John 12:3

Mary of Bethany — sister of Martha and Lazarus, close friends of Jesus — takes a jar of pure nard, a fragrant oil imported from the Himalayan foothills and worth roughly a year's wages for a common laborer, and pours the entire thing over Jesus' feet. She then does something even more startling: she lets her hair down in public, an act considered deeply intimate and even scandalous for a woman in first-century Jewish culture, and uses it to wipe his feet clean. The scent spreads through the whole house. This moment happens just days before Jesus' arrest and crucifixion, and the gospel writer John suggests that Mary understood something the others in the room had not yet grasped — that Jesus was about to suffer and die.

Lord, I confess I tend to measure what I give you — keeping something back, just in case. Teach me Mary's kind of reckless, attentive love. You held nothing back for me. Help me stop treating you like someone who deserves only what I can spare. Amen.

What does love look like when it stops doing the math? A full jar. A year's wages. On feet. The other people in that room — including Judas — immediately started calculating: think of what that could have bought, think of who could have been fed. But Mary wasn't calculating. She was paying attention. She saw what the others couldn't bring themselves to see — that Jesus was headed toward something terrible — and she responded with everything she had. No half-measure. No holding some back for later. Most of us are practiced at giving God the leftover perfume — the spare hour, the modest donation, the faith we keep at a safe distance. Mary broke the jar. She couldn't get the nard back. And the fragrance, John notes, filled the whole house. Extravagance like that tends to. There is something uncomfortable about this story if you sit with it long enough, because it quietly asks: what have you been calculating instead of offering? Not as a transaction, not to be seen — but as a response to someone you love deeply, someone you sense is asking for more than what's left over.