(originally written in February 2003)
While Jesus was in Bethany in the home of a man known as Simon the Leper, a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she poured on his head as he was reclining at the table.
When the disciples saw this, they were indignant. “Why this waste?” they asked. “This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor.”
Aware of this, Jesus said to them, “Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial. I tell you the truth, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.” (Matthew 26:6-13)
The gospel of John throws some additional light on this story. In John’s account we learn that it was Judas who made the remark about selling the perfume and giving the proceeds to the poor. We also learn that his motivations were corrupt, because he was in charge of the money bag and would help himself to whatever was in it.
But let us block that out for now. Let us assume that the disciples’ motives were pure, and that they really had compassion for the poor. Compassion is considered a virtue by the vast majority of men all over the world. Men of almost all religious faiths, even men of no religious faith, consider compassion to be one of the noblest virtues. If compassion is truly such a noble virtue, then why did Jesus rebuke the disciples in the way that He did?
To understand this, let us step back and take a closer look at compassion and its opposite, which is not what we might think. The opposite of compassion is not arrogance, unconcern, or self-centeredness; it is admiration.
Compassion allows you the luxury of letting your spirit go, but admiration requires that you hold your stomach, head, and spirit in an upright posture–and that takes much more than just a girdle. Compassion does not have to have a focus. All you have to do is feel it–without concern for any individual person who might be its object. Just give–and who cares where the money goes? Just act–and who cares whether anyone truly benefits from your actions? Admiration, on the other hand, is impossible to feel without focusing on specific virtues or on specific persons who possess those virtues. Compassion looks down at that which is weak, deformed, and contemptible; but admiration looks up at that which is great, noble, and virtuous. It is impossible to look down at that which you admire. Compassion is a response to suffering, weakness, and infirmity, and it seeks these things out–sometimes manufacturing them in the lives of other people if they are not already present. Compassion even makes a virtue of suffering; if not for suffering, then how can anyone be virtuous by feeling compassion? Admiration makes no provision for weakness or suffering; it responds only to greatness and virtue.
Returning to the story in Matthew, it should be a little clearer why Jesus responded in the way that He did. The woman was motivated by admiration. She recognized the greatness and virtue present in the person of Christ. She recognized that because of His great virtue, He was fully deserving of everything that she could bring to Him—that her offering was in fact just a meager fraction of what He was truly worth.
Had the disciples recognized this, they would not have hindered her. But they were blinded by their compassion for “the poor”–that nameless, faceless mass of suffering humanity. They wanted to take the woman’s offering, her tribute to the infinite worth of Jesus Christ–and throw it away, into the grey fog of suffering, corruption, and deformity known as “the poor.”
Does this mean that we are to be unconcerned about the poor? Absolutely not. The Bible makes it perfectly clear that concern for the poor is one of the ways in which we show our admiration for God. (Proverbs 17:5, Isaiah 1:17, Amos 5:11-12) But let us be clear in understanding the proper motives from which our concern is to proceed Proper concern proceeds from the knowledge that all people are created in the image of God and are the representatives of that image. Out of our respect and admiration for God flow respect and concern for all who bear His image, whether rich or poor. It also proceeds from security in our own identity as children of God and the conviction that we don’t need anything from anyone else that God is unable to provide for us. See John 13:3-5 “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he…began to wash his disciples’ feet.” Jesus was so secure in His identity as the Son of God that He had no need to assert it before His disciples. He was thus free to perform for them an act of service usually performed only by the lowest of slaves.
Much of what the world hails as compassion proceeds from an opposite motive. People are unsure of themselves and they need others to validate their identity. Thus they need the suffering of others so that they might be recognized as virtuous because they eased it. Examples of this are the social worker who convinces his clients that if not for his work they would have nothing; and the people who claim to speak for the black community, who claim that blacks are powerless to attain anything on their own and must trust them to bully their sustenance out of the rest of society. People who engage in this type of compassion dishonor the recipients of their compassion, because they need their suffering to justify themselves.
Let us not focus on “the poor” and how their suffering might help us attain virtue by our actions to ease it. Let us instead focus on God, who is worthy of all our admiration, and let everything we do, even our concern for the poor, flow from our admiration for God.
