Our Easter Gospel today comes from the Gospel of Matthew – one of the four books of the New Testament, in the Bible, that tells us about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Over the past week, on Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday, we have read a big chunk of Matthew’s Gospel, leading us up to this point – Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem, greeted by excited crowds; his confrontations with religious and political leaders there; his last meal with his friends; his arrest, trial, and execution. And today: what happens next.

Our Bible study group read these chapters recently – and our attention was caught by a part of the story that our readings in worship skip over. Right after his enemies make up their minds that it’s time to arrest Jesus in secret and have him killed, Jesus is sharing a meal with friends in a village just outside Jerusalem. While he’s reclining at the table, a woman comes to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she pours on his head – a gesture of honor and celebration. Matthew tells us, ‘When the disciples saw it, they were angry and said, “Why this waste? For this ointment could have been sold for a large sum, and the money given to the poor.” But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why do you trouble the woman? She has performed a good service for me… By pouring this ointment on my body she has prepared me for burial. Truly I tell you, wherever this good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”’

There are several things going on in this brief scene. It points towards Jesus’ death and burial. There’s a hint of a possible motive for Judas, the disciple who leads Jesus’ enemies to him. In the very next verse says, ‘Then one of the twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, “What will you give me if I betray him to you?”’

And then there’s the clash between the disciples’ ethics, and those of Jesus and the woman who anoints him. 

The disciples feel that this expensive perfume should have been sold, and the money given to the poor. That view is reasonable. It’s righteous. It’s sensible and necessary, moral and correct. 

We’ve had conversations like this at St Dunstan’s, at times. Does it make sense to spend money on flowers and special treats and Easter egg prize bags when there are people struggling to make rent? What’s our budget for responding to human need? What’s our budget for joy, for holy celebration? Is there a correct ratio between those things?… 

But Jesus rejects that way of framing the question. He says, She has done a good service for me. The word good here, kalon in Greek, can be translated beautiful, right, fitting, excellent, precious. Far from being inappropriate, excessive, tasteless or senseless, he says that her action is so right that it will be remembered as part of the Gospel, the good news, as it is read and preached around the world. As indeed it is! 

The excess of this woman’s gesture isn’t waste, in Jesus’ eyes. It’s something else, something more. Something beyond sense or necessity. Generosity beyond measure, love beyond respectability. Something more than human righteousness. 

There’s another moment in Matthew’s Gospel where righteousness falls short – way back at the beginning. Jesus’ mother, Mary, is engaged to be married to a man named Joseph, but before they are married, it’s discovered that Mary is pregnant. She says the baby was conceived not in the usual way, but by the Holy Spirit. Matthew tells us, “Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to divorce her quietly.” But before he’s taken action, an angel speaks to him in a dream: “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

Joseph’s plan to set Mary aside was righteous. He was under no obligation to marry an unfaithful woman. Plus, maybe her pregnancy meant she had affection for another man. He would give her back to her family, perhaps give them some money to provide for her and this mystery child, and go on with his life, find another bride. Sensible and necessary, moral and correct. 

But that’s not what happens. Instead, an angel speaks for God, telling Joseph: Take on Mary; take on the child. Take on shame and uncertainty. Take on mystery and possibility. Do something beyond righteousness. 

Generosity beyond measure, love beyond respectability. 

What if beyond righteousness is a theme of Matthew’s Gospel – a theme of the whole Jesus business? 

One of the Big Questions people sometimes ask is: Why did Jesus have to die? And one of the Church’s answers, over the centuries, has been: Jesus died in our place, as a perfect sacrifice, to satisfy our debt to God because of our sinfulness. The logic comes from the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, developed in the earliest years of God’s covenant relationship with the Jewish people. Certain animals were to be sacrificed – ritually killed – at the holy place, the tabernacle and later the temple. Those sacrifices were a means to ask God’s forgiveness, or seek purification and restoration. From the earliest days of Christianity, this ritual system has been one among many symbols and metaphors that Christians have used, to try to make theological sense of Jesus’ death on the cross.  

But the author to the letter to the Hebrews – the place in the Bible that most thoroughly explores the analogy between Jesus and those sacrificial animals – stresses that Jesus’ death on the cross doesn’t just fulfill or perfect the sacrificial system. Jesus’ death exceeds, transcends, overflows the sacrificial system, as he serves as both High Priest and perfect Lamb. 

Understandings of the Cross that make Jesus into an animal killed to buy off God’s indignation turn the whole business into a matter of ledgers and balances – something that we feel able to understand, and perhaps control. It makes Jesus’ death on the cross sensible and necessary, correct and righteous. It’s trying to lock down the grace and mystery and excess into a transactional system that makes sense to human logic.

We see grace and mystery and excess, again, in the gospel of the Resurrection. The earth shakes! An angel tells the women what they need to know – but then Jesus shows up with the same message! The woman rush away “in fear and great joy.” The word for “fear” there is used in the New Testament for the way people feel in the face of strange, divine, confounding things: not just fear but awe, wonder, holy overwhelm. 

Why did Jesus have to die? Why was his death necessary – and likewise, his resurrection? Maybe those are the wrong questions. Maybe “necessary” isn’t the right word or concept at all; maybe the words from the story of the woman with the ointment point us in a better direction – expensive, precious, costly, extravagant. 

Maybe there’s an order of rightness, of goodness, that we’re just not equipped to understand – not because we’re stupid, but because we’re human. There’s only so much we can perceive or understand. The excess, the gratuitousness, the extravagance of Good Friday, of Easter, of all of it – maybe we have have to suspend our efforts to make sense of it all, and just open our hearts to goodness and grace and generosity beyond proportionality or reason. Senseless excess like the beauty of a blossoming tree branch against a blue sky, or the crystals that hide inside a geode, or the way you feel inside when a baby laughs, or the joyful dance your dog does when you come home. 

Maybe Jesus’ dying and rising is so much more than balancing a tally sheet of human wrongs, something instead that this unnamed woman’s act points towards and foreshadows, an outpouring of something indescribably precious and fragrant, a celebration, a consecration. 

Generosity beyond measure, love beyond respectability. 

More than human righteousness. 

Alleluia! Christ is risen.