When I walked across the stage after four years of university study I did not want to be handed my diploma by a homeless man.

I wanted the university president, the dean, or a member of the board of trustees. After all I had spent a lot of time, energy, and a boatload of my parents’ money to get there. Didn’t I deserve to receive my certificate of readiness from someone of accomplishment and high position?

When Christ our king was famously anointed for his work, an act usually performed by a pope, prince, or other male, the chosen vessel of coronation was none other than a peasant woman. It was Mary who poured a pound of costly perfume all over his feet.

This anointing becomes an act of liberation not just for the ‘least of these’ but for you and me as well. Rich as we are, at least in comparison to the sustenance living of Mary and Jesus’ friends, we do well to consider the our God desires the poor to be liberated from their poverty just as much as he desires the rich to be liberated from their possessiveness.
As you and I head into the fifth week of Lent, and our shared work of making order among our stuff, we may have discovered several areas of surplus. We may also have ruminated over the possibility that much of the world has too little because much of the world has too much.  ‘The poor’ are not easily categorized objects of pity, rather God desires the under-resourced and the over-resourced to meet together around a circular table of our shared humanity with Christ in the center. How is our shared Lenten work awakening us to the plight of those who have less? In what ways are we discovering that God has given us much so that we might share with those who do not have as much?