Dear Sisters, dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, earlier in the week just ended we heard the familiar story of the betrayal of our Lord by His own disciple, Judas Iscariot. We heard how he judged that this act of betrayal was worth being paid thirty pieces of silver by the chief priests to bring about. We also heard how Judas complained loudly at what he called the waste of a very expensive perfume which Mary of Bethany poured out upon our Lord’s feet just days before His death. What does this tell us? Well, it says that Judas had a terrible sense of value. There are some things that cannot be given a price, they are so valuable, and I think that is what our Lord was telling the Apostles in general, and Judas in particular, when He told them to leave Mary alone. That bottle of perfume was worth nearly one year’s wages for a labourer; it would have taken someone spending many gruelling and back-breaking hours day after day for the best part of twelve months to earn enough to buy that perfume. But our Lord recognised that it was quite simply a symbol of Mary’s love and gratitude to our Lord for having raised her beloved brother Lazarus from the darkness and stench of the tomb in which he had been buried for four days.
To Mary, then, the perfume was hardly precious enough for what she wanted to show, and our Lord knew that, and so He firmly defended what she had done. For Judas, such an anointing could only be waste because he couldn’t recognise the meaning of the symbol and the real cost of true love and gratitude.
Then we consider the thirty silver pieces, which the Book of Exodus sets as the value of a slave, telling us that: ‘if an ox gores a slave, male or female, the owner of the ox must give thirty shekels of silver to the slave's master.’ This, then, is how not only the Chief Priests, but more shockingly, Judas, arrived at a calculation of the worth of our Lord in their eyes. He was no more valuable than a slave. Worse still, it was as though Judas was saying that Jesus is just a commodity to be traded with, no longer even a person, let alone one to whom Judas owes unswerving loyalty as a friend and a disciple whom he has followed for the last three years.
But why, on this most wonderful of nights, do I go back to those events from last week? It is because they should remind us of another transaction, another exchange, which, while it is equally shocking, is also infinitely more joyful and fruitful. For whereas Judas’s sale of his Lord leads only to two deaths, Jesus’s and his own, this other exchange leads to life, and eternal life at that. For if Judas showed only greed and contempt, and Mary of Bethany showed what love she was able, yet still without being able to save Jesus from death, we are faced with something infinitely greater and more powerful, that is love without limits on the part of the infinite God Himself; a love which cancels out Judas’s miserable perfidy on the one hand and praises and perfects Mary’s generosity of gesture on the other. It perfects it by utterly shattering the bonds of death itself, the bonds in which our Lord has just been enchained as a result of his Passion and death on the cross.
During the Exsultet, the mighty and ecstatic hymn which sang of the joy of Easter following our entry into the chapel this evening, these words were sung to God the Father: ‘O wonder of your humble care for us! O love, O charity beyond all telling, to ransom a slave you gave away your Son.’ Well, what can we say? If Mary’s gesture of love was extravagant and powerfully symbolic, how much more powerful and effective was the Father’s outpouring of His own Son’s life on the cross? Unlike Mary’s sign of love, the crucifixion was no mere gesture, but a total giving of God himself. Father and Son alike did this for one reason and one reason only: love - infinite love, totally extravagant and unselfish love. To ransom a slave God was prepared to pay not thirty pieces of silver, not the price of a powerful perfume, but the price of His own Son’s Passion and death.
But who is the slave? Quite simply, the slave is not just all of us, but every unique and individual one of us. When we reflect on those words: ‘to ransom a slave, You gave away your Son’, just remember that those words mean that to ransom me God gave away His Son to suffer a terrible death. Am I worth that much? God not only thinks so, but has acted in the only way that can prove it: He has done it. The death of Christ is a fact in history and its meaning is this: To ransom me, God gave away His Son.
This gift of Himself is the Sacrifice of Calvary. In it God acts out of infinite love for every single one of us here tonight. To God, then, each of us alone is worth as much as the entire human race. This must surely strike us as an astonishing thing to say! Yet we are that valuable to God. Even if God had thought we were worth no more than thirty pieces of silver, the value of a slave, that would surely be something, but God does not stop at a mere trifle like that: he does not stop at anything less than the complete offering up of His Son as a proof of His infinite love, and as the means of bringing us out of that slavery in which we had been condemned to live and die until our Lord paid the infinite price of His own precious life’s blood on the cross.
Mary’s precious perfume was the best she could offer to show her thanks for the life of her brother. But Jesus here does more than raise Lazarus: by means of His own rising from the dead He promises to raise each and every one of us along with Him on the last day.
So now, on this most holy night we give thanks for that price which has not merely bought us out of slavery, but has crowned us with the dignity of the new life of the resurrection, the life in which each of us is already a first-born son or daughter of God Himself. That is how much we mean to God, to our Father and to his Son our Lord. To ransom a slave, that is you and me, He gave away His Son. And now, the Father has raised His Son to life so that He might be the first of many brothers, the first fruits of the plan that God has had for each of us from all eternity. As St John says, ‘we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is’. May this joyful and holy night bring us all closer to the infinitely loving heart of the Father and prepare us for that final day when He will raise us to the fullness of the resurrection of His only Son, our Lord and Saviour who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.
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