God `n' plenty.

The day I read the first page of my high-school economics text was a turning point in my life. Scarcity, a new term for me, stunned me. The scholarly authors said it means that we are always competing against everyone else because the world doesn't hold enough goods to satisfy us all. In my head, scarcity announced, "Life is a battle and someone will always lose, so work hard, produce, and consume very carefully, and you can minimize the damage to yourself and to others. But you cannot change the sad truth that we will never have enough to satisfy us all."

I had seen poverty. My parents took me to volunteer at a soup line and to visit an acquaintance whose medical bills left barely enough to get by on. But I had never before realized that I myself was in competition against poor people. My 4-year-old nephew suffered this same moment of horror when his mother told him to "eat up, because poor, hungry children in India would love to have that casserole." This darker significance of the food on his plate stifled any appetite he might have had. What he ate was taken out of hungry mouths.

Jesus' companions at Simon the leper's dinner in Mark 14:1-11 hadn't read my high-school economics text, but when a woman emptied a fabulously expensive bottle of scented oil on Jesus' head, they knew the costs the poor pay for the whims of the rich, and they protested. "This could have been sold for more than 300 days' wages, and the money given to the poor." In one flick of the wrist, she spent a year's wages for a laborer, or, at five dollars an hour and eight hours a day, something more than $12,000.

A $12,000 jar of perfumed oil? How much food or clothing or medicine could that money have bought? The lilies-of-the-field stuff sounds nice, but lilies wilt and sparrows fall to the ground, and because the woman spent her money on perfume rather than alms, the blind beggar by the gate and the old widow down the road might die of hunger. Many do.

Heedless of economics, the woman takes that exotic flask of oil, breaks it open, and pours it on Jesus in a fragrant moment befitting the installation of a great krug, like Samuel anointing David to be the shepherd of Israel. She gives no introduction, no commentary, no defense. She simply makes Jesus the Anointed One, the Messiah, and then stands back to see what he will do. Her critics wait as well. Even if they admire the scene she has made, they know her gift to Jesus has robbed the poor. Jesus will take her down a notch, won't he? Here comes one of those sayings against the rich!

Wrong. Jesus not only condones her gift, he even praises the woman for her good deed. "Wherever the good news is proclaimed throughout the world, what she has done will be told in her memory."

Yet Jesus, as usual, adds a few twists. In the dark days surrounding this dinner, everyone is trying to manage Jesus for their own purposes. The religious leaders want a quiet way to kill him, this unnamed woman is making him king, her critics want a prophet of social justice, and Judas isn't telling. Jesus slips out of all of their planning. The woman, although she receives Jesus' praise in silence, must have been shocked to hear her big moment made into a simple almsdeed, to hear him say that being Israel's anointed means being dead and buried, not powerful and effective.

"She has done me a kindness.... By perfuming my body she is anticipating its preparation for burial." He has been anointed for the tomb as he will be crowned for the cross. Jesus never is the king we expect.

Those critics who want Jesus to defend the poor against the rich find the tables turned on them as well. They worry that the woman has wasted scarce wealth, but Jesus ignores that fear and responds as though they were concerned that they had lost an opportunity to do good. "The poor you will always have with you," he says, "and you can be generous to them whenever you wish, but you will not always have me." He comforts them not with promises of paying back the year's wages or giving a rule about how to use funds wisely, but with the good news that no shortage will hold them back from witnessing to the kingdom.

I can almost hear him going on: "Don't worry; you have plenty of opportunities to do the good you are so eager to do. The poor are always with you and you can always do them good. Go ahead, sell what you have and give the money to them today. You can invite them in for a party or for dinner, and why not now? I assure you, even after my death, you will not lack for chances to be generous." Far from a sigh of resignation, "you will always have the poor with you" is an invitation and a promise to those who want to give glory to God. And with it, Jesus puts the ball squarely back in the critics' court--and ours.

Judas apparently is unimpressed by this table-turning. Immediately, according to Mark, he betrays Jesus. Mark does not tell us what was in Judas' mind, but we can imagine it easily. We think it ourselves: Isn't this just pretty talk? Does Jesus expect us to believe that God will magically supply so much that we can afford to blow a year's wages on scented oil and still have plenty of alms for all those in need? He can't wish away the hard choices we have to make between competing goods. We have to be prudent, to be good stewards, because what we spend on ourselves is consumed and lost to those who need it more. Jesus is too romantic, and he ends up permitting honor to his body at the expense of care for other suffering bodies.

Jesus' body is the heart of this episode. Hunted, handed over, anointed for kingship, and--it turns out--for death, that body becomes the storm center of that Passover. Jesus' companions in this story push and pull on that body to fit it into their own expectations, but we, on the other side of the Resurrection, have the advantage of knowing how strange and unmanageable Jesus' body can be.

We expect bodies to consume. I have to use food, clothes, soap, and toothpaste, and when I do, those goods are no longer available to anyone else. But in this story Jesus is not the typical consumer: He graciously receives the woman's gift of precious oil poured out and then makes it the pledge of his own pouring out of his life. He becomes the most costly ointment. The gift given to him returns to us, to invite us to give again. In the same way, Christ's sacramental body is not like any other food. The Fathers of the church were fond of saying that although we consume the Eucharist, it actually consumes us. In the use of it, it becomes more plentiful, more available; in apparent destruction, it bears fruit. The abundance of the Body of Christ only makes it more desirable, and each person receiving it builds up the health of the others instead of stealing from them.

What I've just said about the Eucharist could as easily be said about church, which we also call the Body of Christ. Anointed with the gifts of the Spirit and fed on the food of eternal life, the church is not a corporation coping with scarce resources by making tragic choices between deserving causes. Christ's body is the site of God's generosity, not of the world's scarcity. What I learned about scarcity in my high-school textbook was wrong. The church doesn't live by competing for scarce goods--it lives on unexpected gifts.

The rich who no longer have to be afraid of becoming poor give gifts, of course. But getting enough money out of the rich to take care of the poor is not Jesus' agenda at Simon's dinner. Only the rich are fascinated by exactly how much they should give away; everyone else finds it tedious. The gifts of the poor are far more important for the church.

If in this story Jesus does not rail about the plight of the poor and shrugs at the large amount of money the woman spends, that's because the plight of the rich is far worse than that of the poor. Until we who are wealthy know how to receive from the poor, we will not be able to give well. Who knows? The woman with the oil may have been the poorest person in the room, and her critics with their sharp sense of maximizing utility may have been the wealthiest, who needed a lesson in how to receive as well as give.

Jesus never gave us a theory about how to choose between competing goods, and that was no accident. Gifts given out of God's plenty take the place of trade-offs among scarce goods in the life we share with him. The Body of Christ is with us in the church, which is called to be as generous and poor as the Anointed One himself.

By Kelly Johnson, a graduate student in theological ethics who lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.