Readings – Isaiah 43: 16–21; John 12: 1–8
“Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?”
Admit it, a large part of you agrees with Judas when he asks Jesus this question… keep that in mind, we’ll come back to it!

St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, Kyiv, 13 August 2017. © Gerry Lynch
If you have seen television news reports from Kyiv, you will doubtless have seen the magnificent St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery. A huge trapezium of sky-blue with white vertical stripes, all capped by seven golden domes, and next to it an even bigger clock-tower in similar colours with a truly huge golden dome on top. It was originally built towards the end of the 11th Century, a few decades before our own St John’s, and like our St John’s it was developed in fits and starts over many centuries. It was hugely expanded in the ornate Ukrainian Baroque style which make Kyiv’s churches and monasteries a delight during the 18th Century, the period when many of our beautifully carved wall memorials in St John’s were erected.
What I’ll tell you next is hard to believe, although we have learned in recent weeks the depth of hatred Stalin held for Ukrainian culture and identity, but those wonderful 18th Century baroque extensions were used as an excuse for the Soviet authorities to declare the monastery historically “inauthentic” in 1934, and it was demolished, replaced by a modern office block housing the administrative headquarters of Soviet Ukraine. What we see today has been entirely rebuilt over the last thirty years, as faithfully as possible to what was there before.
On one level, buildings are just stones: but they are also things that can move people to tears through their beauty, and be the repositories of the soul of a nation, or a family, or a faith. Stalin, among others, understood how much buildings mattered – St Michael’s was one of thousands of churches destroyed across the Soviet Union in the 1930s, as the state tried to destroy Christianity. But he also understood the power of beautiful buildings to lift up and renew. Much of the centre of Kyiv was destroyed during the Second World War, and it was the site of one of the first rebuilding efforts in the immediate post-War years, especially around the famous Maidan, a handsome cityscape of optimistic wedding-cake towers and neo-classical pillars. The aim was to incarnate in stone the beauty of Communist ideals of progress and enlightenment, and inspire the people of Ukraine to play their part in rebuilding the USSR after the depredations of Hitler.

Domes of St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv, 10 August 2017. © Gerry Lynch.
Let us turn the clock back even further, before the construction of St Michael’s in Kyiv and St John’s in Devizes, before even the times when Christ walked the earth, to the time when the Scythians were the people who dominated the great Eurasian plain, from Ukraine in the west as far as Mongolia in the east. A few years ago there was an exhibition of their art at the British Museum. The Scythians had no writing, but worked gold with exquisite skill, the equal of the Greeks and Persians of the same period. Complex depictions of Tree of Life, sometimes a foot high, reveal a people with a keen sense of spirituality and the wonder of creation. The instinct for beauty seems to be hard-wired into us.
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