Mark 14:1-9 After two days was the feast of the passover, and of unleavened bread… It is commonly argued that whatever may have been the appropriateness of that earlier devotion which built and beautified the temple, it is superannuated, inappropriate, and even (as some tell us) unwarranted now. Those costly and almost barbaric splendours, it is said, were appropriate to a race in its infancy, and to a religion in the germ. But the temple and the ritual of Judaism have flowered into the sanctuary and the service of the Church of Christ. Not to Mount Gerizim nor Jerusalem do men need to journey to worship the Father, says the Founder of that Church Himself. "God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." If one would show his devotion to Him, says this same Teacher, "sell all that thou hast and give to the poor." It is not to adorn temples and garnish holy places that Christianity is called nowadays, but to rear hospitals, and shelter orphans, and feed the hungry. It is a diviner thing to send bread to some starving household, or to minister in some plague smitten Memphis or New Orleans, to some fevered sufferer, than to build all the altars and adorn all the sanctuaries that ever were reared. No! it is not — not one whit diviner — noble and Christ-like as such service surely is. Let us come to a distinct understanding here as to an issue concerning which, in the popular mind, there is much confusion and much more misapprehension. If it be asked, Is there not an order and sequence in which things equally excellent may wisely and rightly be done, the answer is plain enough. If anybody is starving or houseless or orphaned, the first thing to do is to feed and shelter and succour them. And so long as such work is undone, we may wisely postpone other work, equally meritorious and honourable. But it should be clearly understood that if in some ages a disproportionate amount of time and money and attention have been given to the aesthetics of religion, in others the same disproportion has characterized that which has been given to what may justly be called the sentimentalism of religion. An enormous amount of indiscriminate almsgiving both in our own and other generations has bred only shiftlessness, indolence, unthrift, and even downright vies. God forbid that we should hastily close our hand or our heart against any needier brother! But God most of all forbid that we thrust him down into a condition of chronic pauperism by the wanton and selfish facility with which we buy our privilege of being comfortably let alone by him with an alms or a dole. Better a thousand times that our gifts should enrich a cathedral already thrice adorned, and clothe its walls already hung with groaning profusion of enrichment, for then, at least, someone coming after us may be prompted to see and own that, whatever fault of taste or congruity may offend him, there has not been building and beautifying without cost and sacrifice Those wonderful men of an earlier generation toiled singly and supremely to give to God their best, and to spend their art and toil where, often if not ordinarily, it could be seen and owned and adequately appreciated by no other eye than His. This, I maintain, is alone the one sufficient motive for cost, and beauty, and even lavish outlay, in the building and adornment of the House of God. We may well rejoice and be thankful when any Christian disciple strives anywhere to do anything that tells out to God and men, whether in wood, or stone, or gold, or precious stones, that such an one would fain consecrate to Him the best and costliest that human hands can bring. When any poor penuriousness cries out upon such an outlay, "To what purpose is this waste?" the pitiful objection is silenced by that answer of the Master's to her who broke ever His feet the alabaster box of ointment very precious, "Verily, I say unto you," etc. And why was it to be told? for the spreading of her fame? No, but for the inculcation of her example. (Bishop H. C. Potter.) Parallel Verses KJV: After two days was the feast of the passover, and of unleavened bread: and the chief priests and the scribes sought how they might take him by craft, and put him to death. |
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