that Mary came in, bringing an alabaster vial of the costly essence; and with words perhaps, or gestures, not left on record, but expressive of the adoration which prompted such an act of homage, lavished the precious liquid upon the head and feet of the Redeemer, in such wise that the whole house is filled with the odour of the perfume.
I. If when Iscariot interposed his odious, untimely, detestable and incongruous question, taking the name of the sacred poor in vain, "Why was this waste made? why was not all this bestowed upon the poor? "If some prophetic lip then present had been severe enough, it might have answered, "This waste was made because Christ chose to make Himself the friend, the advocate and the representative of the poor;" and the more a man truly worships Christ, the more certainly he must regard the poor with the least, most suffering of whom the Saviour has identified Himself. This waste was made, like the waste of seed-corn in the parable, that it might die and spring up again an hundredfold. If Judas had been capable of appreciating that act of worship by Mary, he might have gone down to his grave in peace, and lived in sacred history, an honoured and a sainted man.
II. It well deserves remark that the two occasions upon which our Lord expressed Himself with the most lavish approbation, were both of them essentially acts of worship and nothing but worship, unmixed with any utilitarian element, with anything of a directly and materially useful tendency; both of them actions of self-sacrifice, one to the personal honour of our Lord, the other to the maintenance of temple ceremonies; one was the gift of the perfume, the other was the poor widow's gift of the two mites which make a farthing; but both alike enjoyed the unstinted praise of the Redeemer. Strange to think that now, when for eighteen centuries the fragrance of that perfume has evaporated, and its component particles been dissipated and blown hither and thither in the atmosphere, and while those two mites have corroded utterly away and rejoined the primal elements of nature, the memory of these two women survives, and will survive for ever while the Gospel lives, as the representatives, one of profuse, the other of indigent liberality, but both by force of example the instigators of immeasurable, incalculable beneficence, simply from having done what they could.
W. H. Brookfield, Sermons,p. 158.
References: Mark 14:3. R. M. McCheyne, Memoir and Remains,p. 407. Mark 14:3-9. W. Hubbard, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxiv., p. 282; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. ii., p. 1; H. W. Beecher, Ibid.,p. 340; A. B. Bruce, The Training of the Twelve,p. 300; T. de Witt Talmage, Old Wells Dug Out,p. 36.