Beauty and Idols: Sermon Preached on 6th April 2025 (Passion Sunday)

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Philippians 3. 4-14; John 12. 1-8

“Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair.”

When we hear this familiar story of Mary the Sister of Lazarus pouring the jar of expensive perfume over Jesus’ feet, do we ever think about the perfume and how much effort went into making it? Making perfume can still be quite an involved process today, and it seems to have been even more difficult in the ancient world without modern machinery. We actually know a little about ancient perfume-making from writings that have survived into the present day. In an expensive perfume, flowers, spices, sap, gum, resin, roots, and different kinds of wood were gathered, probably from different places. Nard, the main ingredient of the perfume Mary is said to have used, is a plant related to the honeysuckle which grows only in the Himalayas, for example. For weeks or months, the whole mixture was left to marinade in some natural oil, perhaps olive oil or some kind of odourless seed oil, during which time it would be repeatedly boiled and the sediment thrown away. Then it may have been transported a long way, perhaps even many hundreds of miles, to be sold.

Although the manufacturing process has changed over the centuries, making perfume still involves the same truly vital ingredients—time, skill, knowledge, patience, creativity, love for the job, and sometimes an appetite for risk. Perfume doesn’t appear by magic. At its root, it is the product of three things: experience, sometimes painstakingly gathered and passed down over many generations; people’s God-given talents; and the God-given gifts of nature. The perfume exists only to make life a little more pleasant, to stimulate our sense of smell, perhaps only for a brief moment. There is something extravagant about perfume: that’s why it’s such a valued gift.

Was Judas right, that the perfume should have been sold? The person who bought it could still have enjoyed the God-given gifts of beauty it contained, and the money could indeed have been spent on the poor. Surely that would have been more useful than a few moments of smell and sensation as the scented oil was poured over Christ’s feet?

So, you could say Martha pouring the perfume over Jesus’ feet is a ‘waste’. But if you take that view then, as plain, cheap, food could nourish us, it’s a waste to buy spices, or a nice cut of meat. It’s a waste of money to put flowers in church. We could just wear the cheapest tracksuit everywhere and live in prefab boxes, and we could not waste money on decorating them. Men could stop wasting money on trips to the barbers, and instead buy a pair of clippers and permanently sport a buzz-cut—and perhaps over time the women could start doing the same. I mean, back in her heyday it looked good on Sinead O’Connor, so I imagine we’d learn to get used to it.

You must think I am making a ridiculous point here. But it is hard to explain what the point of beauty is. It isn’t essential to our survival. If we look at it in purely practical terms, it is “useless”. Surely, Judas has a point here—if we didn’t waste money making ourselves and our surroundings beautiful, we could give the money we save towards looking after the poor and needy. Yet without beauty, life would hardly be worth living.

Beauty seems to be deeply connected with the nature of God. God made a beautiful universe, a beautiful world, full of beautiful life-forms—including us. He also gave human beings a sense of beauty, a clue that we are made in His image and likeness.

At first thought, it seems strange to have this story of extravagance at this point in the Church’s year. Firstly, it’s in Lent when we’re supposed to be fasting from luxuries. But more than that, this is Passion Sunday, the start of the most sombre fortnight in the Church’s calendar.

The reading itself, however, reports these events took place in the first ever Passion Week, exactly a week before Good Friday, on Jesus’ final stop just before he entered Jerusalem, just a couple of miles away at Bethany. This moment of luxury in the company of good friends, was probably Christ’s last moment of genuine relaxation before He entered the bear-pit of His final week. Mary, Martha, and Lazarus were very close to Jesus, and this was probably the last occasion they met their friend in His earthly life. Afterwards, they were left with the memory of this beautiful smell filling their home, a memory that stands out in the reading.

That isn’t so different from our lives, because beauty is something we often have to appreciate and celebrate in the face of worry and misery and even death. There is suffering enough in all of our lives—usually if we aren’t suffering ourselves in some way, then those we love are, and there is always misery in the world. So every act of joy is enacted in the face of pain, and every experience of beauty is a victory for life in the face of death. That is one of the many meanings of Christ’s life; on the night before He died, He came to supper with His friends, and enjoyed drinking wine with them. The beauty of friendship and the beauty of good wine are two of the great joys of life.

Now, at the same time, we must be careful not to make an idol of beauty. We might see the hand of God in and through beauty, but beauty isn’t God, and if we make it our God, we can end up in all sorts of moral trouble. Beauty can be bewitching, seductive, misleading. It can also be empty; the pursuit of beauty to the exclusion of other important things leads very easily to vanity.

God is beyond our control, and following God involves keeping ourselves open to being surprised as to who God is what He wants from us. We often encounter God as a living presence precisely where and when we least expect it. When we think we have a shortcut to God’s nature and God’s will then, whether that short-cut is beauty or anything else, we start making it an idol, and we get into trouble.

Paul’s short-cut to God was the opposite of pursuing beauty, and he learned the hard way that it actually left him very far from God indeed. Paul describes himself in today’s epistle as being “as to righteousness under the law, blameless”. The young Saul, before his conversion, may thought rigidly keeping every rule he could find proved he was faithful to God, but he was a rabble-rousing, thuggish, bigot, responsible for the gruesome murder of St Stephen among many other wicked things. But he could point to a set of rules that he kept fastidiously, so he could pretend he was “blameless”.

Of course, it’s good to be a law-abiding person, just like it’s good to be someone who appreciates beauty. But both these things can become idols. The pursuit of any good thing taken to extremes can become an idol. Only God is worthy of our worship.

Beauty is not our goal, but it is a gift and a sign—a gift on our journey through lives that can seem like wilderness, and also a sign that we are made for more than just consuming and surviving. The gift of beauty should cheer us as, like St Paul, we strain towards the true goal that beauty signposts us towards—eternity with our Heavenly Father. An eternity gained for us by the victory won by Jesus Christ, and won by Him on the Cross where the beauty of His nature in the face of death is a sign ever pointing us towards eternal life.

Now praise, glory, and honour be to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is with us in times of plenty and times of austerity, when we are doing and when we are fasting, in all the earth and for evermore. Amen.

Top image—the human instinct for beauty incarnated in the great Rose Window at Salisbury Cathedral in sunset light. © Gerry Lynch, 24 March 2025.